Hugh's Worthless Blog

After Mehlville voiced concerns about having  only enough space for 150 of all the transfer students from Riverview Gardens who wanted to attend there, I was curious where RG would choose as their second choice district. Now they even had some solid numbers to know where their students preferred to attend. If they had been looking out for their own students they would have selected a district already picked by a large number of their students like Ferguson-Florissant (200*), Hazelwood (149*) or Pattonville (60*), so that those students could have buses to ride there and not have to be driven every morning and afternoon. But instead they selected the Kirkwood school district , a choice picked by only 13 of their students. Plus Kirkwood is a smaller district with only one high school who has already stated they can only take in about 100 additional students . This choice makes almost no sense at all, unless Riverview Gardens is just trying to save money and deter as many students a

Today the stltoday site had an article that gave the latest tallies of where all the students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens want to transfer throughout the St. Louis and St. Charles county school districts, with a very detailed spreadsheet in a PDF . I found all of the numbers pretty interesting. I found it quite interesting how different the choices and numbers were for the two unaccredited districts, and I made a pretty graph from the numbers as well (sorted by total number of transfers, combining Normandy and RG numbers). Both districts had Clayton as their third most popular choice, but with 139 total requests there (96 for Normandy and 43 for RG) that is equivalent to 5.6% of the students for Clayton's district of 2,500 students. The other districts selected varied substantially. Nearby Ritenour, for example, is the second most popular district in Normandy with 122 transfer requests, but only 7 from Riverview. Hazelwood is almost exactly the reverse with 113 from

As a resident of the mid-county area I was initially pretty excited about the idea of having a " South County Connector " route to connect mid-county to South County. I had always wondered why I-170 abruptly ended at highway 64/40 and why there was no better way to drive down to Webster Groves and on south to South County without just taking smaller roads. So, yes, in concept creating a "South County Connector" sounded like a great idea. And then I saw the plans. The plan by the county is to build about 2 miles of two lane divided roadway (not a real highway) starting at Hanley south of Manchester and continuing on to River Des Peres Blvd near Watson. And as at a cost of $110 million, that seems a lot of money for not much "connector". That means all that traffic would still have to go through the Hanley/64 interchange of lights, then hit the many lights on Hanley and the traffic all the way down to Manchester. I am not sure exactly how this little b

Photo from stltoday article Last night Francis Howell hosted a board meeting to address concerns about the potential transfers from Normandy, and 2,500 people showed up . Wow, that is as big of a crowd as the entire enrolled population of the Clayton School district! Francis Howell is a large district with about 17,000 students, but I was duly impressed with that huge of a turnout. It is interesting that when Normandy or Riverview Gardens have meetings to discuss the transfers a few hundred residents show up, but at Francis Howell it draws thousands. I was also interested to hear FHSD may accept up to 600 transfer students from Normandy which is substantially more than I was expecting would fill their capacity. That amounts to almost 4% of their current enrollment, or 1 or 2 students in a class of 20 to 25. It sounds like Mehlville has much less extra room for transfers , and I doubt their number will be nearly that high. It appears that Normandy is trying to convince parents to

Last night the Riverview Gardens School District gathered to select which district it would provide paid transportation for its outgoing transfer students, and it selected Mehlville down in South St. Louis County. It may also be about 20 miles away from the district (like Francis Howell is from Normandy ), but Mehlville wins the "lower cost" battle since its average cost per student there was only $8,356 per student compared to $9,830 in Francis Howell . So Riverview Gardens saved $1,500 per student in annual cost per transported student over Normandy. Of course, parents would first have to actually volunteer to send their children down there to Mehlville, and the bus trip down there will be even worse than the trip to Francis Howell. There is no direct highway route from Riverview Gardens to Mehlville unless you loop all the way around highway 270. That is pretty insane. The other interesting numbers I saw in the stltoday.com article were the numbers of trans

The latest saga in the transfer of students from unaccredited to accredited districts is the announcement that Normandy has decided to pay for transportation of their students only to the Francis Howell school district . No, not Hazelwood, University City, Parkway or Pattonville, but far across the Missouri River to Francis Howell. Granted Francis Howell is a larger district which can better handle an influx of incoming students, but that is quite a distance and with Francis Howell starting classes at an early August 8, that gives the schools and the parents little time to prepare. Ironically classes start on August 19 in Normandy, so the transfer students will start 11 days earlier than their neighbors who stay behind. I am curious if one of the reasons why Normandy picked Francis Howell was because it was a top performing district where the per student cost is not as high as most of the St. Louis County schools. If you look on the DESE site you can see where the average studen