Who is my Neighbor? <em>Turner v. Clayton</em>: A Watershed Moment in Regional Education

Abstract

There would be a watershed of students from the city and from Riverview Gardens just descending upon all St. Louis County schools, and we would have no ability to turn them away.-Chris Tennill, Chief Communications Officer, Clayton Public Schools (Adolphy, 2010, para. 11)School accreditation is granted by states to local districts to certify their competency and authority to provide a K-12 education. An unaccredited school district does not have state authorization to offer a K-12 education. In Missouri, the process of accrediting school districts is mandated by state law and by State Board of Education regulation. In October 2012, the Missouri Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (Missouri DESE, 2012) reported that 506 of 520 school districts in the state were accredited. This article focuses on four of the 14 school districts that are classified as provisionally accredited or unaccredited. All four of these districts are in metropolitan St. Louis. In 2012, over 30,500 Black students attended schools in St. Louis, Normandy, Riverview Gardens, and Jennings school districts (Center for the Study of Regional Competiveness in Science & Technology, CSRCST, 2014). All four of the school districts are predominantly Black with three of the districts serving over 97% Black students. In terms of poverty, at least 75% of the students attending schools in the four districts receive free or reduced price lunch.The accreditation status of these four school districts will influence students' inter-district school assignment options. In the state of Missouri students from unaccredited schools are legally able to attend schools in nearby districts. The purpose of this article is to provide a case study of two local student transfer cases (Turner v. Clayton, 2010 and Breitenfeld v. Clayton, 2013, hereafter referred to jointly as the transfer cases) with a particular focus on inter-district school assignment. The guiding research question for this case study is how do the student transfer cases relate to prior desegregation and current accountability policies in the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan region?The case study is important because it offers insight into education accountability policy and civic responsibility. The student transfer cases in Missouri reflect a shift in philosophy about access to K-12 public education. Two different conceptions of neighbor provide insight into the change. One conception of neighbor involves geographic proximity, and it is defined as one who lives near (Webster, 2000). In Missouri and throughout the United States, this conception of neighbor is associated with the construction of K-12 school district attendance boundaries. The borders restrict the educational service beneficiaries to residents living within their limits. The link between residential boundaries and property taxes, a primary revenue source for schools, is direct. If an individual pays local property taxes, then he or she benefits. Prior to the transfer case litigation, this residential conception of neighbor was an important influence on Missouri's approach to oversight of local school districts. Local school districts were granted authority by the state to determine student access to their services. A majority of the districts restricted access to educational services to residents living within specific political boundaries. A few exceptions included students participating in the voluntary desegregation transfer programs and those whose parents arranged special tuition agreements with neighboring school districts.For a majority of Missouri, the residential conception of school district attendance boundaries remains intact. However, in the St. Louis metropolitan region, the student transfer case shifted the guiding conception of neighbor to another definition of anyone who needs help, or to whom we have an opportunity of doing good (Webster, 2000). Loss of accreditation is a signal that one's neighbor in an adjoining school district needs help. …