The Normandy School Board’s refusal to pay student transfer bills could jeopardize a request for $6.8 million in emergency state money to help keep district schools from shuttering before the end of the school year.
And the move has intensified pressure on state education officials to step into the failing school district sooner.
“It makes it much more difficult for us (to approve those funds) when they vote not to pay their bills,” said Sen. Scott Rupp, R-Wentzville. To replace the Normandy School Board, he said, “would send a real good message to the Legislature” about accountability.
Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro met with Rupp and a handful of legislators Friday at Lindenwood University in St. Charles. They discussed the impact of an unprecedented migration of students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens to higher performing schools under a law recently upheld by the state Supreme Court. The meeting was scheduled before Normandy School Board members voted 3-2 on Thursday to reject bills related to student transfers, a move that several legislators described as a last straw.
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But Nicastro and some state board members said Friday that they always were hesitant about appointing a special administrative board and taking power away from an elected board, even in a district as troubled as Normandy.
“Since last night, though, that may have changed the context a bit,” Nicastro said. “It certainly would be a factor that they (the state board) might look at.”
The state Board of Education now can replace a district’s elected board at any point instead of having to wait two years after it loses its accreditation. Under the old law, the state board couldn’t have intervened in Normandy until 2015.
Normandy and Riverview Gardens, both in St. Louis County, are two of three unaccredited school districts statewide. Kansas City is the third. About 2,200 students in Normandy and Riverview Gardens have enrolled in higher performing school systems after a ruling this summer said that students in unaccredited districts may transfer at the cost of their home district. Normandy and Riverview Gardens lost state accreditation because of low student test scores and other quality standards. Now, both districts are facing mounting bills that could total $15 million each by the end of the school year.
Thursday night’s vote in Normandy means that 14 area school districts now have a total of $1.3 million in unpaid tuition bills. Nicastro said her department would keep its promise to withhold the amount of tuition payments from the unaccredited district’s state aid if it fails to pay for two consecutive months.
Normandy’s state aid, which makes up half of its $50 million annual operating budget, is about $2 million each month. Bills that were rejected for payment on Thursday night include about $500,000 to the Francis Howell School District. Normandy paid its bills for August tuition, which totaled about $900,000.
State Board of Education President Peter Herschend said he didn’t think the Normandy School Board carefully thought through its action.
“They are stretched, no question about it,” he said. “But if this district does not pay, the state will.”
Normandy School District issued a statement Friday night saying leaders understood that the state would withhold its state aid to pay the bills. But the district cannot educate the 88 percent of its students who remain in district schools using just 70 percent of its budget, officials said.
School districts that are educating Normandy students accepted the reassurance that they would be paid, even if payments were delayed.
“Our top priority has been, and will continue to be, to provide every student — both those who reside here and those who have transferred – ... a high quality education,” wrote Maplewood-Richmond Heights Superintendent Karen Hall in a letter to parents on Friday. The district has 21 students from Normandy and has received one payment so far.
Officials from Francis Howell, the district with the most transfers from Normandy at about 440 students, also were confident that the state would redirect the money. They planned to follow the advice of Nicastro’s department and allow the transfer students to attend through the end of the current school year.
That helped alleviate concerns of Altovise Johnson when she heard about Normandy’s refusal to pay the bills, including tuition for her son to attend seventh grade at Hollenbeck Middle School.
“He loves it. He’d be pretty disappointed if he had to go back to Normandy because of this,” she said. Her son, Savion, gets up at 4:30 a.m. each weekday to board the bus to St. Charles County.
But it is unclear how the Normandy School Board’s vote will affect transportation for transfer students such as Savion.
Normandy’s vote not to pay transfer costs also included bills to bus students to Francis Howell schools, more than 22 miles away.
That involves a contract between the Normandy School District and a bus company, and state officials were unsure on Friday how redirecting funding to pay for those costs might work.
“That’s a question mark,” said Ron Lankford, deputy commissioner for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Also on Thursday, the Normandy board voted to close Bel-Nor Elementary School and lay off 103 employees, most of them teachers, in cost-cutting moves that will save more than $3 million this school year. When the board agenda moved on to approve payment for district bills, including the transfer payments, board members went against the superintendent’s recommendation to pay.
State Board of Education Vice President Mike Jones of St. Louis said that he understood Normandy’s position, and that the School Board’s refusal to pay tuition shouldn’t be a factor in the Legislature’s consideration of $6.8 million in emergency funding for the district.
“The Legislature’s inability to deal with this issue has put everyone who was involved in it between a rock and a very hard place,” he said. “No matter what Normandy did, it doesn’t eliminate the Legislature’s responsibility to address the issue.”
Gov. Jay Nixon, who met with about 25 area superintendents on Friday afternoon, said afterward that there needed to be an “underlying discussion” on whether the transfer law was the proper method to deal with unaccredited districts.
“If we continue to have that option to transfer, clearly we ought to have additional options to provide intensive help and resources to districts that have problems,” he said.
