The Mehlville School Board set class size targets Thursday night that would allow the district to accept about 150 students transferring from unaccredited school systems without having to hire more teachers or devote further resources to educate them.
The class size targets, on the low end of those allowed by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, will allow Mehlville school officials to turn away children once classrooms exceed those numbers.
The point isn’t to turn away children, Superintendent Eric Knost said, but to ensure that no child — from within or outside of the Mehlville district — is subjected to overcrowded classrooms.
“We’re not going to compromise that,” he said.
According to numbers released Thursday, 475 students in the unaccredited Riverview Gardens School District have applied to attend Mehlville schools this fall. Most, if not all, have chosen Mehlville because Riverview Gardens officials have chosen to send buses there as they work to comply with a recent Missouri Supreme Court ruling.
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For years, Mehlville school officials have struggled to lower the district’s class sizes. The ratio between students and teachers in the district is one reason the district’s per pupil operating costs are among the lowest in the region.
For more than 30 minutes, Knost addressed more than 200 people packed into the Mehlville High School library who came wanting to know more about the transfer situation. He told them that he didn’t understand the logic behind Riverview Gardens’ decision to designate Mehlville as where the buses would go. But the conversation needs to focus on educating kids, he said.
“They’re our kids and they’re getting caught in the crossfire,” he said.
More than a dozen people addressed the board members. Some expressed concerns that the millions of dollars Riverview Gardens will spend on tuition and transportation will compromise efforts to improve that district, which has been unaccredited since 2007. Others asked how much time the transferring students will spend on buses. A few questioned whether the transfer students would erode the quality of Mehlville schools.
“I don’t think this is going to be a concern,” said Emma Jean Bretto, a resident who addressed the board. “The children up there should be able to be educated.”
The meeting presented a stark contrast to a recent town hall forum in the Francis Howell district, which drew more than 2,500. Some expressed outrage at the prospect of students from the unaccredited Normandy district enrolling in their schools.
“We get new students in the district every year,” said Trey Marlette, a junior at Oakville High School. “The ones I know don’t have any trouble merging into the district.”
Some asked what will happen if Riverview Gardens cannot afford the tuition costs. The Missouri education department has advised school districts that it would withhold state funds from an unaccredited district once it falls behind on paying tuition bills. The state funds would go directly to pay the tab.
That possibility is one reason Knost said the class size targets are important, so that Mehlville can avoid spending money on additional staff.
“We have to wait and see that this money is going to come,” Knost said. “We are not going to go out and hire teachers expecting the money is going to be paid.”
Not everyone agreed.
“We can save these kids. We can get them on the right track,” said Ron Fedorchak, a member of the school board, pointing out the district stands to receive $4.2 million from the impending transfers.
“We can hire more teachers,” he added.
The board voted 5-2 to set these targets: 17 students per class in kindergarten through second grade; 20 students per class in third through fourth grades; 22 students per class in fifth through sixth grades; and 25 students per class for seventh through 12th grades.
