Missouri, I'm going to have a lot to say about the proposed school closures in St. Louis City and why we all should care, whether you live in an urban neighborhood or a rural town.

This is another example of how We the People are being exploited by our bought government.

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I've worked with several schools on the list, especially Clay Elementary. I've seen principals change, kids grow up, families move. I've seen a charter school in the neighborhood fail its students for three years before it was closed and then reopened with different branding.

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I've lost kids.

In the summer of 2019, one of the kids I taught was shot and killed in front of his sisters while in his yard. He was supposed to start 2nd grade at Clay the next day. His killer was never brought to justice.

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I've met with witnesses who reported crimes to police, neighbors who were afraid to because they didn't want their children to be targets, police who said there wasn't much they could do, officers and EMTs who tried to bring a child back to life while the parents prayed.

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I've been to markets and Halloweens in Hyde Park, street festivals on 14th.

I've met with the Alderman countless times, hearing the calls he takes at night, seeing the frustration and being able to do just about nothing but sit with it.

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There will be Missourians who read the article about the school consolidations in the paper and figure that they were inevitable. Enrollment is down. What else is there to do but close buildings and consolidate?

In my view, plenty.

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Folks who just read the article will get some statistics and history. They'll get a short glimpse into what charter schools - especially the failed ones - have done to the district. They'll read about Sumner High and the Ville's important place in American history.

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But what they won't see is this line from the Superintendent's presentation:

"We operate downstream from political forces that have divested themselves of our neighborhoods and our children."

The truth and cruelty of that one sentence.

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Clay has been slated for closure multiple times. The community protested and saved their school. They got a new principal, a new theme, new promises of resources. I was there. I even helped come up with the plan, visited other schools for ideas.

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It didn't take long for the plan to collapse. The principal was offered better support and greater responsibilities at a different school district. He would turn around their early childhood program before just recently getting hired in New Orleans.

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The new resources didn't materialize. At one point, there was only one teacher for grades 3, 4, and 5. One teacher for all three.

It showed. 2% of the kids at Clay can read at a proficient level, 4% when it comes to math.

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For St. Louis City, 23% of kids are reading proficiently, and 18.5% are doing math at the same level.

For Clayton - a wealthy bordering school district - those numbers are 74% and 73%.

The low proficiency numbers in St. Louis City are concentrated in the poorest areas.

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For the last several years, I've traveled throughout Missouri. For the last many years before that, I spent a lot of time in the most ignored areas of St. Louis City.

Many parts of St. Louis City and many places in rural Missouri weren't a whole lot different.

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If you live there, you know that. And you know something else: The government isn't coming to help.

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A friend of mine from Mountain View once testified in Jefferson City at a hearing about kids being wrongfully dropped off of Medicaid. He's lived there for a long time.

He made the almost 6-hour round trip just to listen.

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He listened as expert after expert spoke. He wasn't going to say anything, but he looked around the room and saw that there weren't regular people there. So he stood up, walked to the microphone, and pointed that out.

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He volunteers at a dental clinic, and he knows people who wrongfully lost Medicaid. He said people just think of it as "something else that has happened to me." Another promise unfulfilled.

For a moment, their voices were heard in our government. But it still did nothing.

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American corruption has extracted our freedom. It has created a large class of people that have things happen to them so a much smaller class can have things happen for them.

Increasingly in Missouri and America, we do not have a representative government.

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We have a bought machine that is shocked when the poor are represented, that makes false promises to keep We the People at bay, that sets up systems to make school closures and hospital closures and small business closures seem inevitable when they're not.

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"We operate downstream from political forces that have divested themselves of our neighborhoods and our children."

That sentence could have appeared in any presentation in so many neighborhoods in our state.

That's where Missouri is right now.

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And that's why I won't give up until we return our government to us, to We the People.

Stand up and Take Back Missouri with us at http://www.takebackmo.org 

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