School transfer law ruled unconstitutional

St. Louis city parents can’t send their kids to higher-performing county schools and expect the city to foot the bill, a judge ruled — again.

St. Louis County Circuit Court Judge David Lee Vincent III ruled against city resident Gina Breitenfeld and in favor of the St. Louis and Clayton school districts and taxpayers in both of those districts Tuesday.

It’s the second time Vincent has ruled in favor of the districts. His 2008 decision was sent to the state Supreme Court in 2009. That court handed the decision back to circuit court, where Vincent heard arguments again in March.

His 16-page opinion says the Missouri statute requiring schools that have lost their state accreditation to pay for students’ tuition and transportation to adjoining, accredited schools is unconstitutional.

He also writes that compliance is impossible. It doesn’t provide extra state money for the accredited schools, so it creates a Hancock Amendment-violating unfunded mandate.

The decision finds that Breitenfeld is on the hook for $49,133.33 for the education her two kids, who never attended city schools.

The suit began in 2007, when St. Louis city public schools lost their state accreditation.

St. Louis city residents Jane Turner, Susan Bruker, Breitenfeld and William Drendel sued the School District of Clayton, the Board of Education of the city of St. Louis and the Transitional School District of the City of St. Louis. The plaintiffs said they were entitled to send their kids to Clayton and their bills to St. Louis, and the schools disagreed.

In the intervening years, all the plaintiffs but Breitenfeld have dropped off.

Arguing in March, plaintiff’s attorney Elkin Kistner said, “This case is about the Breitenfeld children and no one else.” He argued that educating her two kids wouldn’t place any undue burden on either district.

But a large piece of what Vincent considered was a study that considered what thousands of children might do, and how much that would cost. The schools had commissioned a study by Dr. E. Terrance Jones, a professor of political science and public administration at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, which found that 15,740 students would leave the city schools and transfer to county schools if they could.

Going by the numbers in the Jones study, which extrapolated results from a random survey of 601 city residents with school-age children, the districts said that 3,567 students would transfer to Clayton. Both Clayton and St. Louis officials said this would be ruinous for their school systems.

The superintendent for St. Louis schools, Dr. Kelvin Adams, said the cost to the city district of paying tuition for the transferring students would be $223 million, leaving the district with about $26 million to educate the remaining 15,182 students. This, he said, would seriously curtail the district’s ability to serve them.

Clayton, on the other hand, would find its student population more than doubled. District officials said that would mean hiring new teachers and years of planning and building for the new buildings.

Vincent wrote that “the St. Louis public schools would cease to exist in any meaningful sense” if the statute were enforced, and that tuition payments to Clayton would not be enough to fund capital improvements that a suddenly-doubled population would require.

Kistner, who hammered at the credibility of the Jones study back in March, still calls it “speculation, no question about it.” The plaintiff, he said, is likely to appeal. “We’ve been here before in this case,” he said.

The case is Gina Breitenfeld v. School District of Clayton, et al. 12SL-CC00411.