Unheard Voices: The Teachers of Saint Louis Public Schools

All the anonymous sources at SLPS you haven't read about

Skip to the very bottom if you just want dirt on the superintendent

I am planning to write a lot of posts about my own experience at Saint Louis Public Schools, and how it came to an end. My last post was sort of a new beginning for this blog. I plan to update much more often and speak much more personally. I promise there is some interesting stuff involving characters in the news, cheating, fraud, retaliation, the whole bit.

I know that the smart move is not to do this. I am not going to get paid out of this, and I might totally ruin a reputation that is only locally ruined. If you read my long posts and listen to my recorded conversations, I think I can prove everything they said about me was a lie. However, I am an English teacher, and I know nobody reads anymore.

Besides the satisfaction of speaking freely, the other reason I want to speak out is that I am not in a unique position. Plenty of teachers (and some low-level administrators) went through experiences like mine but kept quiet. Keeping quiet is smart if you care about your reputation, since even false allegations are harmful. I am privileged enough and stupid enough to not have to care much about my reputation.

I may not get justice or change the system by speaking out, but maybe I can say loudly what teachers have been saying quietly for years. Not only have I heard horror stories in private, but I happen to know that lots of teachers have been reporting these things for years. I know, because I read the complaints.

The SLPS complaint box

Twice a year Saint Louis Public Schools pays a company called Panorama to survey teachers, staff, and students. Most of the questions are on a Likert scale (agreeing or disagreeing with a statement by picking a number) but there are also open-ended questions. I want to talk a little about what is in those surveys. First, here is an open-ended response from an employee at Human Relations from Fall of 2023:

“I feel that there is a sense of fear permeating throughout the district. People are unsure if they are going to be terminated. People are unsure what is happening when they see their colleagues walked out of the building by Safety Officers. There has been no communication by district leadership on where the district going in the short or long term. Decisions are made in isolation and if staff do not execute those decisions they are ostracized and then terminated.”

The guy who wrote this works (or worked) in HR at 801 (the central office for SLPS). He is not a teacher complaining of bad treatment, he is someone who felt his department was treating others badly. I get what pressure to behave unethically feels like. I think it’s good that he spoke out, and I wonder what happened to him. I doubt he is still there.

I was surprised to read this from someone in HR, but I was not surprised that tons of teachers confirmed the “sense of fear” in their responses. Since the whole point of this survey is to give the administration data to improve, and complaints have been pouring in for years, why has nothing been done?

The panoramic view

I have not read all the surveys or done any fancy analytics of the responses. I have not even looked at any of the student responses yet. I did read most of the teacher responses, but I cannot sum up their results in a sentence. We are a diverse bunch, and there was plenty of positivity if you look for it. I read past most of that, since I admit that I was looking for confirmation of my experience.

However, even looking through rose-tinted glasses, it is plain that something has been wrong at SLPS for a while. You can see it clearly when teachers (and staff in a separate survey) are asked about the “district climate,” which focuses on the central office. You can see the details and the specific questions in the full responses here.

This is a screenshot the percentage of teachers from the whole district who were positive in the questions about the district climate in their responses in each survey I reviewed, (descending from Fall 2021 to Spring 2024):

There is a small up down pattern, but it is mostly down. The free responses confirm and flesh out this hatred. Many teachers have positive feelings about their own schools (remember that I loved teaching at Metro), but it is hard to find any positive feelings from teachers towards the central office. Here are the questions and response rate from the survey in Fall 2023 (when I last filled out the survey):

As you can see, this was a year where things were trending up. These are not great. What is going on at the central office?

Still calling myself a teacher

Just to swerve back to my own story, I talked in my last post about how some of why I was transferred out of my school and to a desk job at 801 by Karlla Dozier and Myra Berry. I still have not actually worked a day of this job, but I have been paid for it since August. I told them at the time that this transfer was worse than a firing; I was a teacher and I did not want to work at the central office. I would rather clean floors at my school (honestly, no disrespect to custodians).

For a lot of teachers, the central office is simply overpaid, unavailable, and unhelpful. You can see that in the survey responses, or by asking a teacher (not a union official). The biggest complaints are about what it does not do (respond to emails, for example). However, as a teacher who has been called into plenty of meetings there, I truly abhor it.

HR (and its sinister offshoot ER) has its offices in the basement, and it performs interrogations in windowless conference rooms. I will be detailing some of those meetings later, but you could listen to this to see how these meetings begin or this to see how they end. My pulse literally races when I enter the building. They can fire me for saying that, but I am only saying what teachers have been telling them for years.

Retaliation machine

The people who read all the surveys are the people at HR. Building administrators get copies as well, but it is up to them whether to share them. Since they are paid for with public money, they are actually public documents. I teamed up with a local group, the Coalition with STL kids, to send a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to get access. It took time, money (way too much money for copying pdfs), and two tries to get all the results, but eventually they released them.

One thing I learned from FOIA-ing these is that they are not anonymous. A lot of responses name people or make their identity clear, and demographics and locations can make it obvious. More importantly, on the district’s first attempt to honor my request (it took some prodding), the results were incomplete but also included some things they should not have. Each response was matched to the unique ID of the respondent, which, while not public knowledge, was available to someone with access to your email (like HR).

For that reason alone, I am not going to just release all the results I got a la the St Louis Post-Dispatch credit card receipts. I think these surveys show a lot more about the district than those receipts, but I also think they were used by the administration to pick out and punish troublemakers. I don’t think handing them over to the public is a good idea. If you work at a school where you fear your administration (as the surveys indicate many do), I highly encourage you not to fill the survey out at all in the future.

If you are a teacher at one of the schools, or a proper journalist who is interested in understanding what they say, you can contact me for access to what I have. I put the overall Likert responses for all schools in a shared folder, since those are fully anonymous and just give a broad outlines. The really interesting stuff is in the free-responses and cite specific surveys.

I would be interested to see what other people see in the data (I could really use the help of a math teacher right now). Personally, I just noticed the sustained negativity about district climate and curriculum offerings (listed as “background questions” for some reason) to be the most stand out results.

New boss same as the old boss

Really, the lack of change over time should be a concern, especially juxtaposed with news about SLPS. While I was killing time on leave, I wrote a bit about how I felt the news about Keisha Scarlett (the now fired Superintendent) was unfair. This was not because I knew her and thought she was a good leader; it was because I saw things get neither better nor worse when she arrived. Technically attitudes went slightly up when she arrived and then down the next semester (though there was some weirdness with the number of respondents that might explain that). But really, she did not seem to have much of an effect on attitudes.

In the fall of 2021, teachers (including me) were complaining about cronyism and retaliation. They said they were not paid enough, and that student behavior was out of control, and no one would help them. In Spring of 2024, they were still complaining about the same things. If anyone read this survey and saw those complaints, it is not clear what they did about any of them.

When I tell people I saw corruption at SLPS, people ask me about Dr. Scarlett (or sometimes the interim superintendent Millicent Borishade). I say I never met them, though I did long ago send them emails asking to meet. If you want dirt on them, you can find it in these surveys. They only really come up in the administrator responses (perhaps predictably) and they are not without supporters. But if you look, you can definitely find people who likely ended up getting their complaints in the Post-Dispatch.

Since superintendent gossip sells papers, here is an anonymous administrator predicting their downfall last spring:

“District leadership is poor at this time and it starts with our superintendent and deputy superintendent. Dr. Scarlett is too disconnected from our work to know how to support us. We do not even have a way to reach her and she does not respond to e-mails. Dr. Borishade is a poor leader with an ego who believes she knows best and that we should follow her blindly. The way she speaks to and treats others is entirely inappropriate.”

Here is another, from a principal, that echoes the HR response I quoted earlier:

“It has become a culture of fear. Parents can complain to district office and district office wants to "put out the fire" so the higher-ups don't find out. I don't like that my only channel is my network superintendent. I miss being able to talk candidly with the actual superintendent.”

Taking these administrators at their word, maybe she was as awful as the news reports say and Saint Louis is well rid of her. Maybe Borishade is just as bad. However, complaining that you have to go through the chain of command to resolve issues is hard to sympathize with when you are a teacher.

As a teacher, I regretted that no one beyond my principal would talk to me about things that their departments seemed designed to handle (tech support was good to me, but nobody else was). I saw my eventual de-teachering coming a mile away, and I sent emails upon emails to the HR, ER, the network superintendent, the superintendent (both of them in turn), a lawyer hired to deal with me, the whistleblower service, and I almost never got even a reply, let alone a real response.

As of this writing, I am still an SLPS employee and am begging someone to talk to me about what happened, which was important enough to hire several law firms, but not important enough to talk to me about. These surveys are full of teachers begging for help.

The dirt

Maybe what pissed off top administrators about Drs. Scarlett and Borishade is that they treated administrators the way the central office treats teachers.