By Duane Martin
To educate Missouri’s kids, the state created a system that allows citizens to form school districts through an election process, each of which is governed by a locally elected board. This system is designed to honor our history of ensuring that control of public schools remains in the hands of elected representatives closest to the people they serve.
As our courts have recognized: “Local control over the public school, after all, is one of this nation’s most deeply rooted and cherished traditions.”
Public school districts are not agencies of the state governed by unelected appointees. They are separate, special purpose political subdivisions of the state with their own elected governing bodies. The state delegates to each locally elected school board broad governance authority to “make all needful rules and regulations for the organization, grading and government in the school district.”
Legally, school boards have general supervisory control and management of the public schools.
With each passing year, the state is attempting to take more and more control away from the locally elected school boards.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) routinely tries to intervene in local school district matters. For example, DESE regularly attempts to effectively make rules for local school districts.
DESE has no legal authority to make any rules for public schools. In the absence of the State Board of Education making such rules pursuant to the appropriate rule-making process, only the locally elected school board has the legal authority to make rules for the public school.
Moreover, DESE often attempts to intervene in local matters in which it has no authority. For example, DESE recently contacted a local school district I represent requesting detailed information regarding an individual student discipline matter. Even though DESE has no authority to obtain this information, and the fact that the local school board had yet to hear the appeal from the parents, DESE sought to intervene in what is purely a matter for a locally elected school board.
By contrast, the General Assembly does have legal authority to make rules for public schools, but when it does so, it takes decision-making power away from people elected locally to govern their schools.
Each year the General Assembly considers hundreds of new ways to effectively reduce the decision-making authority of locally elected boards. With each new school law passed, the increased regulation at the state level creates bureaucratic red tape and compliance checks from DESE. In shifting authority from local school boards to DESE, the state is transferring power from locally elected officials to unelected state officials.
Although the General Assembly has the legal authority to control public schools, it is simply creating more and more daylight between the people and their elected representatives.
The General Assembly’s promotion of charter schools is another example of the state’s assault upon local control. Unlike public school districts, charter schools have no elected board. In fact, charter schools are not accountable to any elected official. Period.
Each year, members of the General Assembly propose the expansion of charter schools, thereby attempting to displace locally elected boards of education.
Our political structure, our democratic traditions and our laws contemplate that the control of public schools should rest with the representative government elected by the local people. With each step we take towards state control of our schools, we widen the gap between the people served by local schools and the elected representatives who decide what is best for our kids. The concentration of power at the state level will only reduce our ability to respond to the needs of students and their parents.
It is time for state officials to return to our deeply rooted and cherished tradition of local control of public schools. Today’s students, parents, teachers and patrons deserve no less.
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