Pope Francis Slay

For my May Project, I am working downtown at the Mayor’s Office in City Hall with Erin and Adam. We’re working under Mary Ellen Ponder, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, and Nahuel Fefer, an Administrative Assistant to the Mayor. I started work on Monday, and my first task was to look into the Ready by 21 Program in St. Louis, which focuses on training community leaders to help children prepare for college, work, and life by providing support in education, healthcare, transportation, housing, mentorship, and finances. Ready by 21 provides a holistic solution to these issues by emphasizing cross-sector involvement among businesses, the government, nonprofits, and educational institutions over single issue-focused solutions. Overall, this initiative seems really interesting and promising and is certainly a worthwhile cause given that (according to this program) only 2 out of 5 youth in the nation are well-equipped for college, work, and life.

Nahuel also had me look into the recent lawsuit filed by St. Louis Public Schools, which was also a really intriguing read. SLPS and the NAACP, among other organizations, are suing the State of Missouri and the Missouri Board of Education, claiming that since 2006, $42 million in sales taxes that should have gone to SLPS were directed instead to charter schools in the area. The current lawsuit stems from a lawsuit about segregation in St. Louis public schools filed in 1972 by a number of parents, which led to a 1999 agreement on a 2/3 cent sales tax intended to fund desegregation in education. Everything was going smoothly until the funding formula of money raised by this tax was changed in 2006, diverting a significant portion of the money to charter schools and away from SLPS. Now SLPS wants that money back, but unfortunately, finding a spare $42 million will be pretty much impossible for the charter schools and could bankrupt them, eliminating the choice in public education that many families take advantage of. No matter what happens, it seems to me like unless more funding is acquired for all public schools in the area, kids are kind of being screwed over.

We also went to the World Trade Center in Clayton on Monday and began a project involving Sister Cities, which we’ve been working on for the bulk of this week. Essentially, we’ve been researching how other sister city partnerships have utilized their traditionally historical and cultural ties for increased economic development. Citing previous examples that have worked, we are going to propose how St. Louis can use some of these same strategies with their 15 sister cities in a presentation at the end of our May Project. We spend our time in the windowless Youth Jobs office at the very back of the Mayor’s Office and work from 9-5 every day. The commute is pretty rough, but we get validated parking!

On Tuesday I sat in on a gathering with 30 visitors from Russia that came to the United States to help foster better Russian/American relations post-Cold War. Mayor Slay welcomed them to our city and Nahuel detailed more specifically much of St. Louis’s history and the plans the Mayor’s office has for St. Louis’s future. It was pretty interesting to hear from both of them, and the Russians had very thought-provoking questions for Nahuel as well.

Today we sat in on the Aldermanic Full Board Meeting. Erin’s Alderwoman, Lyda Krewson, invited us in as her guests, so we were able to sit in on the ground floor as opposed to the balcony covered in caution tape (?). We were invited to speak with the President of the Board of Aldermen next Friday as well about the legislative process, which will hopefully be exciting, or at the very least will get us out of the dreary office we are confined to. The primary issue discussed during the meeting was a bill proposed by Alderwoman Krewson, among others. The bill involves creating a database for the city of St. Louis to keep a comprehensive electronic record of drug prescriptions to prevent the abuse of prescriptions and opiate overdosing. Every state other than Missouri (along with DC and Puerto Rico) has a similar monitoring database already in place, but unfortunately, each time this bill is brought up on the state level in Missouri, it is blocked, so they’ve had to resort to passing this legislature on a local level first.

May Project is going well overall, but it kind of seems like Nahuel is running out of tasks to assign us, so we spend much of the day pondering the passing of time. If you crane your neck into the hall, you can catch a glimpse of the outdoors/a reminder that there is a world outside of this 12x15 foot room.