Many residents of the City of
St. Louis are loath to send their kids to public school. The challenges the district faces are well documented: Fewer than half of city kids will graduate. Attendance is less than 50 percent. Parents worry about safety.
Above all, achievement has been dismal, which several years ago led the state to take control of the troubled district.
For nearly 20 years, low-income families have had an alternative to the public schools.
In 1990, a concerned group of local corporate and civic leaders established the Today & Tomorrow Educational Foundation to provide needs-based tuition assistance scholarships to economically disadvantaged children throughout the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
The effort has grown steadily, and over the past 10 years, the Foundation has been fine-tuning its efforts. In 1999, the Foundation began funding and administering the Elizabeth Lay Midlam/Children’s Scholarship Fund program that promotes school choice, regardless of school affiliation, to financially disadvantaged urban families. This program received more than 10,000 applications for 500 scholarships.
In 2000 a similar program, the St. Louis School Choice Scholarship Fund, was added to serve an additional 750 students.
In 2007, a new initiative—Help for Today-Hope for Tomorrow—rolled out a kindergarten program for 100 students to attend Catholic elementary schools in the City. There are currently 63 students in that program.
This past year, the program introduced a K-4 component, through which 613 students are receiving scholarships that will follow them through their 8th-grade graduation.
Since its inception, Today & Tomorrow has raised more than $25 million in tuition assistance, helping thousands of children in 18 parish parochial schools, according to Sharon Gerken, Today & Tomorrow’s executive director. Throughout the City, says Gerken, there are 3,987 kids in Catholic schools, 675 in Lutheran schools and 859 in other private schools.
For the past school year, more than 1,700 students received approximately $1.7 million in aid. And the need is not abating.
This is where Kevin Short comes in. A resident of the City, member of St. Roch Parish and on the board of Today & Tomorrow, Short chairs the Help for Today-Hope for Tomorrow campaign. Co-founder and managing director of Clayton Capital Partners, Short’s day job is to represent multimillion-dollar companies that have decided to sell.
Meanwhile, for the past 25 years Short has donated his time and provided his financial expertise to help resolve issues from renovations at cash-strapped parishes to teacher salary negotiations.
“We provide support to any non-public school in the City,” Short points out. Schools can be secular, like New City School, or religion-based, whether serving Catholics, Luth-erans, Christians or children of other faiths.
A glance at the list of schools participating in the programs shows that not all start with “St.”: Among the beneficiaries are kids at Frederick Douglass Institute, Hope Lutheran School, Immaculate Heart of Mary School and Muhammad Academy.
But religion is not the issue. Need is. And while it may be interesting to note that most kids show up for school most days—well above 90 percent—attendance is not the issue. Academic excellence is.
“We don’t have to worry about issues like attendance. We’re preparing these kids for college, and eventually to be able to compete in a global economy.”
Unfortunately, more kids need scholarships than there are scholarship dollars to fill the need.
“For the 2009-10 school year we are offering 200 scholarships to new students and we already have more applications than we have scholarships to offer,” says Gerken.
Always a proponent of faith-based education, Gerken says her eyes opened wide when she first tried to get her head around dilemmas that urban education present.
“Today, I’m immersed in it,” she says. “We’re trying to provide these kids with a good education, which is their right. We’re trying to break the cycle of poverty, helping many of these kids become the first in their families to graduate.
“If you try to comprehend the total problem with city education, it’s overwhelming. We’re not trying to cast the public schools, charters, KIPP, in a negative light—and it’s not that our product can’t always be better; we’re all trying to develop the workforce.
“It’s all about helping kids. If I know we’ve helped just one, that’s enough.”
Back when she was in Catholic elementary school in the 1960s, Gerken’s parents made the choice based on faith. Today, parents
are choosing for another reason: The quality of education.
And those on the front lines are exceedingly grateful. Sister Gail Trippett, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet and longtime principal of Central Catholic-St. Nicholas School in North St. Louis, last spring told St. Louis Review that at least 60 of the 239 students in kindergarten through 8th grade at Central Catholic are attending with help from Today & Tomorrow.
“They have been our guardian angel for the past 20 years,” she said.
Short hopes that the program’s scope will one day expand beyond K-8. The goal is eventually to provide assistance to secondary-school students, but he acknowledges that volunteers have their hands pretty much full at present.
“We’re trying to raise as many scholarship dollars as we can, so that we can serve as many students as we can,” he says. “The generosity of the community has been extraordinary, and this alone will allow us to help more children in the future.”
