Former principal Ted Juneau said that he can “feel the voices” of former students who passed through what is now Liberty Memorial Central Middle School duri
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Once community anchors, schoolhouses across the city have been closed and sold off to developers.
It is October 2019, and the old Lyon School is dark. It sits on the end of a quiet street in south St. Louis, fenced and forgotten, a three-story brick castle with boarded front doors and a checkerboard of plywood patches over missing windows. During the day, a few neighborhood kids slide through a gap in the fence to play basketball on a beat-up hoop with no net. They run and dribble on weed-cracked asphalt, the same ground touched by a century of St. Louis students.
Arts and culture leaders pen letter in support of sparing Sumner High School from closure
The St. Louis board of education will vote Tuesday on a proposal to close 10 schools, including Sumner, the first African-American high school west of the Mississippi.
Sumner High School, ca. 1908
On Tuesday, members of the St. Louis board of education will vote on a proposal to close 10 schools within the school district. On December 1, St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams recommended a consolidation plan that would close the following: Clay, Dunbar, Farragut, Ford, Hickey, and Monroe elementary schools; Fanning Middle School; and Cleveland, Northwest, and Sumner high schools. Enrollment numbers, the conditions of school buildings, and neighborhood population were factors in recommending the schools closing. A group of arts leaders, however, have signed a letter expressing support for keeping Sumner High School, the first African-American high school west o