In the Ritenour School District, according to US News and World Report, “28% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 20% tested at or above that level for math. The district’s minority enrollment is 80%. Also, 64.6% of students are economically disadvantaged.”
That’s with a 13-1 student-to-teacher ratio and enough spending to take the whole district to the moon.
Also everything was shut down during COVID, cratering test scores and enabling teachers to head to Aruba to ‘survive’ the pandemic by doing TikTok dances.
In short, another bright and shining advertisement for the public school system.
But the real problem in the St. Louis school district is that they wanted to replace their actual working diesel buses to buy useless electric buses with taxpayer money courtesy of the Biden administration’s green money laundering deal and now the money for the buses has been frozen. (Much like EVs during St. Louis winters.)
A pause in federal funding for climate and clean energy programs has left the Ritenour School District unable to pay for electric school buses it ordered.
Ritenour officials were supposed to receive 24 electric school buses paid for by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The buses would have replaced Ritenour’s entire daily fleet of diesel buses.
“We’ve got a little bit of a bridge to nowhere at this point,” said Ritenour Superintendent Chris Kilbride.
You’ve got a school system where most students can’t read or do math, which seems like the bigger problem here.
In a ceremony in early 2024, EPA officials visited St. Louis to present the Ritenour School District and the Ferguson-Florissant School District with large ceremonial checks.
Ritenour was promised $9.5 million for 24 buses and their charging infrastructure, while the Ferguson-Florissant district was promised $6.3 million for 16 buses.
If you’re wondering, yes that was where the Ferguson riots happened. And yes, the Biden administration decided to spend $15 million on electric buses for minority school districts that may not even survive one Missouri winter. And yes, the media is whining that the children, who were kept home during the pandemic so their government unions could bribe politicians even harder, won’t be able to learn without ‘green buses’.
The district’s celebration of the buses will still happen Tuesday. Ritenour’s superintendent doesn’t believe EPA staff will be there despite months of planning together.
“We’re still going to hold the event and be able to answer questions,” Kilbride said.
.Failing school district to hold event celebrating electric buses that they can’t pay for.
This is Democrat urban governance in a nutshell.