Riverfront Times, February 2, 2021

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MARCH 6-12, 2019

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THE LEDE

“It’s been cool to see the people who come in here. A lot of loyal customers they know by name and have little stories and stuff. A lot of people came out and talked to us while we were working, which is kind of cool to feel that city life, like the vibe. I moved out to the county, so I kinda miss that — just like all the different walks of life.”

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PHOTO BY THEO WELLING

DAN RICKETTS OF ST. LOUIS SIGN & MURAL, PHOTOGRAPHED WHILE PAINTING A MURAL ON ARENA LIQUOR ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 riverfronttimes.com

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A Lesson in Online Schools

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f you’re in the business of offering virtual classes the pandemic has been your time in the spotlight. But freelance journalist and Riverfront Times contributor Eric Berger had already been investigating the for-profit companies and their often too-good-to-be-true claims. For this week’s cover story, Berger homes in on one of those operations, a lucrative arrangement for a rural school district and the political arm twisting meant to keep it all going. With more students than ever learning through their laptops, its an important investigation into what they’re really getting.

— Doyle Murphy, editor in chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS Publisher Chris Keating Editor in Chief Doyle Murphy

E D I T O R I A L Digital Editor Jaime Lees Interim Managing Editor Daniel Hill Staff Writer Danny Wicentowski Contributors Cheryl Baehr, Eric Berger, Jeannette Cooperman, Thomas Crone, Mike Fitzgerald, Andy Paulissen, Justin Poole, Theo Welling, Ymani Wince Columnist Ray Hartmann A R T

& P R O D U C T I O N Art Director Evan Sult Editorial Layout Haimanti Germain, Evan Sult Production Manager Haimanti Germain M U L T I M E D I A A D V E R T I S I N G Advertising Director Colin Bell Account Managers Emily Fear, Jennifer Samuel Multimedia Account Executive Chuck Healy, Jackie Mundy Digital Sales Manager Chad Beck Director of Public Relations Brittany Forrest

COVER

C I R C U L A T I O N Circulation Manager Kevin G. Powers

Educational Value(s) Blatant conflicts of interest, student underperformance and political battles plague for-profit virtual school programs — but they continue to rake in money and contracts Cover image by

EVAN SULT

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HARTMANN Fanaticism Takes the Wheel Proposal making it legal to run down activists is just a start

BY RAY HARTMANN

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tate Senator Rick Brattin (RHarrisonville) takes much offense when his Senate Bill 66 is oversimplified as some racially challenged attempt to make it cool to drive your car over Black Lives Matter protesters should they inconvenience you.

He’s right: It’s a hell of a lot worse than that.

Brattin’s pile of legislative excreta is a collection of outrageous new measures — some surely unconstitutional — that reflect nothing less than an all-out war on people protesting against racial injustice. It doesn’t quite go as far as to mention Black people by race specifically, but it might as well be titled the “We’ll Show Them Whose Lives Really Matter” law.

Senate Bill 66 deserves note for the sheer majesty of its prejudice and fanaticism. It navigates the full spectrum of right-wing grievance regarding the BLM movement. Well beyond the aforementioned right to drive over protesters, it covers monument defacing, traffic blocking, hurting others’ feelings while protesting and even a section penalizing localities for cutting police budgets too much. This is Jim Crow if he played in the steroid era.

Among its un-American sections, the bill would make it a Class B felony to vandalize “any public monument or structure on public property owned or operated by a public entity.” For perspective, damaging a monument would now carry the same penalty as voluntary manslaughter or first-degree domestic assault (attempting to kill one’s spouse but failing to inflict serious harm). That would be five to

fifteen years in prison.

The bill would create a new crime know as “the offense of rioting.” One would “commit the offense of rioting if he or she knowingly assembled with six or more people to violate any state or federal laws.” Let your imagination run with that.

And just in case those conspiracy theories about George Soros pan out, “this act creates the offense of conspiring with others to cause or produce a riot or unlawful assembly. A person commits such offense if he or she knowingly provides payment or other financial incentive to six or more persons to violate the Missouri laws against rioting or unlawful assembly. This offense shall be a Class E felony.”

It also “provides that a person may use deadly force against another person if such force is used against a person who is participating in an unlawful assembly and unlawfully enters or attempts to enter private property that is owned or leased by an individual.” Just in case that Castle Doctrine wasn’t clear enough.

Of course, there’s no need to restrict the attack on BLM to protecting one’s own property.

There’s also this: “This act creates the offense of unlawful traffic interference if, with the intention to impede vehicular traffic, the person walks, stands, sits, kneels, lays, or places an object in a manner that blocks passage by a vehicle on any public street, highway, or interstate highway.

This offense is a Class E felony.”

For snowflakes who might get verbally accosted by BLM protesters, there’s a comforting, new protection: “This act provides that a person commits the offense of harassment in the second degree if he or she engages in any act with the purpose to cause emotional distress to another person, including if such person causes emotional distress to another person while participating in an unlawful assembly.”

Get the point? The initial headlines greeting the bill indeed have focused on its proposed new Right to Mow (not coincidentally part of a national trend, by the way). Brattin has responded hotly to the attention by claiming it’s all caused by “very deceptive, horrible” media coverage.

In his tirade, Brattin doesn’t make any secret about what motivated him to bring forward this gem: “We’ve seen all over the nation the uprisings and the unrest and the lawlessness that has occurred and this bill is an attempt to extinguish that kind of behavior and defunding of the police, unlawful assembly and criminalizes those who want to stop traffic.”

Brattin claims the bill is only designed to help those “who are

Senate Bill 66 deserves note for the sheer majesty of its prejudice and fanaticism.

This is Jim Crow if he played in the steroid era. literally being attacked by violent criminals who are trying to break into their cars and drag them out of them to drive out of that situation.” That all sounds reasonable enough, but not a word of any such language is in the actual bill.

Perhaps Brattin needs to have someone read it to him. Here’s what is says: “Any person operating a motor vehicle who injures another person with the motor vehicle shall not be liable for any damages if, at the time of the injury, the person operating the motor vehicle was exercising due care; and the person injured was blocking traffic in a public right-of-way while participating in a protest or demonstration. The provisions of this section shall not apply to any act or omission of the person operating the motor vehicle that constitutes gross negligence.”

Brattin’s rant is available at the official state Senate website: https://www.senate.mo.gov/ audio-sen-rick-brattin-discussessb-66.

Even by the warped standards of the Missouri General Assem-

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bly, this bill is something special. Perhaps it will come as no surprise that it’s consistent with Brattin’s eight-year body of work as a wingnut state legislator.

In 2017, Brattin, who hails from Harrisonville, about 40 miles southeast of Kansas City, was called out in a Kansas City Star editorial for saying the following: “When one looks at the tenets of religion, of the Bible, of the Qur’an, or other religions, there is a distinction between homosexuality and just being a human being.”

The Star wasn’t impressed, noting also that Brattin’s greatest hits included these: “He has sought an equal footing for teaching creationism in public schools.

He proposed requiring the father’s consent before an abortion except in cases of “legitimate rape.” He suggested college football players who refuse to play for political reasons should lose their scholarships.”

That was almost four years ago. I didn’t bother to check what he’s done since, other than that he was churning out electionfraud conspiracies as recently as a week before the Capitol insurrection.

Strangely, nothing in Senate Bill 66 seems an affront to rightwing protesters, who presumably would be justified in exercising their Second Amendment rights by blowing away any BLM type who even seemed to be thinking about driving their car toward them. In fairness, that’s not part of Senate Bill 66, but might as well be.

During the olive-branch portion of Brattin’s audio rant he said laws are needed “that do protect good citizens AND actual, peaceful protesters.”

Apparently, we wouldn’t want to get the two groups confused.

Not in Rick Brattin’s perfect world, which seems to be a rather scary place. n Ray Hartmann founded the Riverfront Times in 1977. Contact him at rhar tmann1952@gmail.com or catch him on Donnybrook at 7 p.m. on Thursdays on the Nine Network and St. Louis In the Know with Ray Hartmann from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday thru Friday on KTRS (550 AM).

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NEWS

Fake News, Real Crisis in Abortion Access in MO Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

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he death of abortion access in Missouri has been declared several times, but the latest claim of its demise is more than just fake news. Last week, Planned Parenthood’s clinic in St. Louis performed the first surgical abortion procedures of 2021 — but the vision of Missouri as America’s first abortion-free state is alive and thriving.

On January 22, outside the Old Courthouse in down St. Louis, it seemed like that vision had finally won out. Dozens gathered to celebrate a victory over abortion, even though that victory had already been debunked.

Several held signs proclaimed: “No abortions took place in Mo,” and, beneath that, “St. Louis Post Dispatch. January 20, 2021.”

It is true, those words did appear in a January 20 story in the city’s newspaper of record — but the rally-goers’ signs excluded the beginning of the sentence, which read in full: “But for the entire month of December, no abortions took place in Missouri.”

The Post-Dispatch story, bylined by health reporter Michele Munz, was presented as a fact-check of a widely shared “special investigative report” by the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue. The investigation, published January 5, had touted Missouri as America’s “first Abortion-Free State.”

The report claimed that in the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis, the sole operating abortion provider in the state, “no abortion appointments have been available there for months, and none are available anytime in the foreseeable future.” The report did not describe specific evidence for the claim, but said that it had “confirmed” the clinic was no longer accepting patients.

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Senator Mike Moon, at the January 22 rally, is pushing for an abortion ban. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI The report was soon picked up by multiple conservative and prolife websites, and while Planned Parenthood flatly rejected the claim as false, the data it provided to the Post-Dispatch’s Munz showed just seven surgical abortions performed in November, and, indeed, none in December.

FBI Arrests Second ‘Show Me Seditionist’ Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

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portrait of Shirley Chisholm that hangs in the U.S. Capitol appeared in the background of a Springfield man’s livestream on January 6, helping the FBI place him at the scene of the riots.

On January 29, the FBI announced the arrest of Zachary Martin, of Springfield, on charges of being on restricted grounds and committing unlawful activities “with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress.”

Indeed, rioters entered the Capitol building that day as members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence were meeting to certify the results of the presidential election. According to an affidavit filed with the charges,

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Data from the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services support Planned Parenthood’s pushback on Operation Rescue’s claims. The numbers show 39 abortions took place in Missouri from January 1 through November 15, 2020.

Still, that was a drastic fall from Martin’s livestream was spotted by local acquaintances and screenshotted — which would turn out to be a stroke of bad luck for the alleged rioter, as one screenshot included the distinctive portrait of Chisholm staring down at the back of Martin’s head.

Along with identifying the portrait putting him at the scene, FBI agents interviewed four people who knew Martin outside of Facebook and who recognized him in the photos and livestream.

One person, identified in charging documents as “W-4,” told the FBI that they’d met up with Martin at a bar one week before the January 6 rally. The gathering had been organized by then-President Donald Trump and his supporters in order to purportedly “stop the steal” of a Joe Biden presidency.

“During the conversation, Martin told W-4 that he was going to travel to Washington, D.C,” the FBI noted.

Martin was arrested without incident, the FBI said in a tweet.

Martin appears to be the second Missouri resident arrested in connection to the Capitol riots. Last month, the FBI arrested Emily Hernandez, of Franklin, who

2019, when the state recorded 1,368 abortions. Part of that drop has to do with an increase in medication abortions and telemedicine.

In an interview with the RFT, Dr. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer for the regional Planned Parenthood, said that she’s observed a general trend away from surgical procedures and toward procedures that allow patients to schedule virtual visits with doctors from their phones. She’s also seen more interest in medication abortions, which involve a pill that can be taken at home.

Unless, that is, you are in Missouri. Here, the abortion restrictions mandate in-person consent consultation, a three-day waiting period and a pelvic exam, which involves a doctor putting their fingers inside a patient’s vagina, even if the person is seeking a pillbased abortion.

While a pelvic exam is medically relevant before a surgical procedure, that is decidedly not the case for medical abortions, McNicholas says. In St. Louis, she and Planned Parenthood’s staff have refused to perform a pelvic examination before medical abortions “purely based on ethical principles.”

Missouri patients are instead

Zachary Martin’s livestream from the Capitol aided the FBI’s investigation. | DOJ EXHIBIT was filmed among the crowd inside the Capitol carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s broken nameplate. Hernandez is now facing five federal charges. n

referred to Illinois, which does not ban telemedicine in abortion.

There is also no waiting period or consent meeting.

“We don’t provide medical abortions in Missouri,” McNicholas says. “We are not going to provide medication abortion if forced to perform a medically unnecessary pelvic exam.”

This is the underlying story to the claims of an “abortion-free” Missouri. At a time when the pandemic has interrupted medical procedures and encouraged more virtual doctor’s visits to reduce the risk of infection, Missourians are still seeking medical abortions. They’re just not doing it in Missouri.

That doesn’t mean access is gone. McNicholas says seven patients seeking surgical abortions came to the St. Louis clinic for their consent meetings before the required 72 hour waiting period. But she acknowledges that Missouri’s political culture, particularly the conservative-dominated General Assembly, would like to see that number reach zero, permanently.

“This is part of our frustration,” she says, “and the crux of why it’s so difficult for us to provide care while we know the state is always looking for ways to take us down.”

A recent history of Missouri’s abortion restrictions echoes that difficulty and frustration. An eight-week abortion ban passed in 2019 remains temporarily halted as Planned Parenthood fights the measure in a federal appeals court, but the law, if enforced, poses a considerable menace to abortion access in the state: A data analysis by RFT found the law would have banned more than 80 percent of the 3,903 abortions performed in Missouri in 2017, the last year when the state had more than one abortion provider in operation.

In 2020, the hits to abortion access kept coming. State health officials refused to issue an abortion license to Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic, and the organization spent months fighting a legal battle that eventually led to the state issuing the license. Missouri’s 39 total abortions in 2020 represent a roughly 99 percent drop from the abortions recorded in 2017.

But even if Missouri can’t permanently ban abortion, the goal seemed within reach for the

Didn’t See That Coming Budweiser takes the high road, Samuel Adams lets the horses loose in Super Bowl ad clash Written by

JACK KILLEEN

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n a moment of corporate ethos, Budweiser has announced that it will forego a Super Bowl advertisement and support coronavirus vaccine awareness efforts instead. This is the first time in 37 years that Budweiser won’t be advertising in the game.

The announcement came in the form of a January 25 tweet from Budweiser and included a 90-second video narrated by actress Rashida Jones. In the clip, people sing from windows, shoppers dance in stores, NBA players kneel in Black Lives Matter shirts and nurses give thumbs up after receiving vaccinations. Throughout, a piano arrangement of “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers plays in the background.

According to Marcel Marcondes, Budweiser’s U.S. chief marketing officer, the company plans to donate $1 million to the Ad Council’s vaccine awareness efforts, then follow with more contributions in the future, Ad Age reported.

CBS, which is broadcasting this year’s Super Bowl on February 7, has been selling its 30-second advertisements spots for $5.5 million.

Parent company AB InBev will still run at least four minutes of advertisements in this year’s Super Bowl for brands such as Bud Light, Bud Light Seltzer Lemonade, Michelob Ultra and Michelob Ultra Organic Seltzer.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the

crowd gathered on January 22 to celebrate the reports in the PostDispatch and Operation Rescue.

“In no other state in the union is anyone standing on their soil and able to say what we’re able to say,” John Ryan, a well-known fixture in St. Louis’ anti-abortion protests, told the applauding crowd.

“Missouri is abortion-free.”

It wasn’t all celebration. Several speakers at the rally lamented the election loss of Donald Trump and described him as “the most pro-life president in our lifetime.”

Others echoed the false conspiracies that animate the militant core

No, these aren’t Budweiser Clydesdales; they’re Samuel Adams’ knockoffs. | SCREENSHOT Samuel Adams’ advertising campaign featuring the character “Your Cousin from Boston” will return to the Super Bowl in typical half-witted fashion, this time mocking the St. Louis-native beer brand for its long obsession with Clydesdale horses. Samuel Adams released the commercial a week ago.

And, for something produced by Boston, it’s actually pretty great.

It opens on a cobblestone road in a sunlit city. A team of Clydesdales, strapped to a wagon, jerk their heads and stand proudly. The camera pans back as an orchestra conveys the sense of awe and esteem. Then a man in a flannel, sauntering by, pulls a pin from the wagon. The straps slide down from the horses’ backs, and the Clydesdales stride forward in reverent majesty — until one crashes through a stand. Pedestrians run in a panic. Outdoor-dining tables fall to the ground. “Ah, the horses!” someone yells. The wagon-driver is dragged through the street.

of some anti-abortion groups.

Troy Newman, head of the Kansas-based Operation Rescue, whose report on Missouri’s “abortionfree” status had caught national attention, warned the crowd: “Baby parts have been sold on the open market and stuck in vaccines and put in potions to inject themselves for a euphoric high.”

Paul Gewalt, head of Personhood Missouri, told the attendees that Missouri “is in the mop-up phase” of eliminating abortion completely.

“We have won this city. We have won this state,” he said, though he

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“I did not see that coming,” says the man in the flannel — the eponymous “Your Cousin From Boston” — as he holds the pin and a 12-pack of beer.

However lighthearted the tone, the ad could lead to litigation. Anheuser-Busch InBev has a trademark on the beer-hauling Clydesdales. As Ad Age notes in its report, other brands are “legally free to use images associated with competitors for comparative advertising,” but those references can’t be disparaging.

Then again, instead of suing Samuel Adams, Anheuser-Busch Inbev could rebut with their own spoof of “Your Cousin From Boston.” Just hear us out: He could be a beer-bellied, Blues-loving, mostaccioli-devouring St. Louis everyman who says “Farty-far” and “Where’d you go to high school?” On Wednesday, he bowls. Thursday nights he’s at Imo’s.

When it’s Halloween, he shuts the door if children don’t have a joke.

And when he sees a team of beer-hauling Clydesdales, he just admires them. n

too pivoted to an extremist position: “All vaccines, especially the vaccine for COVID-19, are tainted by unborn children’s cells.”

The rally’s final speaker, State Senator Mike Moon (R-Lawrence), has spent his legislative career repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, trying to ban abortion in Missouri outright. This year, Moon has already filed yet another bill to enshrine “unjustified homicide of an unborn child” into state law.

“The battle still wages, and we can’t stop,” Moon told the crowd.

“Let’s get it done and abolish abortion in Missouri.” n

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Attorney Joshua Schindler

had one word for the way Missouri school districts treat families who want to enroll their students in a virtual education program: “disgusting.”

“I have been fighting from one side of the state to the other side of the state,” Schindler, a St. Louis lawyer, told the Missouri legislature’s Joint Committee on Education at an August 2020 hearing.

He has filed lawsuits against districts throughout the state on behalf of families seeking to enroll their children in a local program run in conjunction with one of the largest for-profit online education companies in the United States. His fees are not paid by the clients, but rather a lobbying group that has fought government regulation of the company’s charter schools.

“The abuses are innumerable and would shock the conscience,” he continued during his testimony.

Schindler also blasted the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, claiming during a 2019 hearing on virtual education that DESE has denied students “the best educational opportunities available to them.”

But a review of the evidence that Schindler and lobbyists have presented to lawmakers reveals that the state and school districts are not actually depriving students of a quality virtual education at anywhere near the level that Schindler describes.

In fact, it’s the students who are able to enroll in a program connected to the for-profit virtual education provider, Stride, that are having little success.

In spite of students’ poor performance, the corporation and its local partner, a rural Missouri school district in need of money, have seen an increase in enrollment and profit, particularly during an enormous and ongoing remote learning experiment, better known as the COVID-19 pandemic.

And now Schindler and lobbyists are telling a tale of students oppressed by the state and other school districts as part of an effort to remove pesky oversight and help Stride rake in additional tax dollars.

Republican lawmakers have received Schindler warmly and treated the state education officials as though they were villains breaking the law.

After hearing Schindler’s testimony in September 2019, State Rep. Nick Schroer, (R- St. Charles County), warned DESE officials

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

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that they could “strictly comply” with the virtual education law or “you will be here the rest of 2019 and 2020, providing hordes of documents for us to review.”

Under the assertions promoted

by Schindler and lobbyists, Republican lawmakers are now working on legislation to remove local district control of students and allow the virtual education program to collect money directly from the state, like a charter school — minus the oversight.

Grandview

R-2

School

District draws students for its brick-and-mortar program from a rural area about 50 minutes outside of St. Louis.

“You can’t buy a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk in this district,” Superintendent Matt Zoph told the Riverfront Times in 2018.

With little tax revenue to fund its schools, the district started working in 2013 with Stride to create a summer school program, the Missouri Online Summer Institute.

The superintendent who launched the program, Michael Brown, then retired and formed Show Me State Virtual Education, a company with a mission “to promote online education to students and professional development for educators.”

He signed both a contract with his former employer, Grandview, and a consulting agreement with Stride, which until recently operated as K12 Inc. A 2015 contract between Brown’s company and Grandview included incentives to sign up as many students as possible from other Missouri school districts.

The state would then have to pay the students’ tuition. If Grandview earned more than $200,000 in net profit, Brown would receive 2 percent of the profits above that threshold.

The arrangement has drawn plenty of questions and criticism.

“Virtual schools can bring in extra money for public schools, but you can’t call it profit’ because they are nonprofit entities,” Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University

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who studies education policy told the RFT in 2018.

Luis Huerta, a professor of education policy at Columbia University, added, “If there is profit,’ it should be returned to the district for students’ services.”

Grandview school board member Pam Tisher told the RFT in 2018 that she thought Brown retiring from the district and then starting the company, “was a major conflict of interest.”

At a 2013 board meeting, Tisher suggested that the district table the decision to sign a contract with Brown’s company until it got data on the results of the summer school, according to the minutes.

The board agreed, but at the next meeting, it unanimously approved the contract, even though Tisher says they failed to get the data.

“We were never provided any of that information,” Tisher says.

“Dr. Brown could have sold them oceanfront property in Arizona and the school board at that time would have bought it.”

That revenue became especially crucial to Grandview in 2016 when an auditor discovered that a business manager had embezzled $1.6 million over ten years — seven of them under Brown’s supervision.

After the state passed a law to expand virtual education in 2018, Zoph, who succeeded Brown as superintendent, began working with Stride to set up a full-time program through Grandview. He told the school board that the contract could “be worth $625,000” and “$1,000,000 in two years,” according to meeting minutes.

School districts and watch-

dogs worried that state support for profit-driven online educators would weaken Missouri’s public schools and turn students into commodities.

During the discussion about

the proposed legislation in 2018, the Missouri School Boards’ Association, a nonprofit that advocates for public schools, expressed concern. Susan Goldammer, MSBA’s associate executive director, said at the time that the legislation “might be an opportunity for for-profit companies to come in and receive state aid to educate students or that this is the beginning of creating a virtual charter school. ... We are very wary of any sort of scheme that would allow people to profit off of students.”

The sponsor of the bill, State Rep. Bryan Spencer, (R-Wentzville), assured the St. Louis PostDispatch in 2018 he did not want students to take online courses already offered by their local school district. Districts would also have the right to deny a student’s request for enrollment in a virtual program if they determined it was not in their best educational interests, he said.

Gov. Eric Greitens approved the legislation to create the Missouri Course Access and Virtual School Program on his last day before resigning amidst a scandal in 2018.

After the law’s passage, Grandview R-2 School District set up Missouri Virtual Academy, or MOVA, which only allowed students to enroll full time, meaning that they of course would take classes that districts already offered. It’s now one of thirteen such programs operating in the state.

To (supposedly) ensure that they were good quality, the law contained provisions requiring that virtual teachers be state certified, that curriculum meet state academic standards and that student data be provided to

p U g n i l i a F the state in a manner that protects their privacy.

But that state review process didn’t apply to MOVA, because the law also contained a provision stating that since the district already offered the virtual summer program, it should be automatically approved.

In spite of that provision, DESE officials told the Grandview superintendent that it needed to submit an application for the virtual education program in order to be listed on the state virtual education website and enroll students, according to emails obtained from an open records request.

That didn’t happen.

But Schindler filed a lawsuit on behalf of a family in the Fulton School District who tried to enroll in MOVA but had been denied by the district because the program had not received state approval. A Cole County judge ruled in the family’s favor and ordered the state education department to list MOVA on its website.

Schindler claimed that lobbyists and DESE favored cheaper, lower-quality virtual education programs and wanted to keep MOVA off the list because “it’s the best program, and b) it’s the most expensive,” he said in a May 2020 Facebook video with the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri, a pro-“school choice” organization funded by St. Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield that has joined Schindler in his advocacy efforts.

The organization in 2014 paid Schindler to represent students seeking to transfer out of Normandy School District, located in north St. Louis County, which

e v i s s a m t, s e r e t n i al c f i o t i l s t o c p i nfl nd o a c e t c n n a a t Bla derperform virtual school t n fi u to o t r e n p e u r d n i o u t f n st ue co g y a l e p h s t s t e t c l a r t n batt grams — bu co d n a y o e r n p o m GER n i R E e B k C a r

BY ERI

had lost its accreditation.

Schindler is correct that MOVA is the most expensive. The program charges districts — not parents — $525 per course; the cost of courses in other programs range from $275 to $499, according to the state virtual education site.

The program does not, however, appear to be the best. In general, kindergarten through twelfth-grade students’ academic performance and graduation rates in virtual programs across the country are significantly lower than in-person institutions, according to a bounty of research.

During the 2019-2020 school year, 56 percent of the 498 students enrolled in MOVA passed their courses, which is slightly lower than the already not-sohot average of 59 percent of students who passed courses across the various state virtual education programs, according to a DESE report. (The report does not break the performance down into letter grades or scores.)

“That means that a little more than half of the kids are learning what they should be learning. That’s disastrous,” says Gary Miron, who is one of the authors of an annual report from the National Education Policy Center examining such virtual education programs in the United States.

That poor performance is the norm for Stride’s programs. During the 2017-2018 school year, only 29.8 percent of full-time

virtual programs in the United States operated by for-profit providers like Stride achieved acceptable state standards for students’ academic performance, according to the NEPC report.

Stride’s programs had a 48 percent graduation rate for the 2017-2018 term, placing it 10 points below its largest competitor, Connections Education. The national average graduation rate during the 2017-2018 school year was 85 percent for public high school students, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Those figures have prompted officials in other states to charge that Stride has pocketed millions of dollars while failing to deliver on its responsibilities to students and families.

In 2016, California Virtual Academies, a collection of thirteen charter schools connected to Stride, reached an $8.5 million settlement with the state after the company “misled parents and the state of California by claiming taxpayer dollars for questionable student attendance, misstating student success and parent satisfaction, and loading nonprofit charities with debt,” Kamala Har-

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ris, then attorney general of California, said in a statement.

In Georgia, Stride lost its contract to operate a virtual charter school after the corporation took $54 million of the $90 million in state funding for the program in 2018, according to the 74, an education news organization. The program had also received grades of D’s and F’s on state report cards in recent years because of students’ poor academic performance.

Schindler, however, insists that virtual schools offer top-level programs for students. “We have come to the point where virtual education other than brick-andmortar school is every bit like a classroom that you would see in Ladue or Clayton or anywhere else in the state of Missouri,” he

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says in the Facebook video. “They have heads of schools. They have counselors. They have people keeping an eye on their children.”

The Missouri law allows districts to deny a request for enrollment in a virtual program if they determine it’s not in the student’s best educational interests.

But when districts have issued denials, they have often faced lawsuits or letters threatening legal action from Schindler.

The law allows parents to appeal a district’s decision to the school board and then DESE, but in at least three cases, Schindler filed lawsuits against districts before the parents had done so, according to the defendants’ court filings.

A mother living in the Willard public school district in southwest Missouri tried to enroll her middle school student in MOVA in 201 . Her daughter was getting C’s, D’s or F’s in each of the four core subjects while learning in person. Based on her academic performance, the district determined virtual learning was not in her best interest, according to a letter sent to the family.

“What we have found is that the students who have the ability to self-regulate, they can be successful in the virtual world,” says Matthew Teeter, superintendent of Willard Public Schools.

But students who “have an inability to come to school, are missing multiple days … and don’t tend to make up the work that they missed don’t tend to be successful in the virtual world.”

Schindler alleged that the district had denied the enrollment in MOVA and instead encouraged her to enroll in Launch, a virtual education program run by Springfield Public School that charges 22 less per course than MO A. But a letter from the district to the parent in December 201 makes no mention of Launch in denying her request and states that it does not believe she would succeed in virtual courses.

Schindler eventually dropped the suit. The student did not enroll in MOVA through Willard, Teeter said.

“Parents, I think, do always want to have the best interest in mind for their kids,” Teeter says. “I can also say that sometimes the evidence doesn’t back up their opinion … because we have enough evidence to suggest that virtual education would not be the best option, so how can we as a school 12

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Attorney Joshua Schindler has sued for online enrollment. | COURTESY JOSHUA SCHINDLER district in good conscience allow a student to fail?”

The state’s virtual education

programs operate within an unusual loophole. While MOVA only accepts students on a full-time basis, their students’ performance on state standardized tests is not factored into Grandview’s state assessment. It’s counted against the district in which they reside, which no longer teaches the student. And those districts still have to pay virtual education programs on a student’s behalf.

“Even though a student may never walk in our doors, and they go to an online for-profit, virtual school, we as the school district in which they reside is still responsible for their state assessment score, so [Grandview has] zero accountability in all of this, but they are receiving a substantial amount of revenue for the services they provide,” says Dale Herl, superintendent of Independence School District near Kansas City.

Schindler filed two lawsuits against the district concerning students who wished to enroll in MOVA. In one case, the mother dropped the suit and said in a private Facebook message that her daughter no longer attends MOVA. She declined an interview request.

In the other, the court ruled against the student. The Jackson County judge found that the student had not been legally allowed to enroll in MOVA at Independence’s expense before DESE ruled in the case. The court also stated the district, which is responsible for the student’s performance, had a legal right to ask the student to submit an assessment of her progress more than once a semester.

Otherwise, the “student could

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Grandview R-2 School District is a local partner for virtual education company Stride, boosting enrollment in its online program and profit. | DOYLE MURPHY fail a class, or simply not participate, and [Independence] would not know until it was too late to intervene, thereby harming the student, losing educational time, and wasting taxpayer funds,” the ruling states.

Herl and other superinten-

dents still say that some students can be successful virtual learners.

The Independence district also has a virtual education center that Herl says uses Stride curriculum.

The difference is “we have a faceto-face piece to our online education. We do ask that our students come in so we can proctor tests and monitor their progress,” he adds.

Herl says the district has calculated that it costs the district about $3,000 per student per year, which is half of what MOVA charges.

But some parents say virtual education is better than the alternative in their district. Jasmine Hill turned to Schindler after St. Louis Public Schools denied her request for her elementary school-aged son to attend MOVA. The district eventually allowed her son to enroll and Schindler dismissed the suit.

“I am an entrepreneur, and I am a single mom, and with my lifestyle, it’s better for him and me both for me to teach him one-onone,” says Hill, a hairstylist whose son would spend time with her at a salon near Washington University and “be tutored by different people.”

Her son was supposed to attend Monroe Elementary School, she says, a school where the entire student body lives below the poverty line and where less than 9 percent of students test as pro-

ficient or advanced in English, math and science, according to the state’s annual performance report in 201 .

She tried the St. Louis Public Schools’ internal virtual education program but says her son “started getting sick and nauseous and throwing up.”

“I just don’t think it’s that great to keep children on a computer for that long without interaction from other humans,” Hill said in July 2020, as her son was preparing to start at MOVA. Asked whether virtual education would then be a good fit, given her son’s reaction to the district’s version of online school, Hill said she had been told a typical day at MOVA included plenty of time away from the computer.

In a follow-up interview in December, Hill said her son was “loving it. It came with all the tools he would need, from computer to printers to books to teaching tools, supplies, and paint and brushes.

It comes with a lot of stuff, and I really like it.”

Schindler admits that he is

paid by the National Coalition for Public School Options, a lobbying group that has fought efforts from state and charter school groups to provide additional oversight of Stride’s virtual charter schools around the country. And news organization the 74 has documented that Stride and the coalition have shared the same lobbyists in Washington.

But in spite of Schindler’s praise for MO A and significant evidence of cooperation between Stride and the coalition, Schindler

For the 2017-18 term, Stride’s programs had a

48% graduation rate, versus a national average

85% graduation rate for public high school students.

Dr. Dale Herl. | INDEPENDENCE SCHOOL DISTRICT denies that he works on the company’s behalf.

“I am an absolutely one-trick pony: If a parent has a right under [the virtual education law] and that right is being thwarted, I am going to fight to vindicate the parents — this is not anything other than that,” he tells the RFT. But at the August hearing, Schindler referred to a map created with information he received from MOVA showing the number of applicants throughout the state who were awaiting district approval.

“If DESE, doing its homework, also goes and finds out which school districts are sitting on applications and not even ruling on them, steps should be taken against those districts,” Schindler said.

Republican lawmakers appeared moved by Schindler’s words.

State Sen. Ed Emery (R-Barton) suggested that the state implement a checklist for districts to comply with the state virtual education law and that superintendents could be dismissed if they don’t.

To bolster MOVA’s case, one of its employees also created a spreadsheet titled “NCPSO [the company Schindler works for] Count of Denied MOCAP students” that was distributed to lawmakers at the hearing, according to a letter from DESE. That spreadsheet contained the personal information of 1,450 students. State officials were outraged, describing the list as a “significant data breach” and a violation of state and federal law.

That information could expose children to identity theft, says Chris Neale, assistant commissioner with DESE. And “if you are human trafficking, you could use a stolen child’s identity to cover a child you should not be in possession of,” Neale

says. Asked whether the state would take action against Grandview or MOVA, Neale describes it as an “ongoing legal matter.”

Schindler “used the spreadsheet data in an effort to convince members of the Joint Committee and others that there was a tremendous backlog of students waiting to be enrolled in MOCAP courses,” according to a letter from DESE’s chief counsel.

Even though he referred to the map of students created with information provided by MOVA, Schindler now says, “I think I merely represented in general terms that I understood that there were a lot of students who were not being processed.”

MOVA’s principal also produced a separate list of 1,600 students allegedly awaiting district approval, which a Stride employee then distributed to Missouri State Board of Education members, the company admits in a letter responding to DESE’s complaint. That had students’ dates of birth, phone numbers, parents’ names, addresses and information on disabilities, Neale said in a sworn deposition.

Stride’s attorney states in a letter to Neale that the spreadsheets did not contain the sort of personal information that would constitute a violation of state law but said the company would contact families whose information had been shared.

Ironically, those reports revealed the holes in Schindler’s claims about the terrible abuses committed by districts.

The persons listed in those spreadsheets had only expressed interest in enrolling or had created Stride online accounts “but did not have complete applications,” Stride’s attorney states in the letter.

When the state’s virtual education office followed up with districts that allegedly had the largest number of students awaiting approval, they found that among 750 students, less than 5 percent were still awaiting an enrollment decision, according to a letter

from the DESE attorney.

DESE also received 61 form letters through a website called Oneclickpolitics.com requesting that the state waive its approval process for enrollment in virtual education programs because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Missouri State Board of Education meeting agenda. When the state reached out to the senders, “those who did respond indicated that they did not send the email and did not know what it was about,” the agenda states.

After Schindler testified in August, Nicholas Elmes, communications manager for CEAM, the group funded by Sinquefield, told the committee that three parents had planned to testify about the problems they encountered when trying to enroll their children in virtual education. None showed up.

One parent woke up in the morning and had a check engine light on in her car, Elmes said.

Another had an emergency doctor’s appointment. The third had to work. When asked by the Riverfront Times to connect with these parents, Elmes did not respond.

Amidst the allegations that districts and the state are preventing students from enrolling in virtual education, MOVA has still been able to rapidly expand. This school year, during the ongoing pandemic, MOVA had 905 students enrolled as of January, an 1 percent increase over last school year, according to DESE. (DESE does not yet have data on the number of students who passed the virtual courses during the first semester.)

The state growth is part of a national trend. Stride reported revenue of $376.1 million during the second quarter of fiscal year 2021, a 46 percent increase from last year, largely due to an increase in student enrollment.

In spite of the lack of

evidence that districts are actually breaking the 201 law, and in spite of the fact the sponsor of the

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201 legislation said the virtual program was not intended to duplicate courses that districts were already offering, Republican lawmakers would now like to cut districts out of the equation.

State Sen. Bob Onder (R-St. Charles County), who sponsored the senate version of the 201 bill, has introduced new legislation that would make the parents rather than school districts the gatekeepers over students wishing to enroll in virtual education. A district or the state education department could object to the parents’ decision, but that objection would only be sent to the parents for their consideration.

The state, rather than the district, would then pay the virtual education provider, similar to the arrangement Stride had in Georgia and California when it received hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding despite students’ poor academic performance.

Susan Goldammer of the Missouri School Boards’ Association worries about the vague language contained in the bill, which states that DESE “shall revoke or suspend or take other corrective action regarding” a “course or provider no longer meeting the requirements of the program,” but only after notifying the provider and providing them a “reasonable time period” to take corrective action.

“Even if a vendor is not providing any education to students, we cannot simply cut them off,” Goldammer wrote in an email. “We have to give the provider ‘reasonable time’ to avoid revocation.

Lawyers will debate all day how much time is ‘reasonable.’”

A district that does not advertise the state’s virtual education program on its homepage would be fined 100 each day.

That sort of provision is needed because many of these school districts “have refused to give children access to longstanding, very high-quality virtual school programs that have been in existence for many years and provided excellent education to children,” Onder says.

But what about the state’s report showing that only 56 percent of students in MOVA’s program had passed their courses? Onder says he had not seen it.

What about the data breach?

Onder says he did not know anything about that.

When presented with the evidence that DESE had reviewed the list of students allegedly denied enrollment and found that largely not to be the case, Onder says,

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“The idea that this bill is not needed is somewhat disingenuous on the part of DESE, and I have been very disappointed with DESE in its cooperation” on the virtual education law.

The sponsor of the House bill, State Rep. Phil Christofanelli (RSt. Peters), did not respond to a request for comment.

Another motivator for Christofanelli and Onder could be Sinquefield. One of the largest contributors during their past two runs for office was the billionaire’s campaign committee Grow Missouri, which gave them a total of $36,400, according to Followthemoney.org.

The legislation has been folded into a Senate bill that would expand charter schools and provide tax credits for contributions to organizations that provide scholarships for private education. On January 21, the education committee passed it on a 5-4 party-line vote, with the exception of one Republican who voted against it.

Goldammer sees the new legislation as the culmination of what she predicted in 2018. “We believe the intent of this all along was to open up Missouri for virtual charter schools,” she says. “If Onder’s bill passes, that is exactly what we will have, only there is even less accountability for our virtual charter schools than there are for our existing charter schools in St. Louis and Kansas City.”

The virtual education pro-

gram has certainly been good for Grandview’s finances. The district was able to increase its spending per student to $11,740 in 2019, a 21 percent jump from 2017 when that figure was ,700.

Matt Zoph, its superintendent, is also doing well. He made $151,500 during the 2019-2020 school year, a 31 percent raise from the previous year, which caught the attention of the Post-Dispatch.

Zoph did not respond to the RFT’s requests for comment but told the Post-Dispatch he was initially paid significantly less than other superintendents and was told “that this was a trial and that my salary would be adjusted in the future based on performance.”

In 2019, Grandview also followed a trend among rural districts and shifted to a four-day week in order to address “the decade old problem of the inequity in teacher pay between our district and the surrounding school districts,” Zoph stated in a letter to parents.

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Poor performance by for-profits is the norm. During 2017-2018,

only 29.8% of full-time virtual programs operated by for-profit providers achieved

acceptable

state standards for students’ academic performance.

As to its virtual program, MOVA Principal Steve Richards sees the state data on performance as skewed by students who come and go throughout the semester.

Just months into the 2019 school year, 25 students had already withdrawn from MOVA, according to emails between the program and DESE. An administrator told DESE that “as long as a student achieved progress in a course, a district will be billed for a student.”

“Missouri Virtual is a legitimate school option,” Richards says. “I am not saying virtual is for every student because it’s not necessarily, but if for whatever reason virtual is something you need, I really feel like the program that we deliver is very high quality and that we’re on the path to being a very successful school.”

If Onder’s legislation passes, virtual education providers, unlike public school districts, will still be able to make use of a best educational interest clause — in order to remove the student from their program, at which point they presumably would drop out entirely or reenroll in their public school district.

“Virtual programs have the ability to kick a student out if they are not performing at a level that they deem appropriate. Obviously public schools don’t have that right,” Herl, the Independence superintendent, said. “It’s my belief that school districts will be left to pick up the pieces when kids start to struggle and these for-profit providers start kicking them out.” n

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[SIDE DISH]

A Cold Boon Rachel Burns’ Bold Spoon Creamery is an uncommon tale of pandemic success Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

A

t first, Rachel Burns and her family viewed the mint growing prolifically in their niversity City backyard with a little bit of angst. It was a huge patch, and the less they paid it attention, the more it grew. They didn’t want to get rid of the bush, but they also weren’t sure what to do with all of it, and they could only drink so many mojitos. Eventually, Burns had an idea.

“It was growing so beautifully that we couldn’t let it die, so I started making mint ice cream,” Burns says. “Prior to that, I had never made ice cream before. I had one of those Cuisinart ice cream makers in my basement for years and I would walk past it and pay it no attention, so I brought it up and started making mint ice cream. We had a small pool in our backyard, and we’d invite people over and all have ice cream. Eventually, it became a condition of accepting our invitations.”

Burns laughs at how such a seemingly insignificant detail as a patch of mint in her backyard has launched her into ice cream entrepreneurship. If someone would have told her just a few years ago that she would launch a gourmet ice cream brand, Bold Spoon Creamery, she would have thought them to be crazy. An investment consultant by day, Burns always enjoyed food, but she never considered herself to be an especially gifted home cook, let alone a culinary professional.

However, something about making ice cream spoke to her. That entire first summer she made only a mint version of the frozen treat, but the following one, she began experimenting with flavors. She began to see that ice cream was becoming more than a hobby, and she wanted to explore it further, fueled on by the joy she saw her

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Rachel Burns turned an unwieldy patch of mint into an ice cream venture. | ANDY PAULISSEN handiwork bringing to people.

“I think I wanted to explore it because it’s such an easy way to make people happy,” Burns says.

“Everyone was giggly happy when I brought it out; no one was paying attention to their phones — just talking and happy together.”

With the support of her husband, Burns began the process of turning Bold Spoon into a bona fide ice cream operation in 201 . With the help of her circle of friends, who became her volunteer tasters called “the Spoons,” she came up with recipes, developed a business plan, got all of her licenses and certifications in order, found commercial kitchen space at the incubator STL Foodworks and planned to launch in 2020. Grown out of her home-use Cuisinart, she had her commercial ice cream maker set for delivery on March 1 .

Then, everything shut down.

“Our plan was to sell wholesale to restaurants and specialty stores,” Burns says. “I remember the day we got it, I asked the delivery people if they were even still making deliveries. It was such a bizarre time. We thought about having them restock it, because there was no way we were going to be able to execute our business plan.

No restaurant was going to talk to

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me about carrying my ice cream — they didn’t even know if they were going to be open or closed.”

Burns decided to accept delivery of the ice cream machine and figure out a way to move forward.

She didn’t know where to start, but she knew she had to do something, so she put her ice cream in a cooler and walked it around her neighborhood, giving samples to anyone who’d accept. She also gave her ice cream to hospital workers as a way to give them a little bit of joy in the midst of the CO ID-1 crisis, and eventually set up an online store to sell directly to customers.

When her first orders came in, she was beyond thrilled.

“My husband, son and I were jumping around like we’d made a million dollars,” Burns recalls. “It was really 40, but it could have been a million, because it made us see that this might actually work and someone wants it.”

Burns got to work fulfilling online orders and eventually started selling Bold Spoon’s frozen wares at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market. There, she enjoyed interacting with customers and getting to know the other vendors, many of whose wares she began using in her ice cream. By late July, she had her products in six different

Schnucks locations and several specialty stores around town, and just this January she and her husband moved to Park Hills, where she has space for both a commercial kitchen and a massive garden she will use to cultivate ingredients for her ice cream. Both the move and Bold Spoon’s success are things she never could’ve have imagined, but she can’t help but feel that she was led to this moment, even by the most random act.

“There are so many things that happen that seem small and insignificant,” Burns says. “The fact that I planted that mint in an area where it could grow rather than putting it in a pot like I should have — it’s so crazy. ou think the little things are insignificant, then look what happens.”

Burns took a break from making ice cream to share her passion for the St. Louis food community, how the innovators in the restaurant business inspire her, and how everyone in the industry is better when others succeed.

What is one thing people don’t know about you that you wish they did?

When I was much younger, I used to think about starting a business.

I would think about products or services I could provide. However,

I could never come up with something I thought would be successful, so that went by the wayside. Then flash forward twenty years and I started Bold Spoon and it evolved naturally. Making ice cream started as my hobby, it turned into a hobby on hyper-drive, then it turned into a business. I stopped letting myself get in the way of me and decided to go for it, and I’m glad I did, and I encourage others to do the same, even if that means someone starts another ice cream business. To be successful you don’t need someone else to fail; there is room for all who have a great product and are willing to work hard.

What daily ritual is non-negotiable for you?

I have a cup of coffee in my hands within fifteen minutes of being awake. I tried to change that habit once, but it didn’t stick. I have no plans to try to change it again.

Who is your St. Louis food crush?

I love so much about the local St. Louis food scene; it’s so eclectic. My brother, Brad, is a chef at Lorenzo’s Trattoria on the Hill, so Lorenzo’s is among my favorites. If you haven’t been there you should give it a try. St. Louis is lucky to have so many great and unique neighborhoods all with their individual restaurant scene.

Lafayette Square, Dogtown, the Loop and Central West End, to name a few neighborhoods, all have great restaurants. I also love St. Louis staples such as Imo’s and Ted Drewes. I grew up eating both, so they are a bit nostalgic for me.

Which ingredient is most representative of your personality?

If I think about the ingredients in our ice cream, I will say spiced honey. In our Brie and Spiced Honey ice cream, we swirl honey spiced with cayenne pepper throughout. The honey is mostly sweet and smooth with an occasional gentle kick, kind of like me.

If you weren’t working in the food business, what would you be doing?

I love being in the local food industry. Through our sourcing of local ingredients for our ice cream, I have met so many great people whose products we use in Bold Spoon ice cream. However, this question is easy for me, because I currently have a career outside of the restaurant business, separate from Bold Spoon. I am an investment consultant by day and an ice cream maker by night

and on the weekends.

As a food professional, what do people need to know about what you are going through?

I only have things to be grateful for as a new business owner.

Bold Spoon is off to a solid start, and I have made new connections with great people. Bold Spoon is 100 percent Black-woman-owned (me), and there has been growing interest in supporting minority business, and for that I’m grateful.

I am grateful for the local stores that sell our products; we are currently sold in Schnucks (Arsenal, Richmond Heights, Ladue, Lindbergh, Des Peres and Webster Groves), Smoke House Market, Woman’s Exchange and Garden District STL, and all of them have been amazing partners.

What do you miss most about the way you did your job before COVID-19? What do you miss least?

People often ask me what it is like to do business during CO ID. Oddly, I have nothing to compare it to, as we started Bold Spoon in 2020 during CO ID. Our first sale was May 2, 2020.

What have you been stress-eating/drinking lately?

I can’t stop eating pistachios. I don’t think it’s stress-eating; I just can’t stop eating them.

What do you think the biggest change to the hospitality industry will be once people are allowed to return to normal activity levels?

I think the way we do a lot of things will change. For instance, many jobs are now remote and will likely remain flexible going forward. Think of the impact on restaurants that were near big office buildings filled with people going out to lunch. Now, many of those people will not be coming into the office every day like they did preCO ID, so the potential customer base is reduced. I think we will all be adapting for some time to come.

What is one thing that gives you hope during this crisis?

I love small businesses, and not just because Bold Spoon is one.

Something that gives me hope is all the small business owners I see who keep pushing and adapting day in and day out. I’ve been amazed by all of the innovations people have been forced to create. There is a saying that “necessity is the mother of invention”; 2020 proved this saying to be true many times over. n

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CULTURE [KID STUFF]

The Sound of Science St. Louis Symphony Orchestra launches free SoundLab education series for kids Written by

DANIEL HILL

C

OVID-19 got you down? Tired of the incessant demands of your horrible, cooped-up children? The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is here to help.

St. Louis’ favorite group of worldclass musicians is lending exhausted parents a bit of a helping hand this never-ending pandemic season with a new educational series called SoundLab, a digital effort that promises to educate your children about music and the science of sound while you take a well-earned break to scream into a pillow and question all of your life’s choices.

According to a press release, SoundLab is a four-episode series that “allows children, families, and teachers to create music and engage in the science of sound.” (Notably, it also enables parents to get away long enough to smoke a damn cigarette in peace for a change.)

“Engaging with and inspiring young people to experience and embrace the power of music is at the core of the SLSO’s mission,” SLSO President and CEO Marie-Hélène Bernard says in the release.

“This year marks the 100th anniversary of our education concerts.

We are thrilled to honor that milestone and to support platforms which engages children of all ages in developing a life-long appreciation of music.”

The series, which is free for all, will be hosted by St. Louis actor and singer/songwriter Alicia Revé, and will incorporate performances by the symphony’s musicians alongside STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) based education.

Each episode will approach music — and the science behind how and why we enjoy it — in different

The four-part series digs into the science of sound and our enjoyment of music. | VIA SLSO ways. According to the release, the episodes break down as follows: Episode 1: Feel the Sound – Learn about the scientific and emotional impact of sound waves.

Episode 2: Building a Bridge of Sound – Discover how sound travels and how it can express a kaleidoscope of emotions.

[PLEASE LOUISE]

Tearing Up This Town St. Charles mayor announces ban on loud music, dancing on portion of Main Street Written by

DANIEL HILL

S

t. Charles, already a joyless wasteland devoid of anything even resembling culture or merriment, is cracking down on unsanctioned dancing and loud music for three blocks of its popular Main Street strip of bars.

The ban, which was announced by Mayor Dan Borgmeyer in a news conference, applies to any business with a liquor license in the 100 through 200 blocks of North Main Street. That strip of the street includes such popular nightlife spots as Lloyd & Harry’s Bar & Grill (208 North Main Street, St. Charles; 636-395-7860), Tony’s on Main (132 North Main Street, St. Charles; 636-

Episode 3: Sonic Conversations – Look at how music creates dialogue and explore the science behind pitch and volume.

Episode 4: The Golden Record – The exploration of an endless index of unique sounds, encouraging students to explore and create their own individual soundscapes.

940-1960) and Quintessential Dining and Nightlife (149 North Main Street, St. Charles; 636-443-2211) — the same three businesses Borgmeyer singled out in September when similar restrictions were put in place.

At issue are the huge crowds that are gathering to party in the district on account of St. Charles County’s exceptionally lax coronavirus restrictions, Borgmeyer said.

“I think our allowable number of patrons is about 3,069 on Main Street with all the establishments,” Borgmeyer noted during last week’s news conference. “We are probably running in the 5,000 to 6,000 range. Police are doing a good job of monitoring that and most of the people are respectful.”

And with the crowds, according to city officials, comes crime.

“Part of what we’ve seen is just an uptick in the use of weapons,” Captain Ray Juengst of the St. Charles Police Department added. “We’ve had several investigations where people have been hurt, assaulted or most recently a murder. Those seem to be coming at the end of bar closings, at nights when we have those. So that’s what we’re trying to address and curtail.”

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The series was filmed at Powell Hall, the SLSO’s longtime base of operations, as well as several children’s homes. Each episode is fifteen minutes long, with a target audience of children in grades three through eight. The SLSO will host virtual watch parties for each episode every Saturday in February at 10:30 a.m., and those watch parties will feature an additional fifteen minutes’ worth of interviews with symphony performers and other guests.

Those interested in the SoundLab series will need to register through the SLSO’s website at slso.org/family. Attendance for the watch parties will also require an RSVP due to limited space.

“SLSO SoundLab is a truly innovative and timely addition to our robust library of education programs and at-home resources,” Bernard says, “helping inspire and equip music educators and parents to steward the next generation of music makers and music lovers.”

And as for the current generation, perhaps the series will help get the dang rugrats out of some poor parents’ faces for an entire merciful half-hour per week as well. Thanks, SLSO! n The murder Juengst mentions occurred in late December. Police were alerted to an altercation behind Lloyd & Harry’s after the bar had closed. Police say one of the officers who responded saw Marcell Foster, a Bel-Ridge man, point and fire a gun several times at a man named LaRico Martin. Martin died the following afternoon at a hospital with a bullet wound in his neck. Foster has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder and armed criminal action.

Borgmeyer, who jokingly referred to himself as “Mayor Footloose,” explained that he is able to enact these restrictions because the city’s zoning code does not permit nightclubs. He said that it’s a longstanding code that simply hadn’t been enforced.

That all changes now. Borgmeyer said the restrictions go into effect immediately, and that any business that refuses to comply will have its liquor license revoked.

“The enforcement hammer went down today,” Borgmeyer continued.

“There’s going to be no more of this.

We’re going to bring people into compliance. And if they don’t come into compliance, there’s no contrition.” n

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SAVAGE LOVE QUICKIES

BY DAN SAVAGE Hey, Dan: I’m a 30-year-old straight woman in a three-year relationship with my live-in partner, who is also 30. I love him and he loves me and he wants to make a life with me. However, in this pandemic, the stress is so great that I have lost all desire to have sex.

I don’t want anyone touching me right now, not even myself. I feel like I’m in survival mode. I lost the career I love and I’m working four different jobs to make up for it. I have also been coming to terms in therapy with a sexual trauma I suffered, which is making me want to be touched even less. He’s been extremely patient, and says that we can work through it, but I’m really worried that this is the death knell for our relationship. I’m really trying to figure out ways to get myself back in good working order, Dan, but honestly I’m just trying to survive every day right now. Help?

Witty Acronym Here First, you’re not alone. So many people have seen their libidos tank in response to the overlapping stresses of lockdowns and job losses that sex researcher are talking about (and documenting) a “pandemic sex recession.”

So what can you do?

You have a long, hard slog in front of you, personally and professionally, and you need to carve out enough time and space for yourself to you get through this.

And to do that you’re not just gonna need to reset your partner’s expectations for the duration of the pandemic and/or until you’re back on your feet again professionally and emotionally, you’re going to need to take his yes for an answer. If he tells you he’s willing to tough/rub it out until you’re less stressed out, less overworked, and less overwhelmed, and he’s not being passive aggressive about your lack of desire, then you should take him at his word.

If he’s not trying to make you feel bad about the sex you aren’t having right now, WAH, don’t make yourself feel bad about it.

There’s no guarantee your relationship will survive this (the

pandemic), that (your crushing workload), or the other thing (the trauma you’re working through in therapy). Any one of those things or some other thing could wind up being the death knell for your relationship. But the only way to find out if your desire for your partner will kick back into gear post-pandemic, post-career-crisis, and post-coming-to-terms-withpast-sexual-trauma is to hang in there, WAH, and reassess once your past those posts. Will you two still be together once you’re out of survival mode? Survive and find out. Good luck.

Hey, Dan: I’m a 34-year-old straight woman dating a 32-yearold straight man. When we first met, we had both recently relocated to our hometown and were living with our parents. When we first started dating, things were great, however, the sex wasn’t mind-blowing. Foreplay was limited and he always jumped out of bed afterward. I thought this was probably due to the fact that while we had privacy, we were having sex at my parent’s house which isn’t particularly sexy. We finally moved in together nine months ago and now it feels like we’ve been married for decades. He almost always turns my sexual advances down. And when we do have sex, it lasts about five minutes and I do all of the work and get ZERO satisfaction out of it. He will hold my hand on the couch but if I ask him to cuddle he acts like I am asking for a huge favor.

I’ve explained to him I need to feel wanted and to have some kind of intimacy in this relationship.

And yet, despite the multiple conversations about how sexually, physically, and emotionally unsatisfied I am, he has put in little effort. Otherwise, our relationship is great. We have fun together, I love him, I want to be with him, and we’ve talked about marriage and kids, but I also can’t live this way for the rest of my life. What can I expect from a man who is emotionally and physically unavailable?

Intimate Needs That Involve Making A Team Effort A lifetime of frustration.

You wanna make the sex and physical intimacy work because so much else is working — it sounds

“In this pandemic, the stress is so great that I have lost all desire to have sex. I don’t want anyone touching me right now, not even myself. I feel like I’m in survival mode.” like pretty much everything else is working — but you can’t make the sex and intimacy work if he’s not willing to work on it. And even if he was willing to work on it, INTIMATE, even if he was willing to make an effort sexually, there’s no guarantee that working on it will actually work. Some couples work on this shit for decades and get nowhere. Opening the relationship up might make it possible for you to have him and sexual satisfaction too — by getting sexual satisfaction elsewhere — but opening up a relationship also requires effort, INTIMATE, and effort clearly isn’t his thing. DTMFA. Hey, Dan: My fiancé and I (both male) have been together for six years. I am fully out but he is only out to his close friends and his mom. The rest of his family doesn’t know. His co-workers don’t know.

I’ve met his family and co-workers who don’t know and played the “friend” and “roommate” and it kills me but he still won’t budge.

It’s also not like homosexuality is taboo in his family. He has a gay uncle and his uncle and his partner are invited to family holidays and welcomed with open arms. Is it even worth continuing this relationship?

Feeling Insecure About Needlessly Closeted Engagement our fianc has to choose: He can have you or he can have his closet but he can’t have both.

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It’s not about telling him what to do, FIANCE, it’s about setting boundaries around what you’re willing to do. And for the last six years you let him drag you back into the closet — you were willing to pretend to be his friend or his roommate — but you’re not willing to do that anymore. If he wants to have a life with you, he can choose to come out. If he’s not willing to come out, he’ll have to learn to live without you.

Hey, Dan: I wanted to say something about WEASS, the man with the HIV-positive boyfriend who was reluctant to disclose his status to a new sex partner. As someone who’s been HIV-positive and undetectable for almost 18 years, Dan, I’ve gone through a few different iterations of dealing with (or not) and disclosing my status (or not). But starting about ten years ago it just seemed easier on my conscience to disclose my +/U status to my partners—that is, HIV-positive but undetectable and therefore not capable of infecting anyone. Even after nearly a decade of PrEP and decades of HIV education, my status still generates negative reactions ranging from guys declaring me “not clean” to guys accusing me of trying to spread the virus (which I literally can’t do) to guys rebuffing me in kinder ways. Even people on PrEP have gone from DTF to “no thanks” when I’ve disclosed.

So based on my experiences, Dan, I don’t think that every potential hookup out there would react in an informed and rational way, not even guys on PrEP. Undetectable Poz Fellow Relieved Over Not Telling Any Lies The man WEASS and his HIVpositive boyfriend were thinking about having a threesome might react negatively to the disclosure — that’s why I advised WEASS to sound this guy out before looping his BF into the conversation. If the guy reacts badly, WEASS can spare his boyfriend the grief. But if the guy reacts like an informed and rational gay grownup, UPFRONTAL, then WEASS should loop his boyfriend in. mail@savagelove.net @FakeDanSavage on Twitter www.savagelovecast.com

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