A St. Louis public charter school received its 10-year renewal from the State Board of Education after performing in the top 8% of all Missouri school districts based on 2021 academic results.
“Typically, charter schools get a five-year renewal unless they've performed exceptionally well for a period of time, so this is just really exciting,” said Dr. Sarah Ranney, executive director at Lafayette Preparatory Academy (LPA). “We had the highest academic outcomes in the city and saw strong comparisons with some of the prestigious county districts like Clayton, Ladue, Rockwood, and Parkway.”
LPA, located at 1900 Lafayette Avenue in St. Louis, was founded ten years ago with just 74 students in kindergarten through second grade. Today, the school serves some 400 students through the 8th grade.
“We started as a grassroots community effort without an educational management organization and no big money,” said Paul Brown, one of four co-founders of the school. “We are just a group of people in the community that wanted better school choices for kids in the city.”
Brown formerly served as chief counsel of litigation in the Missouri Attorney General’s Office from Jan. 2020 to May 2021 under Eric Schmitt (R) who is now a U.S. Senator representing Missouri. Currently, Brown sits on LPA’s board of directors.
“We probably raised $20,000 before qualifying for the last of the Walton Family Foundation grants,” he said. “They gave us a $250,000 grant before they pulled out of Missouri. They only spend so much time in every state. We applied the last year that they were giving grants and we got it.”
LPA practices a diverse-by-design school model in which the demographics of the student body are representative of the population in the city of St. Louis.
"About 40% of the kids are free-and-reduced-lunch eligible and the incoming kindergarten class is 50% free-and-reduced-lunch eligible," Brown told the St. Louis Record. "The school continues to find ways to effectively bring kids from the underprivileged community into the school."
Specifically, about 50% of LPA students are white and 50% are of color, according to Ranney.
Last year, the U.S. Census Bureau determined that 46.3% of St. Louisians are white, 44.8% are black or African American, 0.3% are Native American and 3.4% are Asian.
"The other county schools that are in the top 8% along with Lafayette Preparatory Academy do not have anywhere close to the diverse student population that LPA has and they spend 2 to 3 times as much per child as LPA to achieve those results," Brown added.
Ranney, who credits LPA's high performance with its teacher development program, believes LPA's approach can be adopted by public schools to improve their performance.
"We have three full-time instructional coaches and they work with a team of about eight teachers," she said. "We also do weekly professional development after school and a professional learning community. The work our team does together is focused on instruction, but also on creating a strong foundation with a strong culture. This is something that other schools can replicate."