ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

For the past few years, I’ve been in charge of the “first day of school� photo. My wife usually leaves for work before the kids go to school, so the yearly task of marking that important time in a family’s life has fallen to me.

The job comes with instructions. Ever since my two youngest started elementary school, the photo has been taken with them standing side-by-side, on a specific patch of sidewalk, by the front-yard tree. It’s important to follow the rules. (I learned that one year when I tried to be creative.). This year’s photo has to be compared to last year’s photo, and so on, until there are no more first-day-of-school photos.

Round and round …

We are almost to that day. This year, we took the final first-day photo of our youngest child, now a senior in high school. Actually, there were three photos. There was the one on the sidewalk, though not next to her brother, who is in college now. There was the one with the next-door neighbor, as they have taken similar photos since kindergarten. And there was the one in front of her car, an addition to the tradition that started after she turned 16.

After the photos are taken, my wife, like so many parents, puts together the collage for Facebook, where all such photos of our children must be posted — next to the ones we took when they were little, and less annoyed about being asked to pose for pictures.

Round and round …

Something about the look back on the photos struck me this year. In the one from kindergarten, my daughter is wearing a big cut-out picture of a school bus around her neck, with her bus number and name on it. How spoiled we are, I thought. My daughter, first on a bus and now in her own car, has never had a problem getting to school.

That’s not the case in the city of St. Louis this year. As has been outlined in excruciating detail by my Post-Dispatch colleague Blythe Bernhard, the St. Louis Public Schools district has fumbled its transportation plan so badly that many schoolchildren have not had a bus to take them to school the past couple of weeks.

There are myriad reasons for the catastrophe that led to thousands of schoolchildren missing their first day of school: poor management and oversight from the school board; financial difficulties; a contractor bailing on the district; the decline of the neighborhood school in the city, where many children now attend magnet schools or charter schools far from where they live; a nationwide shortage of bus drivers.

The wheels on the bus go round and round …

While this year’s transportation failure is especially bad in St. Louis, it’s not like the issue isn’t a regular worry among parents in the city. For more than 40 years, some students have taken buses to school districts in the county, including the ones my children have attended, as part of a court-forced agreement to increase educational opportunities for Black children in the city.

For years, as I’ve sat in my car outside my kids’ schools, waiting to pick up a child after a practice or other activity, taxi cabs from the city have lined up to take home the children who attend school under the , or VICC. The desegregation program began as a result of a 1972 federal lawsuit alleging discrimination in schools in the St. Louis region. My drive was 5 minutes. The city children, who got to school after waking up before dark, still had a 45-minute drive, or longer, ahead of them.

All these years later, schools in the city and county are still separate, still unequal.

All through the town.

While it’s easy to point to the management failures of St. Louis public school leaders, that only scratches the surface of the larger problem. It was outlined by a blue-ribbon commission in the 1960s that recommended consolidation of school districts in St. Louis city and St. Louis County so that future generations of school children — like mine — would all be in the same district, funded with the same tax dollars as the children waiting for a bus that won’t come.

The consolidation proposal never got off the ground. And as of this year, there will be no new children enrolled in the VICC program, which is being phased out.

Perhaps a new crop of St. Louis leaders, the ones whose smiling faces dominate all of those beautiful “last� first-day-of-school photos, can solve the problem that has escaped their parents’ generation. Perhaps they can find a way to provide equal educational opportunity for children in St. Louis who would love to wear their school bus number around their neck — if only there was a bus to pick them up.