UPDATED @ 5:32 PM:  Part of the trouble with “She Said, She Said” beefs is that they can get pretty confusing pretty quickly. To clear things up, Jeanette Mott Oxford sent us an email making clear what she was — and was not — apologizing to Jane Cunningham for.

Antonio,

I hope it is clear that what I’m apologizing for is not meeting with Rep. Cunningham in advance and asking her to take the three steps in the press release I issued last week in that private session FIRST. I am taking no position on what really happened in her office. But I wish I had offered her a chance to say yes or no to those three steps before taking my case to the public.

Something about how the article from today is framed could lead one to believe I have accepted her side of the story. I still believe the students deserved a different response, a welcome. Even if she could not take time to meet with them that day, she could have invited them to write her with concerns. Being chair of that committee carries a responsibility to hear the witness of youths who have been bullied. And objections about how a young person’s fashion choices (if one chooses to voice them) could be stated in a manner that invites dialogue instead of language that shames that young person.

JMO

Jeanette Mott Oxford
State Representative, 59th District

Here’s our earlier story:

A Democratic legislator has apologized to one of her Republican colleagues after accusing her of disrespecting a group of teenagers attempting to lobby her support for an anti-bullying bill.

Last week, State Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford (D-St. Louis) put out a press release claiming State Rep. Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield) refused to meet with students Desiree Bain and Austyn Langston of Jackson County because “she found their appearance very difficult to look at.” [Read our earlier story.]

Oxford, who did meet with the students, said they had multiple facial piercings and one had vividly colored hair. “Other than that they looked like regular teenagers to me,” Oxford said.

According to a press release for Oxford’s office, after refusing to meet with Langston and Bain, Rep. Cunningham told another group of students that “looking at these two young women was making her ill and that she didn’t understand why they hated themselves.”

Apparently that’s not exactly what happened.

Shortly after making the accusations at a press conference, Oxford, now armed with Cunningham’s side of the story, sent her colleague the following apology:

From:Jeanette Oxford 

Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:39 PM
To: Jane Cunningham
Subject: my apologies
 
Rep. Cunningham,

I owe you an apology. Today I led a press conference calling for passage of the Safe Schools bill (HB 1751) and for you to meet with students who were asked to leave your office. I asked for you to hear their experiences of being bullied at school and to attend the Inclusion Institute for Educators this summer. It should have occurred to me to come to you first and to ask you personally to take those steps. No legislator wants to feel ambushed by her colleagues or the media, and I had not thought this out properly.

It is no excuse, but this is a case where my heart got ahead of my head. As a person who experienced school bullying as a child (bullying based on size, on other appearance characteristics, and on religion), as the best friend of a gay boy who was bullied unmercifully when we were high school students, and as an out lesbian who feels a responsibility to make schools safer now than they were when I was a teen, I simply did not think the process through as well as I should. I wanted to highlight the problem of school bullying – and I can assure you that almost all of the press conference time today WAS indeed focused on information and questions about school bullying, not about you – but still when Bob Watson asked me during the press conference why I didn’t just go to you, it hit me that I should have done that first.

I ask you to recognize that I persuaded Rep. Lampe and Sen. Justus to participate in the press conference today and that my invitation to them focused on the importance of our moving the issue of safe schools forward. If the pace of our week here had allowed it, we quite possibly would have sat and talked through many issues related to the press conference and spotted that an important step had not been taken. Rep. Lampe and Sen. Justus may have even assumed that step HAD been taken; I’m not sure. They left the background work to me and agreed to show up and make a brief statement today. I believe they agreed to attend due to their relationship with me. No malice toward you was intended by any of us. What we want to see is safe schools for all of Missouri’s children. I believe you share that aim as well, but that you have not yet come to recognize some of the realities connected to the dynamics of oppression.

You are welcome to share my apology with the media (thus the written apology) if that is your desire, and I’ll be glad to meet with you and PROMO, the students, the media or anyone else with whom you invite me to meet on this topic.

JMO
Jeanette Mott Oxford
State Representative, 59th District
573-751-4567 (Jefferson City)
314-772-0301 (St. Louis)

Cunningham’s office also released the following statement on the matter:

Because of the heavy legislative role and hectic pace of Jane’s office they have a standard operating procedure that when they have tight deadlines, they try hard to take a few minutes to visit with constituents.  Jane’s office always asks if visitors are constituents. The teens misrepresented themselves as living in Jane’s district and would not leave when asked.  

Even the teen’s chaperone inserted her foot in Jane’s door when Jane’s assistant repeatedly told her we had to prepare for a committee hearing. The assistant was shaken by the experience.    

The elected school board of St. Louis Public Schools released the following statement tonight following the effective firing of Superintendent Diana Bourisaw by the state-authorized Special Administrative Board and forum tonight on the closing of eight more city schools:

State Control of Local Schools – No Room for Children?

Recent actions by the state appointed board (SAB) running St. Louis Public Schools make one thing very clear: the well-being of students is not one of their top concerns.

The members of the SAB clearly are following the charge laid down for them by the Missouri Board of Education: squirrel money away in an account you will never touch instead of spending it to educate city children. The state board of education established the SAB on the recommendation of a report that called for closing many schools in St. Louis in order to transfer money from the school district’s operating budget into the desegregation capital budget, a budget that the state board says can only be used to build new schools in the unlikely event that the county school districts suddenly pull out of the interdistrict transfer program and send all the city residents in their schools packing back to the city. The state board of education and the Missouri Attorney General have it in their power to waive payments into the desegregation capital fund. We think it is wrong that they do not do so.

School Closings

We believe that the state board of education’s demands that St. Louis Public Schools forego spending money it has on education and instead place it into a fund that the state hopes to takeover in 40 years is outrageous and immoral. We unequivocally oppose closing schools to bank money for the state.

We also note that the assumption shared by the state board of education and the SAB that smaller schools are more expensive to operate than larger schools is an assumption that is not supported by research. Studies by researchers at Brown University and the University of Wisconsin, for example, have shown that small schools are not any more expensive to operate than large schools. The key is not how large a school is, but how it is managed.

Instead of closing neighborhood schools, the SAB could have looked at changing the way they are managed to save money. One suggestion to emerge from neighborhood meetings is to have the principal and literacy coach in small schools teach classes, in other words, make the administrative positions part time administrative and part time teaching positions. Yes, that would have required getting the teachers’ and administrators’ unions to agree to changes in their contracts. More significantly, perhaps, it would have required that district administrators – education officers, assistant superintendents, and the superintendent – give up their practice of routinely pulling principals out of schools for daylong meetings. They would have had to think more carefully about when they really needed to pull a principal out of school and plan better in order to use principals’ time out of school more efficiently.

The SAB’s failure to consider alternative management structures for small schools suggests that they are more concerned with preserving management the way it is than with serving children.

The financial talk surrounding this round of school closings masks a prejudiced belief that city school children do not deserve the same small class sizes enjoyed by children in the county. Elaborate arguments about school capacity and utilization are all about one thing: making sure that when city public school children attend school they are in the largest classes possible. We believe that is wrong and we urge the state board of education and the attorney general to do the right thing and forgive payments to the desegregation capital fund.

Forgiving payments the desegregation capital fund would not do away with all of the school district’s financial woes – the state’s charter school policy of having more and more schools fight for pieces of the same fixed financial pie ensures that the city school district will continue to face strong financial pressures – but it would give the school district breathing space to consider alternatives. A year ago, the St. Louis Board of Education asked staff to estimate the cost of reducing class sizes to the state’s “desirable” level. That estimate could have served as the basis for a discussion with legislators and the community about funding. Under the weight of the campaign by the state education commissioner, Kent King, to remove the school district’s accreditation and the remove the elected school board, district staff never prepared or presented that estimate. The SAB never requested it. Forgiving payments to the capital fund could give the SAB time to repair its negligence, if it so desired.

School Violence

The decision to return to the classroom students, who were suspended earlier this year for such felonious offenses as making death threats to staff or getting caught with weapons or drugs at school, is another example of the SAB sacrificing students in order to put a few more bucks in the bank. Such students should have been removed from the population they threatened and put in a program where they can get the concentrated services to change their behavior and progress academically. We emphasize that the issue is one of providing students the services they need, not one of punishment. The decision not to provide such services is really a decision about money that hurts everyone in the school. We strongly urge the SAB to reconsider its decision to deny alternative education services to violent students.

Superintendent

Less than one year ago, the state board of education declared that it had to replace the elected school board with an appointed board in order to stop “the revolving door” of superintendents in the school district. They said an appointed board was necessary to bring stability to the superintendent’s office. Now, one week after the state-appointed CEO is confirmed in his position, he is spinning that door again, and for no good reason. The statement from the SAB that everything was good with the superintendent, but they wanted a change, apparently simply for the sake of change, is insufficient reason for again creating uproar and instability in St. Louis Public Schools.

We believe the SAB owes the public an explanation for their precipitous decision to fire Diana Bourisaw.

In addition to approving the above statement tonight, the school board also voted to appeal the recent court decision which upheld the state takeover of the district.

Last week St. Louis County state representative candidate Don Calloway, Jr. penned a letter to the St. Louis American questioning the strategy of those involved in the effort to recall St. Louis City Mayor Francis Slay. Calloway, an attorney at the firm Thompson Coburn (as of July, Calloway is now with the firm Lathrop & Gage) and a political newbie, is running in the district currently represented by Ester Haywood, who is term-limited.

Whatever justification there may be for the criticism [against Slay], the current recall effort is possibly the most horrendous thing the anti-Slay contingent could have come up with …

… A recall, similar to any other election, is a battle of campaign finance. The pro-Slay contingent will be raising lots of cash to combat the recall. The pro-recall committee doesn’t have the support of an established political base to give enough money to make the recall effort viable. Furthermore, political donations are public record. This will force otherwise-closeted supporters who could give big money to support a recall into the open, which many are not willing to risk.

The Slay for Mayor October 2007 quarterly report shows $318,000 on hand, every penny of which can be lawfully used to battle a recall. Strategically, the pro-recall committee has helped Slay, by giving him a golden opportunity to raise money that will eventually go to his 2009 reelection effort…

Most importantly, the pro-recall effort will weaken the moral authority and political viability of our most important advocacy group: the St. Louis Clergy Coalition.

Contrary to mainstream media reports, the recall is NOT a Clergy Coalition thing, it is a Rev. Douglas Parham thing. As president of the coalition, Parham had to have known that taking a stand as the face of the recall would paint the entire coalition as being in support. This is not the case. At the Oct. 21 recall rally, coalition members in support included Parham and the Rev. James T. Morris, who as a candidate for the state House can take political stances. Where were the Revs. Sammy Jones, Earl Nance Jr. or E.G. Shields? The recall is not a Clergy Coalition endeavor.

Calloway’s letter fails to mention that Rev. Shields is his campaign treasurer.

In response, local activist Eric Vickers, who is one of the organizers of the recall effort, wrote an open letter to Calloway defending the strategy and attacking the young candidate for his old thinking.

[Calloway's] claim that the recall is infeasible because it “doesn’t have the support of an established political base,” is indicative of the racial paradox that has stymied the collective progress by blacks in this city. That paradox, simply put, is the difference between talk and action, the difference between black leaders being captive or being free.

Too many of this city’s black leaders (and blacks in positions like Calloway) live in a benign state of captivity in which they dare not confront the powers that crush beloved black men like Sherman George. They are as afraid today to face and fight a mayor as Frederick Douglas was initially with his slave master. They say it is a difference of means and methods and approaches, but in the end it is fear.

In the end, they are leaders who, as Douglas poetically put it, “profess to favor freedom and deprecate agitation,” but “want crops without plowing up the ground…rain without thunder and lightning.”

In the end, they will realize that Douglas is right about Mayor Slay: “power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Click here to read Calloway’s full letter.
Click here to read Vickers’ full response.

We’re a little late posting this video, shot Saturday outside the America’s Convention Center in downtown St. Louis.

Members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Brotherhood of Union Support Staff (BUSS) picketed outside the convention center, where the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition (Pro-Vote) was holding its 12th Annual Progressive Awards Dinner.

SEIU has filed a formal complaint against Pro-Vote with the National Labor Relations Board charging the organization with “union-busting” and “constructively firing” workers who tried to organize.

Click To Play

According to union members, the United Auto Workers, which was scheduled to receive an award from Pro-Vote for “Outstanding Labor Union” refused to cross the SEIU/BUSS picket line and boycotted the awards dinner.

Earlier Story:

VIDEO: Beef Between SEIU and Pro-Vote

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There is a growing rift between two of the more active organizations in Missouri Democratic politics.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is charging the liberal political action group Missouri Pro-Vote with “union-busting.” Meanwhile, Pro-Vote says SEIU Local 2000 and the Brotherhood of Union Support (BUSS) are using intimidation and harassment to force its five St. Louis employees to join the union.

SEIU has filed a formal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Pro-Vote has responded by kicking SEIU off its steering committee.