State takeovers of local school districts impact more than grades and finances

This year, Missouri joins Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida in use of an A-F public school and district grading framework.

In this accountability system, states consider usual metrics like graduation rates and state testing scores to determine a district’s “grade.” These data points are also used by the Missouri State Board of Education when electing to take over a local district and turn it over to state-appointed leaders. But there’s a crucial data point these decisions don’t consider: health.

Physical and emotional health of students, their families, and the places they live in has never been considered in the context of state takeover policy, despite evidence of emotional impacts on affected, often Black and low-income, communities. Local challenges impacting health such as student homelessness, poverty, and violence, are ignored. State takeover policy is supposed to improve academic performance and financial stability for struggling school districts, but in effect, “struggling” means predominantly non-white, given this state intervention is only happening in communities of color.

Of the St. Louis school districts that have undergone state takeover (St. Louis Public Schools, Normandy Schools Collective, and Riverview Gardens School District), all have at least a 75% Black student population.

In a recent study by our team, many state-appointed and locally elected leaders described the experience of state takeover policy as traumatic, speaking from their own perspectives, observations, or interactions with community members, school staff, or students. The racialized implementation of state takeover should compel us to question the impacts on health. Racism has been linked to poor physical and mental health, though with a stronger relationship with mental health. Such questions are especially relevant to health equity and education researcher teams like ours.

As a pediatric occupational therapist and research coordinator in the Health Equity, Opportunity, and Education Lab, my expertise primes me to investigate elements of children’s environment on their health outcomes, including their educational systems.

Though measuring student and community health can be more challenging than metrics like standardized test scores and financial deficits, the evidence of state takeover’s negative emotional impact demands a new approach to supporting future generations beyond an academic and financial intervention of mixed success. No, schools cannot fix all problems for their students, but they are more than scores, budgets, and letter grades. They are emotional ecosystems.

Questions of state takeover are especially relevant now, as SLPS unexpectedly lost their full accreditation statusin January 2026 in a Missouri State Board of Education vote many community members viewed as singling out their district. Though this does not immediately change any day-to-day operations, it does evoke a sense of déjà vu. From 2007-2019, SLPS endured the disruptive implementation of state takeover policy, where locally elected school board leaders were reduced or replaced with state-appointed leaders.

Community-led protests, which included many students, were ignored as the Missouri State Board of Education voted 5-1 in favor of state takeover. It has been almost ten years since then, but like a letter grade school rating system, state leaders may again accept state takeover as fate, continuing a narrowly focused, and questionably successful, approach to school improvement. We argue that schools are more than their academics or their finances, that they are ecosystems of opportunity to support health for students, families, and the community. We argue that interventions to foster school improvements, including state takeover, must consider health.