By Jake Wagman
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Copyright 2007 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
ST. LOUIS — Twice a week after his 24-hour shift as a firefighter, Dan Lemmon works an additional 10 hours delivering freight on an 18-wheeler.
It’s not to raise money for holiday gifts or a Florida vacation - it’s to keep his kids out of the St. Louis Public Schools.
Many St. Louis firefighters - whose primary job keeps them tethered to home addresses in the city - are drawing second paychecks to pay tuition at private and parochial schools.
To them, the latest turmoil in the city school district bolsters their claim that it’s time to let firefighters and other city employees move outside the city limits. The city fire department employs about 900 workers.
“I’d be living out in Fenton and sending my kids to one of the best school districts in Missouri - and not paying for it,” said Lemmon, who now spends more than $12,000 a year to send three children to Catholic school.
Firefighters and emergency medical technicians are backing state legislation that would allow them to move outside the city if its public schools become unaccredited - a designation that, appeals aside, will become official in June.
The firefighters are not the only ones raising questions.
JoAnn Williams, the carpenters’ union official who represents more than 1,000 municipal employees, has long been an advocate of requiring city workers to live in the city. The condition of the school district, though, has her rethinking that stance.
“It’s a whole different argument now,” said Williams, a business representative for the Carpenters’ District Council. “I think people have the right to expect their children be given a quality education.”
For firefighters, the effort to rescind the residency requirement gained urgency in 2005, when veteran St. Louis police officers - who, although paid by city taxpayers, take orders from a state board - were allowed to move outside the city.
Firefighters say their push is about more than parity with the police, or the cost of paying thousands in private school tuition.
Veteran firefighters worry that the residency requirement will hurt the quality of the department, discouraging potential applicants or pushing young firefighters out when they are ready to start a family.
Take Tom Steiger, who, as a 6-foot-tall, 220-pound firefighter with medical training, would be coveted at most any engine house in the region. He is contemplating a move to the county when his oldest son, now 3, is ready for grade school.
“If this residency issue doesn’t get resolved, my only avenue is to quit the job,” said Steiger, 34, who moonlights as a registered nurse at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
Since police officers were allowed to leave, only about 320 - roughly a third of eligible officers - have left.
Some firefighters say they, too, would stay - they just want the right to choose.
“The whole residency notion is inadequate,” said Richard Putnam, who has been a firefighter for 16 years. “It’s sort of like a Berlin Wall.”
Even so, Mayor Francis Slay says that if it’s up to him, firefighters and anyone else on the City Hall payroll will remain St. Louis residents.
“Every city employee knows when they take a job that a condition of their employment is residency,” Slay said in a statement.
Slay is pushing for more charter schools, which receive public funds but are not run by the city School Board. Others point out that, if the St. Louis schools are unaccredited, city students could be able to attend school in neighboring districts. Still, those districts would have to choose to accept students from St. Louis, which is far from given.
In the meantime, firefighters are focusing their energy in Jefferson City, where the bill that ties residency to the district’s accreditation status is having trouble gaining momentum.
Part of the reason for that is Rep. Tom Villa, a Democrat from St. Louis, who has worked to keep the bill off the House floor. He questions the firefighters’ motives in this latest round of the residency debate.
“Do you think the firemen want to move because of their kids - or because the police got to move?” asks Villa, former president of the city’s Board of Aldermen.
Villa says that the “fact that our schools are unaccredited puts a pall over each and every one of us,” not just the firefighters.
So what should firefighters who don’t want to shoulder that burden do?
“Go fight a fire in Crestwood,” Villa says.