A wide-ranging education package backed by Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe collapsed in the final days of the legislative session after negotiations over school accountability became a fight over which communities should be opened to charter schools.
The breakdown killed legislation that would have shaped Kehoe’s push for an A-F grading system for public schools, one of his top education priorities. But the immediate obstacle was a familiar divide in Missouri’s school-choice debate: broad support among Republicans for charter schools, and resistance when expansion moved closer to home.
“It was really close,” state Sen. Stephen Webber, a Democrat from Columbia, told The Independent. “What killed it, ironically, was Republicans did not want charter schools in their districts.”
The bill was poised to come to debate in the last three days of the legislative session, Senate Majority Leader Tony Luetkemeyer told reporters last week.
“We thought that there were some negotiations between both caucuses in the Senate that may have created a path,” said Luetkemeyer, a Republican from Parkville. “As often is the case, those negotiations sort of broke down last night, and we were unable to get to a resolution.”
For Webber, whose district covers all of Boone County, the priority was a rollback of a 2024 law that allowed charter schools to open in the county.
In April, the State Board of Education approved the first charter school application to open in Columbia, Boone County’s largest city. The Columbia school board is suing the state to overturn the law.
Standalone proposals to remove this statute went nowhere, Webber said, so he sought a compromise: Take Boone County out, but add another county in its place.
School-choice advocates involved in the negotiations and Kehoe were open to the idea, Webber said, but only if the deal resulted in a net increase in the number of students living in areas where charter schools could open.
“(Republicans) wanted a net increase in kids that were covered by charter schools, which obviously I don’t like,” Webber said. “But I was willing to compromise to get them out of Columbia.”
For a while, St. Charles County appeared to be a possible landing spot. Lawmakers, primarily in the House, had pushed to open charters in the county for years.
House Speaker Jon Patterson, a Lee’s Summit Republican, told The Independent that Cass and St. Charles counties were considered. But, he said, the “St. Charles senators opposed that.”
One of those St. Charles County senators, Republican state Sen. Nick Schroer of Defiance, said he turned down the proposal because it did not go far enough.
“I am tired of only dipping Missouri’s toe in the free market known as school choice,” he said. “I would require universal school choice to be expanded throughout the state in any negotiation.”
Republican state Sen. Adam Schnelting, the other St. Charles County senator, did not respond to a request for comment.
Webber said the negotiations exposed a gap between lawmakers’ stated support for charter schools and their willingness to expand them into their own communities.
“I don’t think there are five Republicans in the Senate that want charter schools in their districts,” Webber said. “I went around to a whole bunch of them, and they all support charter schools but managed to come up with a reason they shouldn’t be in their neighborhood, their community.”
He plans to resume negotiating next year, hoping to build enough pressure to reach an agreement.
Next steps for A-F
Although this session’s A-F school report card bills died, Kehoe has not abandoned plans to create a letter-grade system for public schools.
In January, the governor issued an executive order to the state’s education department to develop “an annual A-F school and district grading framework” with scores based on standardized test performance. The department expects to have a plan presented at the State Board of Education’s June meeting, a spokesperson told The Independent.
An executive order doesn’t give the governor authority to unilaterally create a new program, but it serves as a public message to the State Board of Education. Kehoe appointed a majority of the board, and lawmakers have acknowledged that the board’s approval of a letter-grade system is inevitable.
“The governor’s executive order, it’s going to happen either way,” state Rep. Dane Diehl, a Republican from Butler, said during a House debate of his A-F bill in March. “I think we tried to make that process a little better for school districts.”
Four lawmakers filed bills largely mirroring Kehoe’s proposal, with some differences. One, for example, would have created an incentive program that awarded money to schools with top scores or high levels of growth. The House amended its version of the legislation to include a secondary grade to reflect school climate and family satisfaction.
“It was important to not rely on an executive order and have a product that had been worked through the whole legislature,” Diehl told The Independent.
Lawmakers were largely in agreement on the base legislation, Diehl said. But as a broader education package, negotiations were not quite complete as time ran out.
“The merits of the stand-alone bill should have allowed passage, given that there’s an executive order in place for A-F grading that I think is inferior to the legislation that was proposed,” Patterson said.
He pointed to the governor’s request for a grading scale that “increases in rigor” so that when 65% of schools earn “A” or “B” grades, the thresholds for grades “A” through “D” increase by five percentage points.
It is unclear if the State Board of Education is planning to follow every detail in Kehoe’s order, which gave the board until the end of June to get a proposal to his desk.
In a statement to The Independent, the governor’s spokesperson Gabrielle Picard said Kehoe “remains committed to the state putting an A-F grade card system in place.”
“Governor Kehoe believes that parents and families should have a more clear and concise way to review school performance and hold leadership accountable,” she said, “and he looks forward to reviewing DESE’s implementation plan for a statewide school accountability A-F grade card to accomplish this.”
