Even before Robert Harvey was sworn into the Board of Education for the St. Louis Public Schools last February, questions swirled about whether he qualified for the position. State law requires that school board members have spent the previous three years living in the district they seek to represent. But evidence suggested Harvey had only moved to the city two years earlier.
Ben Conover, whose resignation from the school board created the vacancy that Harvey was appointed to fill, filed a lawsuit challenging Harvey’s fitness for the office. Under state law, a group of more than 10 residents of the district can band together to bring that kind of removal action and, in theory, the court should act on it in 10 days.
That hasn’t happened. Eight months later, no one has produced a shred of paperwork indicating that Harvey lived in the district before October 2024, when he bought a house in the City of St. Louis. Conover and his lawyer have shown that Harvey owned a house in Florissant and paid personal property taxes there for 2024, as Missouri law requires for the place a person uses as their “home or dwelling.” They allege he didn’t pay those taxes in the city that year, and no evidence has been produced suggesting otherwise. Yet the case goes on. The school board is set to vote on school closures in early November, and the next hearing in the removal case isn’t until after that…