Late on the evening of January 12th, 2021, the Saint Louis Public Schools (SLPS) Board voted to close seven of its schools and transition one of its high schools to a middle school (Clancy, 2021). Sweeping closures are not a new phenomenon for the residents of St. Louis. Just in the last three decades, SLPS has closed 54 buildings, reducing its sites by 67 percent. What we understand about urban school closure, like those occurring in the city of St. Louis, encompasses official justifications for closure, the history and terms of the policies supporting or driving closure, and the actions taken by school districts as they enact closure. This study joins two spatial concepts, shrinkage and school deserts, through Doreeen Massey's relational politics of the spatial (2008) to explore a) the trajectories of shrinkage (out-migration, economic shifts, and housing) which require negotiation by the Saint Louis Public Schools and b) the resultant uneven distribution of educational access and academic pathways for St. Louis students. Through the creation of a Geographic Information Systems database this study utilizes descriptive statistics as produced from two spatial modeling tools in ARCGIS, each model established a layer which was combined to produce a final GIS database. Two key findings surfaced from this series of analysis. The first is that the variables of shrinkage are not randomly distributed across the St. Louis Metropolitan Area but in fact clustered. The second is a school desert patterning which suggests a) residents of south city, select west and north counties have greater access to a local public school while residents of north city have lost many of their local public schools since the year 2000 and b) a consequential relationship where a block group which shares boundaries with a flourishing school oasis is more likely to be a struggling school desert.Includes bibliographical references
