Who is Frank Kriegel?

Frank posted this in the comments below and I'm reposting it because I was worried that it would get lost down there. (Other candidates are encouraged to send in their statements as well.)

My name is Frank Kriegel and I have listed my name as a candidate for the St. Louis School Board. I am a lawyer in a general civil practice at 6100 South Grand. I was born here a bit more than a half century ago and have remained since in the City of St. Louis. My family came to South St. Louis in the 1850's. I have three children, one a lawyer downtown, one at Washington University's law school,where I went and the youngest, an R.N. at Children's Hospital. None have ever been indicted and all are altogether pleasant in their father's opinion. I have been for some 20 years an AV rated lawyer which means something to other lawyers. The significance of the same can be determined by a visit to martindale hubble's web site, the competency and virtue ratings system for lawyers as determined by anonymous judges and other lawyers. I grew up in Carondelet, comically poor. In proper Dickensian fashion, a priest sent me out of his pocket to a fancy prep school, Augustinian Academy, now burned down. In my first year among the opulent youth, he died; hence my work career began at age 13. I paid my own tuition. I went to Mizzou as a philosophy major on a series of Curators' scholarships and work study and got out at age 20. Richard Nixon abruptly abolished the draft at the same time and my already passed number 69 in the draft no longer meant I was going to be drafted. I worked for a very brief while as the operator of a circular saw making chair legs, the stuff of a thousand unpleasant recollections and way beyond the grisly of Upton Sinclair, and then moved on to another factory as a punch press operator. I got a scholarship to Washington University School of Law and graduated in 1976. Currently I am a member of the vestry of Christ Church Cathedral, downtown at 13th and Locust. I am its secretary and also its chair of finance. It has a budget of about 1.1 million per year and an endowment of about 7.5 million owing to the beneficence of dead Episcopalians. During my term, it finally arrived at a balanced budget after some 20 years. I can read, do, sing financials, all in a fairly congenial fashion. I manage and serve the Saturday Morning Breakfast Club on the fourth and fifth Saturdays of each month, serving about 220 of the working poor, women,kids and old people out of food stamps and the very many and very needy people we carry under the title of homeless. For 2 years I was a twice a week tutor with the YMCA's Y-Read program for gradeschool children reading two levels behind. I am a volunteer for Girls, Inc. I serve on the board of City Angels, a not-for-profit fundraising entity which supports City of St. Louis charities for the needy. I have taught Sunday School for middle school kids. I have served on other charity and religious boards. I tried to a successful and unanimous jury conclusion the first gay bashing civil case in the St. Louis Circuit Court. I served as the civil lawyer who broke up the old LNP Towing enterprise as part of our city's eradication of organized crime and the gang bombings which terrorized the City in the early 1980's (and please don't think I wasn't scared--it just had to be done). I have represented just about everybody in the 11th and 13th wards, the bank and tons of indigent immigrants. I've written extensively on legal topics in the Missouri Bar Journal and the Journal of the Metropolitan St. Louis Bar. For seven years I worked on translating and editing Theophylact's Commentaries on the Gospels, a three volume series of a particularly bright Greek scholar of the eleventh century, as well as the editing of another's transation of some Slavonic hagiography. Okay, enough about me.
I am running for school board because it is imperative that we as a community in collegial fashion consider the following:
1. There are 524 school districts in Missouri. Of them, more than 97% are accredited by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. There are 14 that are only provisionally accredited. The City of St. Louis is one of those 14. This fall from grace occurred in the fall of 2004. If our accreditation scores fall much further or if our provisional accreditation status lasts longer than 5 years, we will be become unaccredited. Take a look at R.S.MO 162.1100 to see what unaccreditation will mean to our community: loss of local control, prescribed tax rates, a suspension of real estate tax abatements and TIFs and a horrific list of draconian educational rules. These consequences, many of which are of economic importance to property owners, are nothing when compared against the harm which will be suffered by our children whose hard work and diplomas will be devalued and become the subjects of scorn.
2. Admirable good work has been accomplished in the last 2 years. We now have gradeschool and high school curricula which are both horizontally and vertically integrated. Transportation has been rationalized. The delivery of books and other logistical operations now actually work. Some good cost savings have been achieved, but not in every respect. There exist system wide and uniform standards of measurement and accountability. We have some truly great grade schools, and even those that are not yet great, have gotten better, with some exceptions. We need to applaud and celebrate these successes. And of course, we need to build on these successes.
3. Most of the high schools and middle schools are an academic mess. The 2004 Missouri Assessment Program scores for llth graders show our kids at this grade level to be doing very poorly: more than 70% are not at a level approaching proficiency in English and more than 90% are not at a level approaching proficiency in either math or science. These figures should be enough to dispel any nostalgia for the dysfunctional ancien regime. As I write this note, these same kids, if they are still in school, are just some 4 months from graduating and entering into the world as either workers or post-secondary education students. As a community of adults we are morally obliged to help repair our system's failure so that other young people are never treated in so insouciant a fashion in our name.
4. The big high schools don't work. The literature supports a view that smaller groupings of kids at the high school level promotes better rigor in studies and better relationships. Our big high schools, say Roosevelt, pretend to educate more than 1400 students. Take a look at the Missouri Assessment Program scores for Roosevelt and our other high schools, not counting the great performing school at 4200 McPherson, and you'll see what I mean. If the actual topography and the map in your hand don't agree, the map is wrong and throw it away. The School Board in congenial and intelligent fashion needs to urge the educators in its employ to consider means to reduce the size of these pathologically hypertrophied institutions that are simply not performing
5. We need to thank and respect our teachers and principals. We need to remember that we are all created equal members of one human family, and that although we may have different tasks to perform, all work is of equal dignity. How do we do this? We need a School Board that has the patience to listen to its teachers and principals, that honors their input and service and when wrong, clearly and sincerely speaks the truth and makes a turn to a better and wiser course.