Original Research by School Decision on St. Louis Voices Academy
St. Louis Voices Academy opened as a new public charter school in downtown St. Louis for the 2023-2024 school year, serving kindergarten and first grade. It is a regular school with a media arts focus, free and open to all city residents. The school plans to grow annually, adding a grade each year; by the 2026-2027 school year it will serve pre-kindergarten through fourth grade.
The school's enrollment is very small, reflecting its start-up status. All enrolled students reported are Black. The school does not have reported data for free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, special education identification, or English learner status, so a full picture of student need is not yet available from standard sources.
Because St. Louis Voices Academy serves only the earliest elementary grades, there are no state assessment results and no graduation rate. This is typical for a school that has not yet reached tested grades and is not expected to produce a high school outcome for years. A parent looking for academic performance benchmarks will find nothing to evaluate until the school's students reach the grades where state testing begins.
The school sits in downtown St. Louis, an independent city with a mixed economy that includes major employers such as Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Washington University Medical Center, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The city has a number of well-known cultural and civic anchors, including Forest Park, the Saint Louis Zoo, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Housing values in the area are below the national typical home price, and rental costs have risen recently at a pace that may be noticeable to families shopping for apartments.
St. Louis Voices Academy operates as its own school district, overseen by the Missouri Charter Public School Commission. It was listed as a new entity by the National Center for Education Statistics. The school's website emphasizes its media arts theme, and it describes itself as growing to serve fourth grade by the 2026-2027 school year.
No state testing data, no chronic absenteeism rate, no staffing information, no discipline records, and no course access data were available for this school. These gaps are common for a school in its first years of operation, particularly one serving only kindergarten and first grade. A family considering this school will want to speak directly with the school about teacher qualifications, class sizes, curriculum, and how the media arts focus works in the early grades. The school's small size and start-up nature mean that many of the comparative metrics that parents rely on for older, larger schools simply do not exist yet.
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