To the editor:

Bravo to The Call for finding something about the Lindbergh School District worth writing about. Your exposé on that April Fools’ joke about Superintendent Lake was a brilliant piece of investigative journalism.

I am left, however, wondering about some other stories The Call has somehow overlooked.

For example, the district’s mismanagement of the new high school construction project that cost the taxpayers $12 million did not seem to warrant The Call’s attention.*

The steep decline in student proficiency and the district’s fall from a top three position in the state to somewhere in the middle of the state** — leaving us behind many smaller and poorer districts — has been met with silence from The Call.

When parents expressed concerns about grotesque pornography masquerading as literature in our school’s libraries, and the banning of classics of English literature — such as Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis — from our libraries, The Call was curiously un-curious.***

Then again, perhaps I should give The Call a break. After all, they have some fiendish April Fools’ jokes to investigate.

Russell Dahmer

Crestwood

Editor’s note: Russell Dahmer ran for the Lindbergh Schools Board of Education in 2025.

*This topic was covered when The Call reported on the March 11 Lindbergh Board of Education candidate forum. 

**Per U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings, Lindbergh High School is ranked 19th out of the 359 ranked public high schools (including public charter schools)in Missouri. Missouri has 725 public high schools total.

***This topic was covered by The Call’s former News Editor. A question on the topic has appeared in The Call’s annual candidate questionnaire since 2022, including this past election. 

Per Lindbergh Schools, during the 2021-22 school year, before the current Call Newspapers news team was on staff, 14 book challenges were received; of those, 11 were retained and three were retained with restrictions. 

In 2022, a new Missouri law banning “explicit sexual” images in school materials made it a Class A misdemeanor to share materials deemed explicit with a student. The district removed items from student access if they contained visual images that meet the requirements set forth in SB 775. 

None of the removed books were authored by C.S. Lewis or Mark Twain.