St. Margaret of Scotland School

Catholic Elementary School

St. Margaret of Scotland Parish School is a diverse, urban, vibrant, and inclusive Catholic community. We provide a challenging learning environment for children, prekindergarten through eighth grade, in which they realize their academic potential and giftedness in body, mind, and spirit. Our students embody the example of our patron saint as responsible leaders and caretakers of our community through works of service and social justice. In our 97 years of educating children from the Shaw neighborhood and other surrounding city neighborhoods, we have feasted in the decades of large enrollments and fasted in the decades of low enrollments. Today we are a preschool through eighth grade with 446 cheerful, energetic and hard-working students guided through learning by a staff of 40 adults who are equally cheerful, energetic and hard-working. Together they create a learning community dedicated to thinking deeply, acting justly and supporting one another with care. As a Catholic learning community we begin each day with prayer, centering ourselves and making ourselves ready to recognize God’s holy presence in our lives. We share a proud history of faith, learning and action.

The Green House Venture

The Green House Venture is a unique collaborative partnership aimed to bring together diverse schools and provide educational opportunities for students. The main purpose is to grow our students’ knowledge of urban agriculture with real-world, hands-on, engaging activities while helping them develop a love of Science.

– Christine Burke

The Green House Venture, even before the greenhouse is built, has already begun to have a positive impact on the St. Margaret of Scotland learning community and holds potential for an even greater impact in the future. Already I as administrator have begun to interact with administrators from school systems vastly different from my own. Our St. Margaret of Scotland science teachers have begun to talk science with teachers from vastly different schools. “Where did ya’ go to high school?” that St. Louis question is part and parcel of the dividing lines so apparent in St. Louis. The Urban Education Alliance has begun to erase those lines of separation by bringing together members of a private school, a parochial school, a charter school and public school. The Urban Education Alliance in conjunction with the Green House Venture has begun to sow seeds of unity where once the weeds of disunity grew intensely.

The Green House Venture – an aquaponics system for growing food – is not only an opportunity for bringing four very different learning communities together it is also a 21st century experiment dedicated to searching out solutions to an ever increasing problem of food shortages throughout the world. This immersion into the global issues of feeding the hungry will serve to challenge the students of the Urban Education Alliance to become leaders who are invested in solving the problems of food shortages. The Green House Venture of this decade will help to empower the next generation of leaders in our city for our world.

–  Julie Hesed, Former Principal

Our Location

Phone: (314) 776-7837

Principal: Christine Burke

Bell Times: 7:40 – 3:00

Grades: PS 3- Grade 8