RFT 📰

The teacher who was caught on video saying the n-word in class at Glendale High School is no longer employed with Springfield Public Schools, the district has confirmed. [content-2] Last week, Mary Walton, 15, recorded her geometry teacher discussing how the n-word is used. He took issue with the fact that Black people could say it, and it wasn't considered derogatory.

The very day that Judge Michael Noble coined the phrase "rudderless ship of chaos" to describe St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner's office, Gardner spent about three hours at a health clinic in the Grove.  The Riverfront Times previously reported that Gardner was enrolled in a graduate nursing program at Saint Louis University even as her office collapsed.

In a moment that surely had trans people across Missouri saying, "Why are you so obsessed with us?" the Missouri GOP decided to use Mother's Day not to celebrate all of the state's moms but to remind everyone that the party is deeply anti-trans. The legislature already passed a law that prevents minors from starting gender-affirming care and made it so all athletes, even college ones, must play on the team of their gender as assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with. But in case you thought the anti-trans laws were about protecting the kids — the rhetoric the GOP likes to use when doing anything anti-LGBTQ — the party indicated that it is actually more keen on disparaging trans people.

MONDAY, MAY 8 It’s barely May and already muggy. Any St. Louisan knows that summer weather means bloodshed, and sure enough, the last 72 hours saw a spree of killing. From Friday through today, 11 people were shot in the city and five killed.

Wes Anderson is fully a thing at the moment, and fans are getting psyched for the release of his 11th film, Asteroid City, which will be out on June 16. Thankfully, those of us living in St. Louis don't have to wait until then to  get our Wes Anderson fix. Instead, we can just head to Wes-Fest, Cinema St. Louis' celebration of the film auteur.

St. Louis CITY SC lost for the third consecutive match following a 1-0 defeat to the Chicago Fire at Soldier Field. It marked a second straight loss to Chicago after the Fire eliminated CITY from the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup on Tuesday.

Last week, a video of a geometry teacher using a racial slur at Springfield's Glendale High School went viral on Snapchat and Reddit. The teacher has since been placed on administrative leave. The school also suspended Mary Walton, the student who recorded the video, from May 15 to 17.

Five years ago, Robert Stumpf noticed something missing in St. Louis. St. Louis had the Gateway Men's Chorus, the St. Louis Women's Chorale and CHARIS for women and nonbinary people. But there was no all-encompassing, gender-inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ singers to come together.

The Saint Louis Zoo is caught up in a controversy rocking the animal research world that  involves a campaign of retaliation against one scientist who accused another prominent animal researcher of sexual harassment.   As reporter Asher Elbein laid out last week in a long story for Undark, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, known as the AZA, recently paid a $2.8 million settlement to an orangutan research expert.

The last day of the Missouri legislative session kicked up controversy on Friday. It is National Police Week, so representatives have been honoring law enforcement in their morning remarks. Representative Barry Hovis (R-Whitewater), a former police officer, wanted to speak on the topic.

An event to celebrate queer people and people of color at Delmar Hall was abruptly cancelled last week.  On Friday, St. Louis-based musician and drag artist Maxi Glamour said their event Faeded was cancelled after someone they believed to be the owner of Delmar Hall told the event's sponsor, BeLeaf Medical, he "didn't want the show there."

Audience building is the perpetual quest of all arts organizations, regardless of medium. How can we get people who don’t think they like dance, visual art, classical music in our doors? 

Although one of the world’s most accomplished filmmakers, with a remarkably deep and surprisingly diverse body of work stretching back 50 years, Paul Schrader has seldom received the adulation lavished on such contemporaries (and past collaborators) as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, or even the more critically divisive Brian De Palma. Certainly, he’s respected — especially for his screenwriting on such now-canonical films as Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull — but Schrader never quite managed a major commercial breakthrough, with American Gigolo (1980) the long-ago exception, and for most of the past two decades, he’s struggled mightily to find viewers, toiling on an uneven mix of under-seen work-for-hire films and more personal projects that were either mishandled by distributors or mangled by producers.

The chief warrant officer for the beleaguered St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office is on his way out the door, multiple court sources tell the RFT. Chief Warrant Officer Chris Hinckley was in court this morning representing the Circuit Attorney's office when the RFT saw him outside the courtroom.

On what should’ve been its biggest day of the year, a chain of Missouri dispensaries lost a large chunk of sales after an e-commerce platform for online ordering crashed on 4/20.  Nick Rinella, CEO of Hippos Cannabis, says his business lost tens of thousands of dollars on Missouri’s first 4/20 holiday with legal recreational marijuana after the Dutchie platform crashed for a large part of the day. 

The whispers that Nelly and Ashanti might be back together have turned into shouts now because our favorite possibly rekindled noughties couple have made it to Page Six. Nelly, who seems to party anywhere but St. Louis these days, was photographed with Ashanti at New York City’s Marquee nightclub where — according to an “insider” quoted by Page Six — “they were smiling at each other nonstop.” Though Page Six reports that they both looked “smitten,” a source also told them that the pair were keeping it “very cute and not heavy into the PDA.”

Shane Presley is a testament to sticking with a passion project. A lifelong music fanatic and hometown loyalist, Presley is the St. Louis music scene's best buddy.

A bill that would ban Missourians from holding a phone while driving is one step away from becoming law. The Missouri Senate agreed to finally pass the Siddens Bening Hands-Free Law with a 26-7 vote today. It now heads to the governor's desk for final approval.

Thursday 05/11 Fruit Rootin' Picking your own food is cool again, and many of us in St. Louis eagerly await the chance to get some fruit and veggies right from the earth while paying for the pleasure of doing so.

Police have made a second arrest related to a shooting on Cherokee Street over the weekend. The SLMPD announced this morning that it had taken Darion Benton, 33, into custody. Police say that Benton was one of two individuals who opened fired into a crowd on Cherokee around 7:30 p.m.