So, Where is Marquette High School Exactly?

In my time as an editor at Patch, I’ve began to notice some strange going-ons with the addresses of business, schools and other institutions in West County that came into the fore in an article published last week.

The story concerned Marquette High School in the Rockwood School District and its recent top 10 placement in U.S. News and World Report’s survey of Missouri high schools.

All in all, good news, but our ever-vigilant readers clued us in that not all was right with our article. It wasn’t a grammatical mistake or an errant typo, but instead singled out what I had written as the location of the school.

Incorrectly, I had stated that Marquette was located in Chesterfield, but as one commenter quickly pointed out, it’s not. It’s actually in Clarkson Valley.

This left me puzzled initially, since I had done a quick search, landed on the district’s website for Marquette High School and saw in the left corner, “2351 Clarkson Road, Chesterfield, MO 63017. Facebook pages for clubs at the school gave the same information.

I quick Google Search brought about much the same result, with Google Maps also giving the high school a Chesterfield address. It wasn’t until I overlaid that with a search of the boundaries for Clarkson Valley (see the screenshot accompanying this article) that my confusion cleared.

Yes, Marquette is located just inside the tiny municipality’s borders, although it draws students from the Chesterfield area, so it’s still of interest to many of our readers. Properly chastised, I added a correction to the article and filed away a mental note for future references.

So, what gives with the apparent mislabel? I sent my question to the Rockwood School District and received an answer from Bill Sloan, the district’s director of purchasing and transportation.

According to Sloan, while the city code for Marquette is indeed Clarkson Valley, what the district uses is considered the “taxing address” by the St. Louis County Real Estate locator. In fact, the mapping software used by Patch will also only recognize the address as in Chesterfield. 

For me, it’s a valuable lesson learned and ensures that I will be double-checking listed addresses with actual city boundaries, but it if you look around, you’ll realize this isn’t the only place that seems to have caused some head-scratching.

Parkway has much the same issue with several schools in Manchester that bear Ballwin addresses. With so many West County communities with contiguous borders and usually separated by nothing more than the width of a two-lane road, it’s no wonder that confusion proliferates. 

Have you ever had an experience receiving this kind of mixed message when searching for an address or starting a business in the West County area? Tell us about it in the comments section below.