- [Jim] It's one of St. Louis's most famous and historically significant high schools.

And when the district put it on the list for possible closing, a community fought back.

- [Drake female] Sumner means too much.

It has given too much.

To close the doors, unacceptable.

- [Jim] There's a local spot that for 50 years has been devoted, not just to the survival of wolves, but to the reshaping of their public image.

And they know what they're up against.

- Think of what you've grown up with, Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs, when you're a teenager, there's werewolf movies.

It's always wolves being misrepresented as the big bad wolf.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat music) - I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we're gonna start off with a back to school story that almost wasn't.

As you probably know, the St. Louis Public School District, over the years because of declining enrollment has had to make some tough decisions about which schools to close and which to keep open.

Now, every school has a story, but when Sumner High School made that list of possible closings, well that was different.

Sumner has played an important role in the Black community during segregation and after, and a lot of people in the community were not about to give that up, and they didn't.

Gabrielle Hays on the Sumner story then, and now.

- [Gabrielle] If being a family was the Drake's pride, (laughing) being Sumner High School graduates would be their joy.

- What made us go the Sumner?

It wasn't like it was a home conversation that "You're going to Sumner, you're going."

We just kind of just knew that that's where we wanted to go to school.

- [Gabrielle] In fact, their family has attended Sumner since 1949.

- I think after getting here, feeling the family, Sumner is family.

- [Gabrielle] Charles H. Sumner High School opened its stores in 1875.

Its namesake, Sumner, was a United States Senator and an abolitionist.

He would later go on to author one of the nations first civil rights bills.

(gentle music) - [Drake Female] This is home.

We still, we gather together and it's family and it's love.

- [Gabrielle] Sumner High school was the first school west of the Mississippi for Black students.

And for generations, family after family would go there.

The first of the Drake family graduated in 1949, and the most recent in 2018, but there were plenty of generations in between.

- With me coming in, in '99, I followed my mother, of course, my aunties, my grandfather as well.

So it was kind of shocking once I got here, how many people knew my family.

So I couldn't get away with anything.

- They're like, "I know who you."

- Right.

As soon as you say the last name.

- [Gabrielle] Cynthia, Brenda, and Debra are all sisters.

And as they sat on the steps of the school, we revisited some of their favorite memories and stories they will never forget.

- My father, Melvin Drake, he graduated on 1955.

- So did your mother.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

- Actually, they're pictured together.

- Oh my God.

(laughing) - Our mother - Started to bring her yearbook.

- Graduated in 1955 as well.

And they actually met here in Sumner.

- Aw.

- They actually met.

It was a love story.

(laughing) This is where they dated.

They actually loved.

I was going through my father's yearbook, and they had a prophecy page and it actually said, "Melvin and Ann will be Mr. And Mrs." - Aw.

(melancholy music) - [Gabrielle] But like most schools, the home of the Bulldogs would experience its own ups and downs, it's most recent in early 2021 when the St. Louis Public Schools Board of Education was set to vote on whether or not to close it.

The news brought great concern across the city, and alumni, just like the Drake family were heartbroken.

- Can't let this happen.

(laughing) - It's devastating.

It hurts to even think that there's a possibility there'd be no Sumner.

- [Gabrielle] Support from alumni, local officials, and a plan to make the school arts intensive kept it open.

The Drake family says that's a testament to just how important the school is.

- It's unthinkable for me.

I can't imagine that.

Sumner means too much.

It has given too much.

To close the doors, unacceptable.

- [Gabrielle] We sat down with Sumner's current principal, Dr. Sean Nichols, to better understand what the future of Sumner looks like.

- Starting from the ground up is where Sumner needs to go, and I think the community is behind that.

People are supporting that.

And I think that's what the district, the Board of Education, the superintendent, these are some of the things that they wanted to see.

- [Gabrielle] Dr. Nichols says relearning the history of Sumner and listening to the community was key.

- The way they describe and they talk about Sumner High School, that's culture.

But here in this school, people call and they want to share a story with me, and I make time to hear those stories.

- [Gabrielle] Especially, when they span generations.

- So when you have multiple people in your family that attended this institution, multiple people that are connected to other people, everyone knows someone that went to Sumner High School, and they find out that I'm the principal, it's to a point sometimes I keep my mouth shut, because if I start talking, then everybody wants to talk to you.

It's like, "Look, I came in the store to shop, to get some groceries," but if I start having a conversation about Sumner, I'll be in this grocery store for six hours.

(gentle music) - [Gabrielle] These stories of Sumner won't be going away anytime soon.

This Summer, it said goodbye to the Class of 2021, and this Fall, it will say hello to a new chapter.

(crowd cheering) - I would want them to take away, Sumner, we are still here.

We're still standing.

We're not going anywhere.

We're gonna fight tooth and nail.

You cannot close.

It cannot.

And if it does, history still, you can't, this is a building.

We are Sumner.

- Right.

- If you walked those halls, you are Sumner.

You can close these doors, Sumner's still gonna be.

- Sumner lives on.

- Sumner will live on.

(laughing) - It's hot out here, but I got a chill.

- Yeah.

- Sumner's gonna live on.

- Yeah.

- It's always interesting to find out about something that St. Louis is known for, maybe not to the general public, but to others in the field, nationally, even internationally.

As it turns out, as Kara Vaninger shows us, when it comes to wolves, in some ways St. Louis is leading the pack.

- [Narrator] The wolf, for centuries, it has been feared like no other animal.

It has been branded a killer, a threat, even to man.

(wolves howling) - Think of what you've grown up with, Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs, when you're a teenager, there's werewolf movies.

It's always wolves being misrepresented as the big, bad wolf.

- [Kara Vaninger] For the past 50 years, the Endangered Wolf Center in Eureka, Missouri has worked to dispel this myth by giving visitors the chance to observe and learn more about these elusive animals.

- They are actually shy.

They actually want nothing to do with people.

- [Kara] Although timid around humans, the wolf has been vilified for centuries, thanks to their eerie, nocturnal chorus, and occasional raids on rural livestock.

In North America, native Americans revered and respected the wolf as a fellow hunter.

But when white settlers brought their livestock and old fear to the new world, they saw wolves as a threat, not just to their cattle and sheep, but also to another important food source.

- In the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a campaign to get rid of all large carnivores, bears, wolves, mountain lions, you name it.

And the thought back then was that if we remove those large carnivores, that there'd be more deer and elk for us.

- [Kara] This federally funded bounty campaign to exterminate the big, bad wolf continued into the mid 20th century.

By the time Congress granted gray wolves protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1973, it was almost too late, not just for them, but for almost every other type of wolf in the United States.

But it wasn't just Congress that took action.

A few years earlier, the hosts of Wild Kingdom also noted the desperate situation and founded the Endangered Wolf Center.

- Marlin Perkins and his wife, Carol Perkins had traveled the world filming for Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and after all the things that they saw, they really were starting to notice the decline of wolf species here in America.

So they wanted to step up and say, "Hey, look as the host of Wild Kingdom, I tell you that this animal is worth saving."

- [Kara] So the Perkins created a space that would allow wolves and other endangered canids to live and breed in peace and safety.

- We are the most successful Center in the world for breeding endangered canids.

And a canid just means anything in the dog family, wolves, coyotes, foxes, and we have all of those here.

You can come see everything from the Mexican wolves, the American red wolf to African painted dogs, to several different fox species.

- [Kara] In the conservation world, it is often said that people will protect what they love, or at the very least understand.

Ambassador animals, like Daisy the fennec fox help to create connections between canids and humans by making appearances at summer camps and other events.

- She represents fennec foxes and all of the habitats that you can find in Africa too.

So helping people fall in love with Daisy helps all of those other animals and those other species that are in her habitat as well.

- [Kara] The Center's observation decks allow visitors to learn about wolf behavior without disturbing the pack.

- Seeing an animal in real life is very, very powerful.

You can almost see that seed being planted, become more empathetic.

And it's so awesome watching their dynamics, puppies kind of try and play with their older siblings and get everybody riled up and excited, tail's wagging.

It's really nice to see those private moments when you least expect it, and then you get to see those personalities come out.

- We try to really give people a magical experience here.

- [Kara] After filming an episode at the Endangered Wolf Center, former Wild Kingdom host, Stephanie Arnie, couldn't stop thinking about the place and eventually joined the staff there in 2021.

- We do daytime tours around the entire center, but we also do nighttime tours that we call a howl.

So people come out, you learn more about how wolves communicate.

As a big group, you all howl together, and then you wait for all the different wolf species here to howl back.

(wolves howling) And when that happens, you see everybody just go, "Oh, wow.

That is so cool."

- [Kara] But the Center isn't just a place for people to learn about the true nature of wolves and observe their behavior.

It has also spent the past five decades working to reverse the devastating effects of that big, bad wolf story.

- We are so excited 'cause we are about to take two American red wolves to the wild in North Carolina, Imani and ShowMe from The Endangered Wolf Center.

And this is the first time in over 20 years that we have been able to release wolves from managed care into the wild to help this critically endangered species survive.

(gentle music) - Seeing our two wolves released was bittersweet.

You know, we saw them as teeny tiny puppies, and now they're adults running free, but it was such an incredible joyful moment.

The Endangered Wolf Center works on the two most endangered wolves in the world, the Mexican wolf and the American red wolf.

We can have animals that are born here that are raised to be wild wolves by their parents.

We are hands-off, we don't habituate them to people.

And what that means is we don't pet them, we don't talk to them, we don't hand feed them, so that they're not associating people with something that they wanna be around.

- [Kara] I got to see this firsthand when animal keeper, Sarah Holaday, let me tag along to place enrichment items in the American red wolf enclosure - That's one of our males, and you can see he did the correct thing.

He saw us, realized we were coming toward him, and then turned around and ran away.

- [Kara] That day, we put out antlers and popsicles made from deer blood, but sometimes enrichment means a whole deer carcass donated by local hunting groups.

This gives the pack a realistic social situation, teaching the young pups pecking order and everyone how to share.

And even though we had a bucket full of enticing items, the animals stayed as far away from us as they could.

That's because Center staff has done their job right, even when the resolve is tested by routine health checks on impossibly cute Wolf pups.

- It is really hard to stay handoffs, when they're so adorable, but the American red wolf has less than 20 wolves left in the wild.

I mean, they are on the brink of extinction.

And it is our responsibility to make sure that they stay safe and that they're successful when they're released.

- [Kara] Historically, the American red wolf could be found ranging from Texas to Pennsylvania and were also native to Missouri.

Today, the few that remain in the wild live on a reserve in North Carolina, including the two just released by the Center.

Wild fostering has also been a success for an impressive number of Mexican wolf pups born at the Center.

The little ones are fostered into a pack that is already established in the wild to boost their current population.

- We are conservation in action.

We are literally helping save endangered species here.

We want people to understand the bigger picture.

We want them to understand the role of the wolf in our state of Missouri, but also in North America.

- And we've actually gotten to see an example of how wolves can help make ecosystems healthier through Yellowstone.

- [Kara] Almost 70 years after being purged from the area, gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, curbing the overpopulation of deer and elk that had thrived in their absence.

- They ate everything down to the dirt.

By bringing wolves back, they actually started to see the ecosystem come back to life.

Diversity started to come back.

They don't decimate deer or elk populations.

What they do is they bring them back down to a healthy level that the ecosystem can sustain.

So, they'll go after deer that have diseases, like chronic wasting disease, and by removing those deer from the population, they actually make the population healthier.

And they also help reduce diseases that are spread to humans.

(wolves howling) - [Kara] After centuries of being the villain of campfire stories, the Center is making sure that wolves are not only better understood by the public, but also celebrated.

- People always ask us, "How can we help?"

Get out here, come and visit us.

Share all the information that you've learned here with your family, friends, community, and your representatives.

Let everybody know how important it is to save endangered species.

(upbeat music) Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Living St. Louis is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

(upbeat music)