Today, with thousands of federal agents targeting Minnesota schools, bus stops, day care centers and other places where immigrant parents gather with their children, remote learning options have been revived in numerous districts, with varying degrees of success. And, unlike the pandemic-era emergency measures, the steps schools are taking to keep kids safe are anything but uniform. 

In many schools — especially those that enroll diverse student bodies — who can show up and who can’t changes by the day, forcing teachers to improvise continually. Still confronted with the absenteeism, mental health crises and lost learning of the pandemic shutdowns, educators know what’s being lost — and exactly which children are going to suffer the disproportionate impact of an emergency now in its ninth week.   

Two St. Paul Public Schools teachers recently gave ����Ӱ�� glimpses inside their classrooms. In his 18th year on the job, John Horton teaches at Barack and Michelle Obama Montessori, where classes contain multiple grade levels and the student body, as he puts it, “looks like the people that live in St. Paul.” So far, all 28 of his first, second and third graders have been in school, every day.

Across the city, in the equally diverse Como High School, 31-year veteran Eric Erickson teaches a host of subjects where current events are inescapably relevant: AP Psychology; a University of Minnesota College in the Schools government course; and U.S. history, co-taught with an English learner instructor. 

As improbable as it sounds, the families of Horton’s pupils want them physically present in class and have moved mountains to get them there safely. But the divides in in-person attendance in Erickson’s classes are illustrative of a deepening inequity. He knows that a persistent chasm of unequal opportunity is likely to yawn wider. 

Until the abduction of a child or violence at or near their school forces them into the spotlight, most Minnesota educators have been too fearful to speak out, using their names and those of their schools, about what it’s like in classrooms right now. Yet Horton and Erickson, both of whom have been Minnesota Teacher of the Year finalists and/or semifinalists, told ����Ӱ�� they want people to know what school is like in this unprecedented moment. 

These excerpts from conversations with them have been edited for length and clarity.

Who’s in class in person, and who isn’t

Horton: Children really, really thrive on structure, routine, predictability. The problem that’s different from COVID to now is that during COVID, even though things were upended, there were still some structures and routines and things in place. But with the way things are heading right now, those things aren’t present anymore. 

Our school has some teachers that have been reassigned to take on virtual learning. They’re pausing their in-person job and moving to the online school. They’re teaching children who haven’t ever been to online school. So it’s a whole new program and a whole new mode of instruction.

My classroom has 28 kids normally, and I have 28 kids still here. I have a very good relationship with a lot of the families, and they really wanted to stay in person as a community. There’s definitely some fears and anxiety, but for young children, that predictability is really important. 

We are fortunate to have a community of volunteers keeping watch around the school. We have precautions in place for children who don’t feel safe waiting for the bus. There’s been a lot of community- and school-level action that has helped mitigate the fear. But there’s a lot of anxiety about leaving the house. 

Erickson: The students who are not here tend to be students with brown skin and black skin. And in many ways, this division along race and ethnicity makes this version of virtual learning feel a lot more like battles we thought we had overcome in the Civil Rights Movement, and with equal access to opportunity and education.

The difference in who’s here and who’s not can be seen in the difference between a U.S. history English-language cohort and a senior-level, University of Minnesota college-level government course. I’ve got 95% of my seniors in college-level government present, and about 30% of my co-taught U.S. history classes are online. But our English-learner classes, some of them are less than half in attendance in person. 

(Students are) not able to listen to their (in-person) peers and process what’s happening. They’re living in isolation with their family and social media as connectors, as opposed to the support of peer-to-peer and caring adult interaction. 

We are still their teachers. They are still on our class lists. We are pushing out lessons, videos, documents and assignments to students in their homes. But there’s no substitute. Students who miss live instruction and interaction with peers and their teachers cannot obtain the same quality of education.         

What they’re hearing from students 

Horton: The challenges the kids are experiencing at home and in the community are real. Children talk openly about the immigration crackdown. They’re making posters and expressing their frustration. A couple of my kids have been to protests. A few of my kids have had knocks at the door and agents enter their homes.

And, of course, a lot of children are aware of what’s going around the community because of parents’ stress. In a lot of ways that’s very similar to COVID, where families are trying to isolate children from everything that’s going on and yet the children know something is going on.

I don’t know if I can share all my stories. There was an incident at a child’s house a couple weeks ago. And that was scary. The child was scared, the family was scared. I was shook. They called me Sunday at 6:50 in the morning to tell me what was going on. Some of the people in our community are going through a lot, and they don’t have a lot of people they might be able to know or connect with or trust.

I’ve worked with these families for three years in a row, and I have good relationships. There’s a lot of blessings with that and also heartbreak. It’s really hard to hear what’s transpiring, but I’m also really surprised by the outpouring of love. 

When they’re struggling through traumatic events — and our city has been through so many over the last few years — children also need a sense of hope and joy. To see their friends, to have things they know how to do, be it an art project or something. Having those things, those distractions, those avenues are really important. The children that have been coming to school have been very happy in my class.

Erickson: When we are debriefing the current events in the news cycle, Minneapolis and St. Paul are at the center of a federal surge that has drawn the attention of the world. It’s imperative that we’re able to discuss, analyze and evaluate the impact of the situation surrounding us. I take pride in listening to my students, taking their questions and helping them think critically about what we’re experiencing in relationship to what we’ve studied with the Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. 

They ask appropriate questions. They see injustice. They observe an overreach of federal power. They notice that the guardrails are off with regard to checks and balances. Congress is not holding the Executive Branch accountable. Court decisions are not necessarily checking the expansion of presidential power. They wonder if it’s their time and place to exercise their First Amendment rights.

How students are expressing themselves   

Horton: This is a Montessori school, and we believe in honoring children’s voices. The posters children have written are very simple. They say “ICE out.” Or, “Leave our friends alone.” “You are not welcome” is one of my favorite ones. The kids are expressing themselves through art. Having that outlet is so important. 

The kids started a food shelf in the classroom. And they’re collecting money for the [a St. Paul nonprofit that helps refugees and immigrants resettle]. Two children are carrying around a box, collecting change. 

Families have donated gift cards to support other families. To see all the people coming together, that makes me hopeful.

Erickson: We saw a highly organized, peaceful student protest on Jan. 14, a week after Renee Good’s killing, where students from across St Paul high schools — mostly public, but also peers from private and charter schools — converged on the state Capitol to call out the injustices they’re seeing and to ask for human decency from the federal government. 

We were fearful as a school community about what might happen to them if they exercise their freedom of speech and freedom to assemble. We were inspired to see them advocate for themselves. We, of course, did not attend or endorse the student walkouts. But parents and community members coordinated to serve as unofficial marshals and watch over the routes they were taking to the Capitol, and to be there for support, to be observers of their constitutional rights. 

There were three students in the room with me, the other 20 were at the rally. We were able to watch a livestream. And as we observed democracy in action, two of their classmates gave speeches on the steps of the Capitol. One addressing the humanity of all people and immigrants being the backbone of this country, and another addressing the impact of ICE’s actions. They were articulate messages — positive and hopeful in tone — while also criticizing the overreach of the federal government.

Their own mental health

Horton: Well. Oh boy. That’s a doozy of a question. My job is to make sure the children are safe and secure, and sometimes that means that you have to co-regulate with them. You have to show them what calm, caring and compassion looks like. And also anxiety. You need to model it: “I’m feeling this way, and this is how I can deal with it.” It’s almost like you’re teaching as you’re feeling, which is tough. 

And then my own children. You know, what they hear when I talk at home. I’m trying to be a really good role model, and that comes first. Sometimes as an adult and a parent and someone in the community, you just have to put aside your own preferences for the good of the group. 

Talking to children about hard things is important, but they can only take so much at a time. As a teacher, and especially a teacher of young kids, having difficult conversations is part of life. But they really need time to process things. Talking briefly about these incidents and then giving them an opportunity to have a say and have some hope and have some joy in their life is very important.

The hardest thing for me is I know the impact it’s having on our families. That’s really hard. And I also know it’s impacting staff. There’s staff that carry around documents now, and they’re scared to go out. 

I keep using the word “community,” but I really have found a lot of comfort in that. You know, comfort with the children, the families, the staff. But to say it’s easy would be a lie. 

It’s a relief in some ways that they can be together. Just being in community is such a powerful thing for the people out protesting — even in our classroom.

Erickson: As much as I pride myself on teaching from a non-partisan perspective and analyzing political issues and the role of government with objectivity, seeing the harm to our students and families has caused me to choke up more than once in class while listening and guiding discussion on these matters. 

Yes, it has taken an emotional toll on teachers. Teachers love and care for all of our students. To have 30% of them not be able to reach school and go to your class where they belong is a cruel and sad injustice.

That was one local district administrator’s swift reply when asked what she wants people to know about educating kids in the Twin Cities right now.   

Two weeks after federal agents killed Minneapolis mother Renee Good, virtually every aspect of schooling throughout the region is being shaken by the presence of some 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers. 

“We’re being impacted on a basis that well outpaces targeted immigration enforcement,” says Heather Anderson, a Minneapolis Public Schools parent who runs a nonprofit education-related program for students of color. “It’s pervasive. Everybody is being affected. Nobody can go to work. Nobody can use the school bus. …. I literally just dropped a load of groceries off to a family who can’t leave their house.” 

At one of Anderson’s neighborhood schools, an estimated two-thirds of students are enrolled in distance learning, she says, but many families lack wifi or hotspots. The number of students participating in her in-person program has dropped by half.    

“The kids who did come, several gave reports that ICE had been in their apartment complex, in their buildings, on their streetcorners,” she says. “We worked really hard at just creating a bubble of joy for them.”

Educator Kara Cisco lives a couple of blocks from where Good was killed. “My daughters are terrified even though they don’t fit a category that would fall under those that are targeted,” she says. “They’re both carrying their own passports. That’s scary.”

On the first day of distance learning, attendance in one of her daughter’s classes dropped from 25 students to nine, even though most are citizens. “It’s the general sense of fear,” says Cisco. “I’ve got one daughter that’s texting me pretty much every hour on the hour to notify me of the ICE presence around school.”

Federal agents outnumber the officers employed by the metropolitan area’s 10 largest police departments combined. They are roaming neighborhoods — often in convoys of unmarked SUVs — detaining U.S. citizens and legal residents along with people whose status is unknown. have reported ICE , in at least one instance at gunpoint.     

St. Paul Public Schools reported that two vans were stopped by ICE last week. Students and parents in urban and suburban school systems have been detained while waiting for school buses or public transit. A Hiawatha Collegiate High School senior was at a Minneapolis bus stop Jan. 15. A parent waiting with multiple Robbinsdale Area Public Schools students the day before.

The Department of Homeland Security claims to have detained 3,000 people so far. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the agents to stop using pepper spray and non-lethal munitions and detaining protesters and observers unless they obstruct the officers or there is reason to believe a crime has been committed. The U.S. Department of Justice this week appealed the order, even as residents continue to report observer detentions.     

Several labor unions — including educator unions in St. Paul and Minneapolis — have called for a general strike Jan. 23, and some students have said they plan to join what’s being described as an economic protest. St. Paul schools will be in session. In Minneapolis and many Twin Cities charter schools, the strike will coincide with a long-scheduled teacher record-keeping day. 

Asked at a what it feels like to attend classes now, a teen in a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of Roosevelt High School — where ICE agents pepper-sprayed and tackled parents, educators and students the day Good was killed — said it was hard seeing how many kids were not there. 

“When I came to school and I found lots of friends and classmates missing, it was scary,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine what they were going through.” 

The chaos has made it hard for schools to create and communicate contingency plans. The St. Paul district closed Jan. 20 and 21 to allow educators to organize distance learning options. Parents and teachers in other districts, however, are reporting school-by-school ad hoc arrangements.   

A parent at a high-poverty Minneapolis school in a neighborhood where an ICE agent last week says her child’s in-person classes are overstuffed as some teachers are temporarily reassigned to teach groups of kids online. Like many parents and educators, she asked not to be named for fear that her child’s school would be targeted. 

Adding to the strain, it’s unclear whether kids who are technically enrolled in remote instruction are actually online. Numerous students at her child’s school are simply no longer attending any classes because a parent or sibling has been detained, the parent says. 

“It’s happening at such breathtaking speed,” she says. “What are you even going to do?”   

forced the small, social-justice themed charter school attended by Good’s 6-year-old to move entirely online, according to Sahan Journal, a Minnesota news outlet focused on immigrants and people of color. Good had been appointed to the Southside Family Charter School’s board in August, according to the news site. 

Residents not at risk of deportation are waiting outside schools and at bus stops before and after classes, but parents and advocates say many families are still too fearful to leave their homes.  

“Parents don’t even want rides,” says one St. Paul education advocacy group leader who did not want their name used because they are at risk of detention. “They’re like, ‘I’m not going nowhere.’ … With COVID, we feared the disease itself, but it still wasn’t like if you walked outside your door there might be a masked man that jumps out at you.”

“This is no longer about immigration enforcement,” says Josh Crosson, executive director of the advocacy group EdAllies. “It feels like we’re all in a collective trauma.”

Twin Cities schools are still grappling with the impact of the pandemic and of unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he adds. “Students are witnessing their classmates and friends being abducted or removed from their school communities. The direct and indirect trauma is resulting in increased behavioral incidents with students, withdrawal and disengagement, difficulty concentrating.”  

Like many other parents and teachers, Anderson is frustrated that inequities in distance learning and community support persist even after COVID. “Schools with lots of resources are mobilizing quickly, and schools without resources have nothing,” she says. “We really aren’t in distance learning. We are really just not having kids in school if they’re poor.”  

Cisco echoed this, noting that a big difference from pandemic remote instruction is the lack of an official coordinated response.     

“A great deal of federal funding helped pay for things during COVID such as hotspots,” says Cisco. “It’s never been a foregone conclusion that every family has access to the internet — particularly those that are in sanctuary settings. … It’s absurd to expect a scholar to learn under these circumstances.”

Teachers, she adds, spend a lot of time building community and a sense of psychological safety, especially with students who are homeless or face other kinds of instability: “Creating the conditions for real learning to take place, that is completely lost when half your class is suddenly gone.”  

In a , Rochester Superintendent Kent Pekel said people of color and immigrants in his community — including citizens and district staff — are fearful of leaving their homes.

“I have no doubt that how each of us responds to this present moment will have a powerful impact on how our students see themselves and our society in the years ahead,” he said.

As horrific as the violence has been, Anderson says, she also is proud that young people are watching the community organize. “My kids have lived with this through many iterations,” she says. They know this is what their parents are going to do when their neighbors need us. 

“They have gotten to see us love with our feet and our hands.”  

Minnesota’s forward-thinking initiative was the subject of a Dec. 5 Reinventing America’s Schools webinar, co-sponsored by ����Ӱ��, and Minnesota’s .  

The successful passage of these laws provides funding to replicate programs like the one at , an alternative public school in St. Paul serving students aged 16 to 24. The school’s director, Jody Nelson, participated in the webinar, which was co-created by PPI’s Taylor Maag and Tressa Pankovits. 

Nelson explained that GAP’s construction program:

• Enables students to learn marketable construction skills, giving them a head start on a well-paying career

• Produces homes that help to meet Minnesota’s need for affordable, permanent housing

• Helps to provide workers for construction and related fields, which are encountering significant shortages

“Our students have renovated four houses and built two new homes,” Nelson reports. Another is in the works, and the school has plans to do more. “Lots of our students are immigrants and refugees. This is a great way into high-wage, high-demand jobs.”

The school’s construction career pathway has been affiliated for years with the national , as well as . GAP also recently won a national from the U.S. Green Building Council.

GAP alumnus Hser Pwe was born in Burma and grew up in a refugee camp in Thailand after his family fled murderous Burmese soldiers. This year, he before the state legislature that the YouthBuild program at GAP not only taught him construction skills, but helped him improve his English and realize that he really did have opportunities. When he graduated in 2014, GAP helped him find a job installing floor covering. Eight years later, he has been promoted to foreman. He loves his career and makes more than $44 per hour.

Pwe told lawmakers, “Because of this program, I can speak English and support my wife and children. I have even become a U.S. citizen. Without YouthBuild, I do not know where I would be today.”

, co-director of , helped lead the legislative effort, and with good reason. Rogers, who also is featured in the webinar, personally experienced homelessness.

After moving from Chicago from Minneapolis for what they hoped would be a better life, the Rogers family found their resources were soon exhausted by hotel bills and by landlords who demanded bogus rental application fees. The family was forced to sleep in their car. Finally, they found a shelter, but it would accommodate only his mother and siblings. His father wasn’t allowed to stay. Rogers recalls being in kindergarten and not knowing how to respond when a teacher asked students to draw a picture of their home. He described the experience as “dehumanizing.”

He has documented similar experiences of more than 30 young people, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization , and Rogers shared his findings with  and . As he testified before the Minnesota legislature in 2021, “Many students find shelters to be dangerous places — we need to provide permanent housing options.” In part because of those efforts and youth activism, Minnesota legislators allocated $20 million per year over the next six years to help produce more permanent affordable housing.

In December 2022, Rogers and Joe Nathan convened 40 advocates, including Minnesota House Member Matt Norris, educators, city, county and state officials, lobbyists for people experiencing homelessness and 12 students already learning construction skills and building homes, to discuss possible legislation for 2023.

Based on these conversations, the Center for School Change led a coalition that produced the two laws during the 2023 legislative session. Lawmakers  for , a program that helps at-risk young people earn a high school diploma while developing marketable construction skills and knowledge. They also modified another state program to allow public schools, for the first time, to apply for up to $100,000 from a pool of more than $40 million to help construct permanent affordable housing. The success of schools with home-building career pathways convinced legislators to scale up these programs.

To help public schools seek this funding, the center has produced four free case studies of school home-building initiatives. These include  and a between GAP and Good Will/Easter Seals Minnesota that is constructing housing for low-income veterans and those who are experiencing homelessness. Two other brief reports describe schools where students are building tiny homes: and . Additional case studies are being prepared.

Educators and policymakers in other states also may find these brief reports useful.

Minnesota , lead sponsor  and  in the Minnesota House, was also on the Dec. 5 webinar’s panel. Norris calls these bills “win-win-win.” That’s because the programs efficiently help meet needs for strong career preparation, more workers and affordable housing.

Plaintiffs had sought the Supreme Court decision to short-circuit the standard trial court process, asking the justices to rule that the existence of racially imbalanced Twin Cities schools by itself proved their case.

If the families who brought the 2015 suit, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman vs. State of Minnesota, move forward, they will not have to prove that the state intended to create segregated schools. They will need to show only that schools in each community ended up with racial imbalances.

They will, however, have to demonstrate that those enrollment patterns deprive some groups of students of the “adequate” education they are guaranteed under the state constitution. Over the last quarter-century, Minnesota has required traditional school districts to make good-faith efforts toward integration, resulting in a tangle of ineffective “voluntary” rules.

In trying to craft rules that conform to the law, officials have not been able to prove that racial isolation per se results in poor academic outcomes. Nonetheless, the task forces and policymakers have repeatedly concluded that a large bipartisan majority of people value diverse schools for moral and cultural reasons. 

The decision overturns a ruling from a state appellate court, which held that only “intentional segregation of the type described by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education” would violate the state constitution.

The lawsuit asks the court to find that Minnesota laws allowing students to attend schools outside their home districts and in public charter schools contribute to segregation. Charter schools are specifically exempted from the state’s integration rules, which require districts to make good-faith efforts to foster diversity. The plaintiffs asked the court to overturn the relevant portion of the charter school law. 

In response, a number of charter schools were allowed to join the case. While students apply for seats in blind lotteries, a number of Minnesota charters now enroll students almost entirely of a single race or culture. Several of the schools that joined the suit dramatically outperform their traditional district counterparts, complicating the plaintiffs’ argument that racial imbalances alone deny students their right to an adequate education.

If the plaintiffs prevail, attorneys for the charter schools have argued, the high-performing schools would be hard-pressed to continue with their culturally affirming models — which serve the families who sought them out — while responding to pressure to enroll a racial and ethnic cross-section of students. 

In the main opinion, the justices made a distinction between state and district policies that exclude particular groups of students — intentionally isolating or segregating children — and the existence of racial imbalances. 

Newly installed Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, the first Black woman to hold the post, issued a blistering dissent, arguing that “de facto segregation” in Twin Cities schools by definition violates the state’s constitution. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have not yet said whether they plan to proceed to trial.

That was the foundation of a special Dec. 5 webinar sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute and ����Ӱ��. Featured speakers included Executive Director of Change Inc.’s Jody Nelson; State Rep. Matt Norris; Khalique Rogers, founder of Good Riddance Consulting and Co-Director of the Center for School Change; and PPI’s Tressa Pankovits.

This panel’s focus: The Guadalupe Alternative Programs in St. Paul, Minnesota, a community-based middle and high school serving grades 7-12, and its work expanding career opportunities in residential construction.

Watch the full replay of the event:

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• Charters Yield More Learning, Higher Earnings than District Schools Per $1 Spent
  
• Alaska Leads States in First-Ever Rankings of Charter Performance on NAEP
  
• Indiana Seeks To ‘Transform’ High School, Making Work Skills A Priority

Four of 10 seats on a new finance advisory committee will be filled by community members, starting in a few weeks — the first time the public has been given a formal role in fiscal oversight. In an effort to recruit new voices, priority will be given to people who have not previously volunteered with district governance but have ties to schools and some knowledge of finance. Three school board members and three district executives, including Superintendent Joe Gothard, will round out the committee. 

Over the summer, as the school board considered the current $1 billion budget, community opposition to some cuts convinced district leaders that as public as had been, even more outside participation was needed. 

St. Paul Public Schools is one of the most diverse in Minnesota, serving one-fourth of the state’s English learners, with concentrations of Southeast Asian and East African students. Less familiar populations, including Karen, Burmese and Bhutanese families, are also expected to grow. When the district first started planning to address the pandemic’s learning losses, leaders knew that the demographics meant schools would need numerous strategies. To identify them, they tapped dozens of community organizations.

When the federal aid started flowing, trying to both incorporate feedback from so many groups and speed up the hidebound bureaucracy that keeps money moving seemed impossibly daunting, says Stacey Gray Akyea, the district’s executive chief of equity, strategy and innovation.

But finding time for community input is already yielding dividends in making the system more nimble and assuring that limited funds are spent on students’ most pressing issues. Instead of waiting for multi-year evaluations, looking at early evidence can help leaders decide whether to put more energy or money into an initiative.  

“We’ve got to continue to coalesce around student learning needs,” Akyea says. “Everything else really needs to be able to shift according to what we need to be able to do to do what is best for our students.”

To this end, a year ago district leaders created a series of dashboards tracking, in real time, key information about each of the dozens of strategies initially adopted. As they began using the data to make decisions much more quickly than usual, they shared them publicly. They hoped to help the public understand, by sharing evidence of where change is needed, why some programs got boosts while others were cut. 

The effort drew national and local attention from the U.S. Department of Education, which invited district leaders to present their work at a webinar for other districts; from the Council of Great City Schools; and, most recently, from the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, in naming Gothard the newest superintendent of the year.

Whatever ultimately ends up in the budget to be approved next June, school board members will have to justify their choices to the public. Better, say district leaders, to start those conversations now. 

Case in point: The relief aid allowed the district to test new strategies for closing longstanding racial and socioeconomic academic gaps. Funding those that turned out to be seems like an obvious priority. Yet new concerns have surfaced in the years since in-person schools were shuttered. 

Chronic absenteeism and student safety are much bigger community concerns now, for example, than they were in 2020. After schools reopened for in-person instruction, it became clear that giving older students passes for public transit, now plagued by rising crime, wasn’t as likely to get them to school as it had been. So St. Paul used some of the aid to raise driver pay so it could reinstitute school bus routes.

“We did some student surveys last spring after a lot of tragic incidents in and around our schools,” says Innovation Office Director Leah Corey, one of the district leaders who created the dashboards tracking how well pandemic interventions have worked. “Yellow buses came up a lot as something that students and parents missed. They thought they would be safer and be more on time and more accountable to get to and from school if they had a yellow bus.”

Khulia Pringle, the National Parents Union’s Minnesota state director, has applied to join the committee. If she is chosen, she says, she will also raise safety issues. The parents she works with want more orderly schools, she says, but believe that would better be accomplished by increasing the number of community groups with a presence in schools than by reviving contracts with local police.

As painful as these choices sound, St. Paul may hit fewer speedbumps navigating them than other large school systems.

Right now, administrators everywhere are taking their first painful steps toward creating budgets for the 2024-25 academic year. For many, this means finally confronting the so-called fiscal cliff, a precipice that education finance experts warned of three years ago when Congress approved $190 billion in recovery aid. Now, with federal funds , these districts are figuring out who to manage with dramatically reduced funding. 

Lawmakers and finance experts had hoped much of the aid would be used to from pandemic learning losses, but many school systems instead used it to plug pre-existing budget gaps. Frequently, the mounting deficits were caused by years of falling enrollment driven by declining birth rates. 

Compounding the crisis, a record number of families moved their children out of district schools during COVID, accelerating the need for painful structural changes. Instead of helping their remaining students rebound, lots of districts spent relief funds staving off unpopular decisions such as closing schools and laying off staff.

Between the start of the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, St. Paul Public Schools lost 10% of its students, accelerating a trend decades in the making and projected to continue. Operating a large number of drastically underenrolled schools, in fall 2021 the board decided to close several and consolidate others.

The move allowed the district to spend most of its $319 million share of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund on strategies tied directly to meeting students’ needs. With an aim of pushing the system to respond more nimbly to internal data showing what’s working and what isn’t, district leaders created a public dashboard for each expenditure outlining its goal and tracking progress. 

That information should help the new committee be strategic in considering what recommendations to prioritize in 2024-25.

For example, the panel will likely be asked to consider continuing a program that put 105 literacy specialists in elementary and middle schools to work with small groups of struggling students. In addition to allowing the district to retain highly effective educators even as it closed buildings, the effort — known as What I Need Now — quickly started to boost reading rates. 

Test data show that the more than 4,000 kids in the program are learning to read more quickly than their peers. The district is nowhere near catching everyone up, however. After an initial dip at the start of the pandemic, reading proficiency rates on annual state exams have stabilized — around 35%.

District leaders are working to extend the program, which will cost an estimated $12 million during the current school year, from elementary to middle grades. They have also instituted a parallel effort in math, training teachers to use data and higher quality instruction in schools where students are struggling.

The district has also had success addressing labor shortages. St. Paul spent $4.6 million in pandemic money creating a team to recruit and retain teachers, administrators and paraprofessionals of color and in areas where job openings are particularly hard to fill. Among many strategies, the new staff has traveled to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, made on-the-spot offers at job fairs and — a rarity in Minnesota — used hiring bonuses to help fill vacancies. 

The investment appears to be paying off. Over the summer, as neighboring districts struggled to retain educators of students with disabilities, St. Paul offered $10,000 signing bonuses to special education teachers, filling 70 vacancies in short order. Of the nearly 750 staff hired during that time, half were teachers.

The new finance committee is expected to meet four to six times a year.

“I said, ‘Just open up the door, I can get in myself,’” Ellis remembered.

Prince finally relented, and Ellis wrote and performed in “Graffiti Bridge,” the sequel to “Purple Rain.” 

“It was just the experience of a lifetime.”

Extra credit is a series where ����Ӱ��’s video team shares interesting tidbits that didn’t make the final cut. Watch the full documentary about Ellis’s school, which uses hip hop to engage who have struggled in traditional schools: Hip Hop Is Saving Teen Lives in Minnesota 

ST. PAUL, Minn. — In the early days of the pandemic, Kentarios Franklin, now 24, who goes by KD, spent his days looking for jobs and new places to stay. He walked into restaurants and stores, asking if he could help stock shelves or do other odd tasks, and bounced around among friends’ homes, sometimes staying for as little as a week or two. 

He continued like this for about three years until one day, a friend gave him a camera. That’s when his life began to change, Franklin says. About six months ago, through a local youth organization that teaches video production, he met former professional soccer player turned philanthropist Tony Sanneh. Sanneh offered him a job as a photographer and videographer for the Sanneh Foundation, which runs free sports camps and other out-of-school opportunities for diverse, low-income, urban and immigrant youth. 

Sanneh Foundation founder Tony Sanneh, left, and youth worker KD Franklin pose for a photo at the foundation’s St. Paul office.

For the first time since the pandemic began, Franklin has a stable job — and stable housing — where he feels like he can grow. He’s one of 14 Sanneh Foundation youth workers currently living in subsidized housing provided by the foundation specifically to support workers like him.

“Stability is everything,” Franklin said. “Ever since I picked up a camera, my life has changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I’m already in cahoots with videographers outside of the Sanneh Foundation, and being in this environment is helping me to develop not only as a professional, but as a man as well.”

Low pay and the lack of benefits as well as career development are common among frontline staff in the youth work industry — broadly defined as jobs that serve kids outside of school, from afterschool and tutoring programs to sports to summer camps. Funding sources can often be ad hoc and industry staffing standards are not highly regulated, which opens the door to much-needed workers without formal degrees but can also prevent career advancement.

“Workers in these spaces are undervalued,” said Dale Blyth, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. Blyth is also part of a group conducting a comprehensive survey of youth workers called the . 

“They’ve been thought of as ‘nice things for kids,’ but not necessary for learning and development. But what we’re increasingly learning is that these opportunities for young people after school, during the summer, on weekends, are actually critical learning and development opportunities. They are often where young people have a chance to explore their interests and take their learning further than they might be able to in a classroom.”

Research shows that out-of-school programs can have a profound impact on kids, including , and . But workers in the field don’t see a big financial payoff. More than  earn $10-$20 an hour, with 9% earning less than $10 an hour, according to a nationally representative 2022 EdWeek Research Center survey. According to a spring , only 21% of workers receive full or partial benefits and paid leave. 

Funding for out-of-school programs operated by school districts often comes from . But many programs are operated by nonprofits, faith-based groups and volunteer-based groups that rely on philanthropy and whose leaders say they aren’t able to simply pay workers more due to grantmakers’ restrictions on how funding can be used. Some youth programs like the Sanneh Foundation, however, are finding more creative ways to support workers. 

About six years ago, the Sanneh Foundation surveyed its staff members at the time about their work, lives and well-being. The survey found that five of the organization’s 50 employees didn’t have permanent places to live.

“We found a lot of young people who wanted to serve their communities and help other youth, but it was just a struggle. It’s a low-pay and low-opportunity field,” Sanneh said. “So we asked ourselves, ‘how can we invest in them while keeping the foundation sustainable?’”

With housing insecurity topping the list of staff concerns, the foundation began offering employees housing vouchers, paying security deposits and co-signing leases when necessary. 

Fourteen Sanneh Foundation youth workers live in subsidized housing provided by the foundation including this shared home.

A few years later, the foundation started purchasing houses to rent to workers. Most workers pay $500 per month for a room plus $100 in utilities, compared to an  in rent for a one-bedroom in the city, and also receive a box of food every week as well as supportive services for mental health and other issues. 

Many of the foundation’s workers who don’t work directly with youth are hired through the AmeriCorps VISTA program and receive salaries between $20,000 and $25,000 a year, with additional stipends of up to $14,400 a year. Staff over 18 who work directly with kids are paid about $16-$20 an hour.

Other organizations are also working to support youth workers outside of raising salaries. Starting in January, the Indiana  will provide thousands of youth workers across the state — including out-of-school workers, child welfare professionals, shelter staff and mental health counselors — with access to telehealth services, mental health counseling and peer learning groups. They also plan to launch a professional development program for emerging leaders of color. 

The project will be operated by the Indiana Youth Institute, a nonprofit focused on training professionals in youth work, and be funded by a $20 million Lilly Endowment Inc. grant. The project grew out of a 2022 survey of the state’s youth workers, said Cassie Wade, vice president of youth worker well-being at the institute.

“Youth workers talked about high levels of vicarious trauma they experienced working in the field,” Wade said. “They talked about high workload, inadequate or lack of access to benefits, lack of clear career advancement — and all while being a youth worker during a global pandemic.” 

California offers a cautionary model for non-school-based youth programs looking to support their workers. Before the pandemic, the state put nearly $800 million toward expanding before- and after-school and summer programs and later expanded the programs with the help of the federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Today, $4 billion a year goes toward out-of-school programs, with the number expected to reach $5 billion by 2025.

A  found that the expansion allowed more kids to be served, for more hours in the day, and with a greater diversity of learning experiences. But even as the funding increased, Tiffany Gipson, the program director for equity and quality initiatives at the California AfterSchool Network, said some programs are still on the verge of going out of business and struggling to pay their workers minimum wage.

“It’s not just the transactional piece of ‘oh, give us more money so that we can pay staff more and make staff do more,’” she said. “For me it’s more, how do we help the systems understand the value of this work and that it’s been undervalued?”

In light of the lack of consistent and reliable funding to increase salaries, Sanneh wants to invest in his workers’ career development and help them find more stable, better-paying careers rather than stay at his foundation, unless they want to. For some, that means helping them become teachers or social workers.

For Franklin, that means helping him network with other video and photography professionals and make a financial plan to achieve his goal of owning his own video production business, ideally making documentaries that shine a light on issues like youth homelessness. 

“I didn’t have a choice to go to college,” Franklin said. “That was out the window in the first place. But the fact that I didn’t go and am still here, it’s like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I never would have thought I’d be working at this level.”

At the October conference of the Council of Great City Schools, an organization made up of urban districts, leaders of St. Paul Public Schools took a victory lap. Despite wave after wave of national data showing alarming pandemic-related learning losses, St. Paul’s reading scores were inching up.

One reason for the progress, the superintendent and his chief of strategy said, was the decision to use some of the district’s $300 million in federal pandemic recovery funds to provide intensive literacy instruction for struggling readers. That program, launched in fall 2021, was called WINN — What I Need Now.

The district’s Office of Teaching & Learning identified the top reading teachers and assigned them, in pairs, to every elementary school in the district to work intensively with students who were behind. The progress was impressive enough last year that this year, district leaders added two more coaches to the program.

But as promising as WINN appears to be, it’s not the St. Paul strategy that’s drawing national attention. What has researchers and policymakers buzzing are the district’s efforts to track the effectiveness of WINN and dozens of other initiatives to help students make up lost ground — and to use that information to refine their programs as they go.

In the coming days, a working group of staffers from different district departments will officially unveil a public dashboard that shows and how well is — or isn’t — working.

Other examples include $10 million in grants to 37 community partners to provide afterschool programs and mental health services, many tailored to particular ethnic or immigrant communities; $6 million to boost instruction for children who missed special education services during the pandemic; $2 million to pay for 625 bilingual students to take language assessments, enabling them to graduate with a collective $11 million worth of college credits; and $25 million in funds given directly to schools to meet whatever unique needs they have.

With the pandemic working group, a is responsible for monitoring the impact of more than 50 recovery strategies, collecting information on how well each meets short-, medium- and long-term goals — all ultimately helping close longstanding achievement gaps and increase overall academic performance in the district.

Already, the data is being used to fine-tune programs in progress. Information about job stress among new special education teachers, for instance, has led the district to boost spending on recruitment of classroom aides by $400,000.

St. Paul is one of only a “handful” of districts that are gathering data and using it to make changes in real time, says Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, who recently called on school systems to quickly commit to address the dismal results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“The fact that they’re doing measurement of their investments and looking at them both internally and publicly is miles ahead of many other districts,” she says. “It’s what it takes to do continuous improvement.”

School Board Chair Jim Vue was delighted to hear that policy watchers are tracking St. Paul’s efforts — but says the district’s academic recovery strategy was hatched organically and early, before the government had even outlined rules for spending the relief funds. As in other high-poverty school districts, St. Paul’s leaders for years have talked about what they might be able to do with more funding. 

“Now, we were being given this money, and it’s a chance to show we can do something great,” says Vue. “We knew who we were serving, and we knew what their struggles were.” 

Some 30% of St. Paul’s 30,000 students are Asian, a fourth are Black, 22% are white and 14% Latino. More than 60% are impoverished and 29% are learning English. Adds Vue: “We knew we had to be specifically targeting different groups in our schools.” Closing and consolidating schools after years of declining enrollment and per-pupil funding has allowed the district to dedicate the lion’s share of its COVID relief money to meet those needs. 

Academic recovery: WINN for the win

All St. Paul students lost academic ground during the pandemic, but longstanding gaps between affluent whites and historically underserved children dramatically widened. In 2019, 40% of district students passed state reading tests — an average that obscures big gaps. While 65% of white children read at grade level, just 16.5% of Black students, 20% of Asians, 22% of Latinos and 10% of Native American pupils met or exceeded standards. 

On the 2022 tests, half of students lost ground or remained below grade level in reading, as did 59% in math. Only 21% in reading and 19% in math made academic progress.

Many districts, faced with staffing shortages and other logistical hurdles, have turned to online programs to provide the high-dosage tutoring — trained adults working in person with two or three students three or more times a week — that experts say is needed to reverse these declines. St. Paul chose instead to reconfigure school staffing and schedules. While school closures typically mean layoffs, St. Paul identified several dozen educators — both in schools slated for closure and in some staying open — with strong reading instruction backgrounds. The district placed 72 of them to work in pairs in elementary and middle schools, and asked six more to coach them. The cost: $11 million a year.

Schools juggled their schedules so the WINN teachers could join every early-grades reading class to work with kids who need intensive help, says Innovation Office Director Leah Corey. Last year, this resulted in 2,300 students — 20% of the district’s kindergarten through third graders — receiving WINN services. 

The program’s structure offers a number of advantages in terms of meeting the district’s long-term needs, she says. At a time when many school systems, including St. Paul, are attempting to align their teaching to the science of reading, the WINN teachers are demonstrating evidence-based literacy instruction in classrooms throughout the city. Their presence also frees up regular classroom teachers to work with other students.

Pupils who struggle get the cutting-edge instruction before they fail, unlike typical reading remediation programs. And with a variety of expertise, the teachers can provide tailored assistance to English learners, students with dyslexia or those receiving special education services.

Data gathered in WINN classrooms is already guiding district decisions. Elementary students’ reading levels are measured using an assessment known as the FAST, which gives information on specific skills each has mastered or needs to learn. These results are helping teachers decide which students need small-group assistance, for example, and will help WINN coaches plan professional development for classroom teachers, with an end goal of boosting the district’s overall reading proficiency.

When district leaders looked at scores from the 2021-22 school year, they saw strong progress among students who participated in WINN. In grades 2 and 3, gains by pupils who received the support dramatically outpaced those of classmates. In third grade, for example, WINN students’ scores increased an average of 60%, compared with 40% among non-participants. 

The data is preliminary, cautions Stacey Gray Akyea, the district’s chief of equity, strategy and innovation. But it’s promising enough that this year, the district added two more staffers to the program.

Goal: Diversity up, vacancies down

Long before teacher shortages dominated headlines, educators of color were in desperately short supply. Nowhere has that been more true than in Minnesota, where, in recent years, the teaching force has consistently been more than 90% white. Despite research showing the positive impact educators of color have on all children, barriers to their hiring and retention persist.

St. Paul used some of its recovery funding to create a 14-member recruitment and retention team that has both boosted the percentage of new hires of color and slashed the number of unfilled teaching jobs dramatically. Thirty percent of teachers hired between January and November 2022, came from underrepresented demographic groups, versus 23% during the same time span in 2021. 

Between Aug. 7 and Nov. 22, the number of open teaching positions fell from 113 to 44. By mid-October, the number of special education vacancies — particularly hard to fill everywhere — had dropped from 42 to 22.

Until recently, would-be teachers trained at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Tribal Colleges found it all but impossible to secure licenses to work in Minnesota. All the HBCUs and more than 90% of the tribal colleges are located out of state, and Minnesota had accepted very few transplants. A new law has eased the process somewhat, and St. Paul’s recruiters have planned hiring fairs at several HBCUs in the coming months. They have also held local job fairs, making offers on the spot to top prospects. 

With a , the team is also interviewing new teachers of color to learn what will keep them in St. Paul schools. Upon hearing that special education teachers are stretched too thin, district leaders earmarked an additional $400,000 to recruit classroom aides to work with children with disabilities.

Nine of the team members — many existing employees doing new jobs — are being paid with recovery funds. In fiscal year 2023, the amount of stimulus funding in question comes to $1.6 million. In 2024, that figure will rise to $3.3 million. 

In addition to the interviews, team members will analyze recruiting and retention statistics by race and will share the information with principals and other supervisors with an eye toward helping them create inclusive cultures, increasing the number of teachers of color who stay and, ultimately, decreasing racial disparities in student achievement.

In the cases of both the intensive literacy program and the educator recruitment and retention teams, Roza sounds both positive and cautionary notes. It’s important to remember, she says, that the country is likely headed into a recession, which means jobs created now may be imperiled when stimulus funds dry up. Tapping existing staff to perform new jobs is a valuable way to avert layoffs and start delivering pandemic recovery services quickly at a time when hiring is hard, she says. 

A trusted — and underused — path to student engagement

In 1989, three University of Minnesota professors launched an experiment to prevent students with behavioral challenges and learning disabilities from dropping out. A school staff member mentors one or more students, using a research-based set of relationship-building skills, and monitors data about their attendance, behavior and academic performance. 

More than 30 years later, is recognized as a leading strategy to promote student engagement, boost graduation rates and improve . Still, schools often struggle to implement the program. Even when they can find grant funding to pay for it, they are loath to add extra duties to teachers’ already full calendars.

For five years, St. Paul has had a state grant to operate Check and Connect with a small group of Black and Native American students who receive special education services. Recent results were so promising that this year the district expanded the program to nine schools, using federal funds budgeted for special education recovery services. 

Pre-pandemic, data on student disengagement showed unmet needs that have likely widened since the first school closures in spring 2020. In 2019, according to state statistics, some 73% of Black St. Paul students attended class 90% of the time. Just 62% of Native American children and 71% of students with disabilities had consistent attendance. By St. Paul’s calculations, in the 2021-22 school year, 75% of Native American students missed 11 or more days of class, as did 67% of Black children. 

But despite unprecedented rates of disengagement among at-risk high school students nationwide, this year, seven of eight seniors enrolled in the St. Paul program graduated on time. District leaders concede it’s a small sample but point out that the results for Check and Connect participants are higher than both the district’s 76% overall graduation rate and the 49% of students with disabilities who graduate on time. 

Because worked so well with a student demographic that’s particularly at risk of dropping out, last fall district leaders trained 40 school support staffers to be mentors and plans to add more in the spring. They also hired a specialist with the expertise to work with Black and Native students in schools that are too small to have a full program, and are piloting Check and Connect in elementary schools. Because mentors are expected to forge long-term, trusting relationships with families under very high stress, a high degree of cultural competence is required. 

To learn whether they are succeeding, the counselors and other staff involved in the mentoring program will survey students about their experiences and look at graduation and college- and career-readiness rates. The end goal is to increase academic achievement among students receiving special education services.

‘Library of lessons’ on Native history, culture

Home to a large number of Native Nations, Minnesota historically has struggled with teaching Indigenous culture and history. Since a mandate to include Native American topics became law in 2007, numerous proposals to update state academic standards have sparked repeated waves of controversy. 

An effort earlier this year to update state math standards to include references to Dakota and Anishinaabe communities ran into both from anti-critical race theory conservatives and Indigenous people. The ongoing revision of the social studies standards has also been a flashpoint. 

Over the next two years, St. Paul Public Schools will invest some $1.4 million in changing its approaches to addressing the needs of its almost 900 Native American students. A full-time staff member is bolstering the district’s resources. In addition to reviewing curricula for places where Indigenous history and current issues should be taught, the district is creating a library of lessons, helping individual schools adopt Native circle-based restorative practices and training all staff on contemporary issues. 

The district also hired a counselor to work with Native American students and recently passed a policy allowing Indigenous smudging rituals — the burning of sage and other herbs to purify people and spaces — in schools. 

Addressing longstanding equity issues is hugely important, says Roza. But districts that do what St. Paul is doing — tracking the outcomes of their recovery efforts on individual dashboards — need to start with an end goal in mind and reverse-engineer the data they track.

“They need to be clear about what they hope to get from it,” she says. “If you think it will boost attendance for Native Americans, then track attendance. If it will boost reading and math, then track test scores.”

Staff responsible for the will monitor how often teachers use the lessons the district develops and how often they include materials about Indigenous culture in their instruction; will survey educators about their confidence regarding Native topics; and, ultimately, will look for increased academic progress among Indigenous students.

Any degree of progress toward helping students rebound from the pandemic is, of course, welcome, says Roza. But shifting to a culture where making changes at any point in the year is an innovation that will serve St. Paul going forward. 

“ ‘We’ll see in next year’s test scores’ — that’s an unacceptable response,” says Roza. “The problem is complicated? Well, let’s roll up our sleeves and solve it.”

“The existence of a racial imbalance in the student body of a school, as compared to other schools in the same school district or school system, is not a per se violation of the education clause of the Minnesota constitution, unless the racial imbalance is caused by intentional … ���𲵰��𲵲��پ��Dz�,” in upholding a Hennepin County District Court judge’s decision.

Within hours, attorneys representing the plaintiffs, a group of Twin Cities parents, said they would appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The case dates to 2015, when Minneapolis and St. Paul parents sued state officials, alleging that racial isolation in schools deprived children of the adequate education they are guaranteed by the Minnesota constitution. The parents called a number of state efforts to desegregate schools stretching back more than 20 years inadequate.

Since the start of the case, state officials have insisted they did not cause school segregation. 

Because the plaintiffs challenged a state law exempting charter schools, several high-performing Twin Cities charters asked to participate in the case as defendants, arguing that they do not exclude any group of children. Rather, they say, their “culturally affirming” school models appeal to families looking for an alternative to local district schools, which have some of the largest achievement gaps in the nation.

The state Supreme Court already decided a separate issue in the case, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman et. al. v. State of Minnesota, in 2018. By law, the next phase of the case was mandatory mediation. After 18 months of closed talks failed, the plaintiffs asked a Minneapolis judge to stop the case from proceeding to trial by declaring that concentrations of poverty and of students of color in their schools was, by itself, a violation of the right to an adequate education under the state constitution. 

In an order issued last winter, Hennepin County District Court Judge Susan Robiner did not go so far as to call racially isolated schools segregated, noting that the term has a particular legal definition regarding the separation of students by race: “The court will use the term ‘segregated’ when referring to plaintiffs’ allegations in order to accurately describe what plaintiffs allege. It will use the term ‘imbalanced’ otherwise, recognizing that the word ‘segregated’ often connotes an intentional policy of separating races, or other protected classes.” 

Minnesota, like many states, requires charter schools that have more applicants than seats to conduct blind lotteries, a practice initially designed to ensure fairness in enrollment. Among other challenges to school choice, the plaintiffs want the state’s desegregation rules to apply to the publicly financed, independently managed schools — in other words, charters. 

The suit’s historical roots are tangled. In the late 1990s Daniel Shulman, the main plaintiffs’ attorney in the current lawsuit, was involved with a different Twin Cities desegregation suit. That case ended in a settlement that ordered the state to pay to bus students from impoverished census tracts in Minneapolis to then-largely white suburban schools, to create regional magnet schools and to give districts financial incentives to expose students to children of other cultures. 

Among other problems, the children of color who attended suburban schools did not perform as well academically as those who stayed in Minneapolis Public Schools. A state audit found that some districts spent their integration aid on such questionable things as ethnic art. Subsequently, lawmakers appointed a bipartisan committee, which decided that integration was valuable for its own sake, but had few recommendations about how to encourage it. 

Since Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court has put parameters on the mechanisms states and districts may use to integrate schools, drawing a line between intentional and unintentional segregation and ruling that race can’t be the sole factor determining a student’s school assignment. As a result, like Minnesota, a number of places have adopted voluntary integration policies, but . 

In May 2021, the Minnesota plaintiffs and the state announced they had reached a tentative settlement that included a number of the same elements put in place after the first suit. State lawmakers, however, did not take up the bills proposed to facilitate the agreement. The charter school defendants, meanwhile, opposed the settlement. 

With the case then seemingly headed to trial, the plaintiffs asked Robiner to decide the case herself by ruling that segregation per se violated their rights. If the state Supreme Court upholds her refusal to do so, or declines to consider another appeal, the case will head back to her courtroom.

Because the district’s nearly 28,000 students have been out of class for 15 days, the school day will be extended by 42 minutes starting April 11, right after spring break, and two weeks will be added to the school year to make up for missed instructional time mandated by state law. 

“This is a historic day,” union President Greta Callahan said Friday outside district headquarters. “We know that we have historic wins.”

Hours earlier, Superintendent Ed Graff and school board Chair Kim Ellison spoke at a news conference. “The days have run together into months and weekends,” Graff said. “I am just grateful we are able to get back together in the end.”

While the union’s teacher and educational support professionals are covered by separate contracts, the two chapters walked out together March 8. Chief among their joint demands was a pay increase for most paraprofessionals to a minimum of $35,000 a year, as well as a 20% hike in teacher pay in the contract’s first year and 5% in the second. 

But after district administrators balked at using finite stimulus funds to boost the permanent pay scale, union leaders asked for bonuses instead. Each teacher will receive $4,000 in April, a 2% raise in the contract’s first year and 3% in its second. 

Members of the union’s Educational Support Professionals chapter will receive raises, plus $6,000 in bonuses spread over two years, with an additional $1,000 for those with 10 or more years on the job. Because of temporary increases in hours available until the end of the two-year contract in 2023, a “significant number” will be able to reach $35,000 a year, union leaders say. 

Shaun Laden, president of the support professionals union, said the increased hours and bonuses would allow the district to tap the stimulus funds. District leaders have not yet said how much the settlement will cost or whether they will use recovery money to pay for it.      

District leaders project a $21.5 million shortfall for the 2022-23 fiscal year — a gap that would be much larger had they not earmarked half of the $260 million in federal pandemic recovery aid to avoid laying off teachers and closing school buildings after years of precipitous enrollment declines.

Researchers and school finance experts have warned that using one-time infusions of federal funds in this way will create a steep “fiscal cliff” in 2024, when the money runs out. In the days before the settlement, Ellison warned that increasing pay for paraprofessionals would necessitate $10 million in cuts elsewhere. 

In neighboring St. Paul Public Schools, which is facing similar tensions over enrollment losses, board members recently voted to close and consolidate a number of schools and have budgeted the lion’s share of their stimulus funds for addressing student learning. 

District leaders declined to answer questions before the union vote on the contract, which took place over the weekend, but posted to their website. They have not yet said whether the one-time spending outlined in the contract will come from the remaining stimulus funding and how much will now be diverted from other uses. 

According to the , in the 2020-21 school year, the district employed some 2,155 teachers and almost 1,000 instructional aides. Leaders of the union say they have 4,500 members. 

Tensions roiled the community during the strike. For months, the district and unions traded proposals to protect teachers of color from ongoing, disproportionate vulnerability to layoffs and changes in assignments. The two sides had differed on how broad to make any exception to “last in, first out” seniority rules. 

Because of a deadline in state law, the week before the strike began, the district announced that some 50 teachers of color were among those who had been excessed — lost their current postings — because of possible layoffs for the 2022-23 school year. The following day, Southwest Voices, the union withdrew its layoff-protection proposal. 

In the days leading up to the settlement announcement, a number of teachers of color and the local chapter of the NAACP , and the union’s offer regarding the protections was reintroduced. 

The provision approved along with the new contract protects teachers from “underrepresented populations” but does not apply to as many as 50 teachers just excessed for the 2022-23 academic year. Callahan called the new protections “nation-leading.”

While community support for the strikers ran high, many families expressed concern that students had very little in-person instruction between March 2020 and the start of the current academic year and again lost classroom time in January, when the Omicron variant surged. 

The Minneapolis teacher strike has extended into its third week, reportedly with some progress in negotiations. The district made what it described as its “” offer to settle the question of pay for education support employees. There was no new information on just how far apart the two sides are on teacher issues.

While bargaining continued, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers took direct action to pressure the school board to accede to their demands. On March 13, union activists marched on the homes of all nine school board members. One in particular, Josh Pauly, got special attention.

Marchers trailed behind a truck with two large speakers. They chanted, “.”

Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, look out Pauly here we come!

— Heather Paulson (@Heather37727075)

They posed for photos in front of his home …

… stapled flyers to telephone poles that read “Where is Josh Pauly?”

… and asked, “If you see him, share information online and tag @MNWorkersUnited.”

Pauly resigned from the school board two days later.

noted the resignation and remarked, “This comes after community marched on his house on Sunday!”

, “On Sunday I did a very loud and very annoying bit in front of Josh Pauly’s house and today he resigned from the school board. Draw your own conclusions.”

Pauly did not mention the protests in an , saying he resigned, in part, due to differences with district leaders. 

“I don’t feel like I am in a place where I can work towards rebuilding trust with the current MPS leadership,” he said.

Pauly did not respond to Union Report’s request for an interview.

Pauly had also caused some controversy by taking a job with a tutoring company that has a contract with the district. The district stated that Pauly’s new job did not represent a conflict of interest.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers endorsed Pauly for school board when he ran in 2018, citing his three years as a teacher and the fact that he was “.” In fact, the union endorsed seven of the nine Minneapolis school board members. Those endorsements and friendly attitudes toward the district’s unions, though, haven’t shielded the board members from protesters appearing on their doorsteps.

Rallies and protests are standard items in the union toolkit. Showing up in force at a school board member’s home is an attempt at intimidation, and it’s patently unfair. If protesters were to line up in front of the homes of the union president and her executive board, I doubt they would accept it with grace and understanding.

Minneapolis school board members are paid $20,000 a year. They don’t need such aggravation from people making more than three times as much.

The Minneapolis teachers strike entered its second week with some apparent movement by the school district on union demands but no discernible end in sight. In time, a settlement will be reached. While teachers will likely receive much of what they want, the repercussions will be felt for years to come.

The union will get class size caps, at least at schools with the highest needs, and substantially higher pay for support employees, though not nearly at the levels desired by the union.

The biggest chasm is between what the union wants for teacher salaries and what the district is willing to pay. According to the district, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers’ proposal would raise salaries by 21 percent over two years, while the district is offering a 7.4 percent increase over the same period.

“Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) today presented counter proposals to Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) that school leaders and board members predict will steer the district toward long-term financial crisis,” . “MPS faces a $59.5 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2022-23. Due to one-time COVID-19 federal funding (ESSER), MPS is able to reduce the budget deficit to $21.5 million, which ultimately prolongs the deficit. Union proposals will worsen it.”

that it wants average teacher pay to be on par with that of St. Paul Public Schools, which avoided its own strike with a last-minute settlement. The average Minneapolis teacher made $71,535 last year, and the average St. Paul teacher earned $85,457.

It’s understandable that the union wants to match its neighbor’s pay, but the district has its own messaging, which is that it’s tapped out. Its remedy for the budget shortfall should open the eyes of all Minnesotans.

Even if the union accepts the district’s offer, “we will have to make other drastic cuts unless the state provides additional funding in the next two years,” .

The union would probably welcome a state bailout as well, but it wants its demands met regardless of what the budgeters say.

“We can no longer have this middleman of HR and lawyers and data scientists in the way of making the decision,” . “We’re really hopeful that today we’re going to see more intervention from the real decisionmakers, from elected leaders and the superintendent.”

Callahan sees the dispute as something larger than working conditions. “Our fight is against patriarchy, our fight is against capitalism, our fight is for the soul of our city,” .

However the strike is ultimately settled, it will have little to no effect on the school year. State law requires at least 165 days of instruction. Teachers are not risking lost wages while on the picket line. Strike days will be made up, and since teachers will presumably receive a raise in any settlement, they will receive more pay for those days than they would have had they not walked out.

Everyone will be relieved when teachers and support employees return to work, but problems will linger. School districts that make long-term commitments with short-term money inevitably find themselves in a budget hole. In an enterprise as labor-intensive as education, the ensuing cuts will fall most heavily on personnel. Oakland, California, endured and has responded ever since with .

Union seniority rules ensure that the most recently hired are the first to be let go. This means that all the effort and expense to recruit teachers, particularly those of color, is wasted as they quickly become ex-teachers. Such a jolt can happen in any profession, but how will those discarded educators respond when the district and the union next sound the staff shortage alarm? Once bitten, twice shy.

Also, things will not improve if the district continues to hire staff without being realistic about enrollment. Adding employees while losing students has been . The COVID pandemic exacerbated enrollment loss across the country. Districts can keep that up until they have one teacher, one bus driver and one cafeteria worker for every individual student, but they’ll have to make payroll with scrip, because they’ll be out of cash.

People reflect on these types of problems when strikes end, but their concerns are soon displaced by other issues. They forget that the problems of tomorrow are a consequence of today’s concessions. Minneapolis will eventually fade from the headlines, but its lessons won’t be learned. .

Minneapolis school employees walked off the job March 8, the first teacher strike in more than 50 years. While the St. Paul union reached a last-minute tentative agreement to avert a strike, both unions shared a common set of demands: pay increases, class size limits and additional hiring. Administrators from both districts called these demands untenable due to funding losses caused by falling student enrollment.

“Those at the top continue to run our schools with a corporate, top-down model as our students and educators continue to do so much more with so much less,” , president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

“For decades, we’ve watched as district leaders choose to not invest in our students, our schools,” Callahan continued. “We’ve also seen those at the very top, elected leaders, defund our schools. It’s time to make some serious investments.”

Rhetoric like this comes with the territory of a teacher strike, but these claims are especially divorced from the realities of school funding and staffing in the Twin Cities over the last couple of decades.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, namely the 1997-98 school year, when I first began reporting on national teachers union issues. Let’s look at the numbers for Minneapolis and St. Paul, provided by the archives of the .

Back then, Minneapolis educated 49,157 students at a cost of $8,488 per pupil. St. Paul had 45,142 students and spent an average of $7,394 on each.

Twenty years later, Minneapolis enrollment had dropped to 32,722 students and the district spent $16,571 per pupil, an increase of 26.7 percent after adjusting for inflation. St. Paul’s enrollment fell to 34,928 students, and it spent $15,564 on each, an increase of 36.7 percent after adjusting for inflation.

Beth Hawkins of ����Ӱ�� reported that the combined enrollment for the two districts will barely clear 60,000 students in the 2022-23 school year.

Teacher staffing has not been so dramatically affected. A more than 40 percent decline in enrollment in Minneapolis over those 20 years resulted in a teacher workforce reduction of about 26 percent. St. Paul actually had more teachers in 2018 for about 10,000 fewer students.

There are approximately 15.1 students for each teacher in both districts, .

The average Minneapolis teacher made $71,535 last year, and the average St. Paul teacher earned $85,457.

You can describe this situation a lot of ways, but not as any lack of investment, or defunding, or working with less, or decades of neglect.

It remains to be seen whether parents will see school closures as the result of a strike differently from school closures as a result of COVID. I wouldn’t expect the answer to that question to come from polling or focus groups, but by enrollment numbers in the fall. Some families may express their opinions simply by taking their business elsewhere.

Leaders of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Educational Support Professionals said more than 90 percent of their members voted, with 97 percent of teachers and 98 percent of classroom aides favoring a strike. Two-thirds of St. Paul Federation of Educators members cast ballots, with 78 percent approving a walkout. 

“For decades, we’ve watched as district leaders choose to not invest in our students, our schools,” Minneapolis union President Greta Callahan said in a Friday online news conference. “We’ve also seen those at the very top elected leaders defund our schools. It’s time to make some serious investments.” 

Union demands include pay increases, reduced insurance premiums, class size caps, more school psychologists and social workers, and efforts to recruit and retain teachers of color. Administrators in both districts have said declining enrollment and associated decreases in state funding put the cost of meeting the unions’ demands out of reach. 

The time is now! teachers and ESPs vote with comfortably over 90% participation, and an astonishing over 97% Yes on authorizing a strike.

The time is now to invest in the safe and stable school Minneapolis kids deserve.

— MN Workers United! (@MNWorkersUnited)

St. Paul teachers went on strike two years ago and narrowly averted a walkout two years before that. Its 2,500 teachers are the best-paid in the state, with an average salary in the 2020-21 school year of $85,457. District officials, who recently announced they would close several schools because of drops in enrollment, have said their hands are tied by a $43 million budget shortfall. 

They also say class-size caps in the current contract have been an impediment to increased enrollment. In the 2020-21 school year, St. Paul Public Schools enrolled 35,000 students. District officials project that next year, the number will drop to 32,000. 

Minneapolis teachers have not struck since 1970, according to . The district has seen a more dramatic drop in enrollment than St. Paul, and taken fewer steps to adjust. In 2016, it had nearly 35,500 students. This year, enrollment is hovering around 29,000. If Minneapolis’ 2,500 educators do walk out, some big questions will be put to the test.

A year ago, the district and began negotiating a contract to cover the 2021-23 school years, with any increases in compensation and benefits applying retroactively to June 2021, when the last contract lapsed. The union’s educational assistant chapter is also negotiating a new contract on the same timeline.

Citing frustration with a lack of progress, district leaders in October to appoint a mediator. By law, once mediation begins, sessions are closed to the public and the parties are limited in what they can say. Minneapolis Public Schools officials declined to comment for this story. 

The union’s last public offer, issued in early December, demanded a 20 percent increase to the salary schedule for the 2021-22 school year and 5 percent for 2022-23, as well as permanent hikes to pay rates for extra duties and professional development. 

According to the district, meeting these demands would cost $45 million in the first year of the contract, which would be paid retroactively, and $65 million the next year. The district has countered with increases totaling $20 million over the two-year contract.

Behind the saber-rattling, the district finds itself at a serious inflection point. The pandemic accelerated a decade of enrollment losses that officials have for years warned must eventually result in a drop in the number of teachers — and possibly schools. Since the start of the 2019-20 academic year, the Minneapolis district has lost more than 12 percent of its students, according to preliminary data. 

Last fall, as negotiations were underway, district leaders said they would dedicate nearly half, or $75 million, of Minneapolis’ share of the third round of federal COVID-19 recovery funds to stave off layoffs necessitated by pre-pandemic budget deficits. All told, the district will use $108 million to plug fiscal gaps. 

Some school finance experts have warned against using relief dollars to delay painful decisions associated with “right-sizing” shrinking districts, noting that such measures often increase the size of the “fiscal cliff” a school system will face when the money runs out.

At the same time, the district is in the midst of a reorganization intended to stanch the years-long exodus of families of color by redrawing attendance boundaries and making schools more welcoming to Black, Latino, Native American and Southeast Asian students. Without changes to the teacher contract, retaining many of the educators vital to that effort will be unlikely. 

Next year, the district will need 135 fewer teachers, according to its financial projections. By fiscal year 2027, it will need 219 less, assuming continued drops in enrollment. State revenue may continue to tick up modestly, but so will the salary schedule that automatically increases teacher pay each year. 

Union leaders say their members are overdue for meaningful raises, demanding that 90 percent of the nearly 1,000 classroom aides — whose pay ranges from $15 to $30 an hour — earn a starting salary of $35,000 or more. 

District leaders have not said how much wages have increased over the last decade, but , from 2011 to 2018, instructional salaries went up “dramatically.” During those seven years, administrators told the newspaper, classroom aide wages rose 31 percent. 

According to state records, average teacher pay rose from $70,708 in 2019-20 to $71,535 last year. According to the teacher contract, the lowest starting salaries have risen from $37,000 to $44,500, while the highest have fallen from $103,000 to $98,000. 

Pay isn’t the only issue. District, union and community organizations are in the fourth year of a conversation about how to diversify the teacher corps. Those discussions have repeatedly deadlocked. By law, teachers who will be laid off must be notified in coming weeks. If the stalemate is not broken within that time, community advocates say, many recently hired educators of color will be let go.

Because new hires are disproportionately teachers of color, historically they have been laid off in large numbers. According to the Advancing Equity Coalition, a consortium of community groups, this is why, despite increases in the number hired, the district had a net gain of just six teachers of color between 2018-19 and 2020-21.

In Minneapolis, 74 percent of white students passed last year’s state reading test, compared with 24 percent of children of color and Indigenous students. Similar disparities are seen in math. Research shows that children who have at least one teacher who looks like them do better academically and socially. Yet some 82 percent of district teachers are white. 

Partially in response to several years ago that showed teachers of color made up 14 percent of Minneapolis’ educator workforce in 2014 and 17 percent in 2018, the district stepped up recruitment among underrepresented demographics. In 2020, 30 percent of new teachers were of color. Yet, 37 percent of teachers of color and Indigenous teachers are probationary, meaning they enjoy little job protection, versus just 23 percent of white teachers.

Because it’s not legal to make layoff decisions based strictly on race, school districts that want to protect their teachers of color have had to come up with mechanisms for modifying educator contracts. Before closing the talks to the public, district administrators and union leaders were unable to come to agreement on which teachers to protect. 

According to their , the teacher union wants to extend layoff protection to teachers at the district’s 15 most “racially identifiable” schools — buildings where the percentage of students of color exceeds a certain legal threshold. Citing a desire to have a diverse workforce in all schools, district officials proposed protecting educators who are underrepresented when compared with the demographics of the student body, who are members of the communities surrounding the schools and otherwise have a “cultural or communal affinity” to the building where they work. 

As talk of a possible strike began circulating in recent weeks, community activists said they feared the lack of agreement on layoffs would mean fewer teachers of color in classrooms next year. 

“We cannot let [the union] use protections for teachers of color as a bargaining chip or leverage with the district,” said Titilayo Bediako, executive director of the nonprofit We Win Institute and a former Minneapolis district teacher. “And that is why an agreement needs to be in place before a strike begins.” 

The next mediation session for teachers is scheduled for today. The educational assistants’ unit returns to the bargaining table Feb. 22.

State officials are still tabulating this year’s count. But preliminary numbers suggest that since the start of the 2019-20 academic year, Minneapolis Public Schools has lost more than 12 percent of its students, while St. Paul has lost almost 10 percent. 

Like most states, Minnesota funds schools primarily according to enrollment. A loss of even 3 percent of a district’s student body — — can be destabilizing financially. Double-digit losses? There’s no playbook for that. 

Both districts have . In Minneapolis, 74 percent of white students passed last year’s state reading test, compared with 24 percent of children of color and Indigenous students. In St. Paul, 67 percent of white students read at grade level, versus 23 percent of students of color. Similar disparities are seen in math.

Each is also slated to receive more than a quarter-billion dollars in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund aid to help their school systems and students recover from the pandemic. But here, the two cities’ tales diverge.

St. Paul is proposing to over the next two years, to reflect the current, reduced student head count. Minneapolis plans to use nearly half of its stimulus funds to plug an ongoing budget gap in hopes enrollment will rebound. It is an approach that experts warn will likely create a fiscal cliff that the district will have to deal with when stimulus funds run out.

St. Paul’s reconfiguration plan does not specifically target chronically underperforming schools, but rather buildings the district says don’t enroll enough students to offer all the academics and enrichment classes called for under state standards. The goal is for every school to have at least 350 students, which district leaders say would allow for instruction in music, art and science, as well as support staff such as nurses, counselors and librarians. It’s a controversial plan, slated to be taken up by the school board Dec. 1. But because the vote is being held before four newly elected members are sworn in, it may provide some political insulation for officials willing to say yes.

By contrast, Minneapolis is succumbing to the temptation to spend stimulus funds — more than $108 million — on existing budget deficits. The Council of the Great City Schools, for one, has about using the money to hire staff they won’t be able to continue to pay or ink contracts that lead to more inequitable teacher employment. Districts should recall, the group says, that when federal aid from the Great Recession ran out in 2011, tens of thousands of educators were laid off —a disproportionate share of them teachers of color. 

“There is a broad appetite across districts to not make too many big cuts right now,” says Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “The thinking is, ‘We’re in this chaotic moment, we should protect what we have.’ Of course, if you do that, it’s hard to invest in getting students back on track.” To be most effective, she says, the stimulus dollars need to be targeted as closely as possible to the needs of specific groups of students. Keeping underenrolled schools open and teachers employed does not necessarily mean a district will have the right staff to meet students’ needs.

‘Making some progress right now … is the better play’

Arriving in two allotments to be spent before fall 2024, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding will pump more than half a billion dollars into the Twin Cities’ core school systems. St. Paul Public Schools is slated to receive $299 million, while Minneapolis is in line for $234 million. 

Both districts — still reeling from the racial upheaval that followed the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer — have made addressing historic inequities centerpieces of their strategic plans. Both say making sure long-neglected schools get their share of resources is a priority. 

Both have also seen dramatic enrollment declines since the 1990s, when the student population totaled 91,000, distributed virtually equally between St. Paul and Minneapolis. Birth rates have declined, and families have increasingly chosen charter schools or taken advantage of open enrollment to send their children to suburban districts. In Minneapolis, the exodus has been most pronounced among Black students. In St. Paul, Southeast Asian students have left in large numbers. Both districts now serve slightly less than two-thirds of the school-aged children who live within their city limits. 

Between its larger slice of American Rescue Plan dollars and its decision to deal separately with the challenges posed by decades of falling enrollment, St. Paul has far more money — some $297 million — to spend helping students recover from the trauma and losses of the pandemic. 

St. Paul, Roza says, nationally for separating its pandemic recovery efforts from its plan to deal with long-term demographic changes: “Making some progress right now while we’re in chaos — and COVID is chaos — and people are understanding of it is the better play.” 

The district’s includes $90 million for academics, including $24.5 million to be sent directly to schools to be spent on their most pressing needs, $23 million to place additional teachers in schools to support reading and math efforts, and funds for more instructional time. 

Some $11.5 million will support students with specialized needs, such as Indigenous pupils and children with disabilities, and almost $10 million will support a racial equity plan that includes recruiting and retaining diverse teachers. As that proposal was being created, the administrator responsible for each initiative had to specify what would happen when the federal dollars ran out.  

Still, efforts to “right-size” the schools have met with stiff political opposition. 

Some of the buildings that would be reconfigured under St. Paul’s consolidation plan had been slated for closure or reorganization in 2016. A teacher union-led campaign to organize parents around several flashpoints that year resulted in the election of a school board that fired the superintendent and scrapped the effort.

One of the programs targeted for closure in 2017, Galtier Community School, had 156 students at the time, according to state data. Last year, it enrolled 157, despite district hopes that a renovation would make it more attractive. Now, district leaders want to merge it with nearby Hamline Elementary, which last year enrolled 236 students. Slated for closure are four other elementary schools, Highwood Hills, John A. Johnson Achievement Plus, Jackson and Wellstone, as well as LEAP, a program for high school students who are that went from 341 students in 2013 to 133 today, according to state enrollment data. 

Other changes are designed to respond to families’ preferences, such as replacing a Montessori middle school with a Hmong dual-language immersion, a kind of program popular with many Southeast Asian families who have removed their children from district schools over the last decade. 

Confronted with its own underenrolled schools, Minneapolis has repeatedly drawn down reserves and asked voters to approve referenda to deal with budget deficits that by 2018 to $33 million. The district’s chief financial officer has warned that even if enrollment begins to rebound, structural changes are needed. 

Several years ago, Minneapolis leaders started talking to families, about 80 percent of them of color, about why they pulled their children out of district schools. The top three answers were a lack of academic rigor, safety concerns and lack of a welcoming feeling, according to Eric Moore, senior accountability, research and equity officer.

Shortly before the pandemic began, Minneapolis launched a redesign that is moving magnet programs, language immersion schools and other popular options into parts of the city that are home to predominantly people of color. These new school attendance boundaries are also geared toward shifting students to the smallest schools and cutting transportation expenses. 

District leaders say they expected the shift to be a factor in several more years of enrollment drops before beginning to draw families back around the 2025-26 school year. Though this year’s decline was bigger than anticipated by more than 1,600 students, the plan has reduced the number of schools that are hypersegregated from 21 to 12 and the number of underenrolled schools — which Minneapolis defines as having 250 students or fewer — from five to three. 

“It’s a social justice plan, aimed at deconstructing our system of white supremacy that has contributed to years and years of underachievement of students of color, special education students and students in our [English learner] programs,” says Moore. “It’s reinvesting in what our families are saying they want.”

‘This is what it looks like when it gets put off for a long time.’

Because of different ways of calculating enrollment, state and district data differ on the exact size of the student body in any given year. The state has yet to post its 2021-22 tallies, but district leaders say this year Minneapolis has 29,120 students, down from 31,254 last year, 33,202 students for the 2019-20 year and 34,088 in 2018-19. Reach back two more years to 2015-16, and enrollment has dropped 18 percent. 

In addition to the unknowns of the pandemic, Moore says, Minneapolis’ larger-than-normal enrollment decline may reflect the racial unrest that has swept the city, either because of white flight or other displacement.  

Before the federal stimulus funds were announced, Minneapolis officials had predicted the district would be insolvent by fiscal year 2024. Using recovery funds to make up shortfalls will push that out until 2027, though the district would need “constant enrollment growth” and substantially reduced expenses to avoid completely depleting its funds, according to a recent presentation to the school board’s finance committee. Current enrollment projections show that by that year, the district will need 220 fewer licensed teachers.    

Officials say they do not yet have a budget for the stimulus funds that will support “continuity of services, staffing and programs” beyond the $108 million. Of the remaining $126 million, Minneapolis is budgeting $41.3 million for “impacts to learning.”

At the board meeting, Superintendent Ed Graff defended the decision. “Enrollment has declined over the years, and the number of schools that we have does not align with the number of students we have,” he said. “While that is an accurate observation, it’s also an observation that we had never spent the level of investment or the adjustments of our resource allocations in an equitable manner.” 

Roza is skeptical. Even if Minneapolis succeeds in drawing back some families, she says, it will have spent funds that could be used to retrain educators and otherwise ensure that any school that grows is appropriately staffed for its students. And if the district has bet wrong, and ends up with a budget in the red, it could land in receivership. 

“What usually happens is the state steps in and says, ‘You’re going to become insolvent’ — and then there’s going to be really large pain,” she says. “This is what it looks like when it gets put off for a long time.”

St. Paul, Minnesota

What do you do with a school that is beloved by its families but is failing them academically? That is the heart of a community but isn’t teaching its children to read well enough to go to college, get jobs and give back?

If you shut the school down, you inflict a gaping wound on those families. If you don’t, you condemn the next generation to the same fate as the last.

Dugsi Academy, located in St. Paul, is one such school. The families of its 300 elementary and middle school students are all refugees displaced by the decades-long war in their native Somalia. When they first enroll, many have never been to a school or had a formal lesson.

Some were born here and some have been here for mere weeks. Many made the trip from refugee camps where food and other resources are scarce and the future uncertain. The majority arrive at the school speaking little to no English.

Families seeking permanent homes come and go midyear. All struggle to adjust to a new country where their religion, Islam, is often demonized.

Somali culture exalts education; indeed, the Somali word for school, dugsi, means a place where children are educated, sheltered and nurtured by teachers who play a parental role. To its community, Dugsi Academy lived up to this definition.

Academically, however, 11 years after it opened in 2005, Dugsi Academy was one of the lowest-performing schools in the state. In 2016, just 7 percent of students passed state reading tests and fewer than 6 percent passed math. Still, abysmal as those numbers were, they didn’t mean much to Dugsi’s families, many of whom didn’t understand that children this far behind wouldn’t succeed in high school and beyond.

As a public charter school, Dugsi is accountable to its authorizer, which grants it permission to operate and is responsible for ensuring that it meets performance goals. After the 2016 test scores came in, the school’s nonprofit authorizer, Pillsbury United Communities, staged an intervention.

The school had 12 months to turn itself around, or Pillsbury would revoke its permission to operate. And there was one condition: Dugsi’s board of directors had to accept outside help.

Enter Mary Stafford. The ranks of those who specialize in top-to-bottom school overhauls are thin, and common wisdom is that in order for the reboots to succeed, all or most of a school’s leaders and staff must be replaced. But Stafford, a school turnaround veteran, had come to believe that starting over with a new set of educators drives families away. A school might be reborn with much higher performance, but it was likely to deliver those good academics to a different set of children.

Stafford took the reins in July 2017 with the ambitious goal of seeing Dugsi’s students make up years of learning lost either because of their families’ refugee status or because of the school’s lackluster performance. A year and a half into what she jokingly calls “Extreme Makeover: The School Edition,” enrollment is up and 80 percent of the staff are employees who either made the transition to Stafford’s leadership or had left the school and were lured back.

The Dugsi community quickly sprinted past its initial academic goal of boosting the number of students making more than a year’s progress in an academic year. Because many are years behind, however, students will need to grow academically even more quickly if they are to graduate from eighth grade ready for high school.

So far, signs are promising that it could happen. Halfway through the second academic year of the turnaround, the number of students who are two or more years behind in math and reading has fallen significantly. In elementary grades, the percentage of students scoring above grade level or at low risk of failing end-of-year assessments this year rose from 47 to 71. In reading, the percentage predicted to pass went from 28 to 62.

In middle school, all students have made significantly more than a year’s growth in both years of the turnaround, with eighth grade so far this year posting a collective 150 percent. Also noteworthy: The proportion of English learners on track to meet state goals meets the state average. As a result, the school has been granted permission to operate through June 2021.

Assuming the progress continues apace, Dugsi’s experience might hold some lessons for educators and policymakers who study school improvement strategies. If a standalone school serving students with multiple challenges and a distinct culture can make such a dramatic change, what might be possible at other struggling schools?

Turning a difficult corner

School turnarounds are , whether the school in question is a charter or part of a traditional district. Two-plus decades of efforts have yielded evidence about necessary elements, but no reliable formulas. In 2009, the Obama administration pumped $3.5 billion into a plan to overhaul the nation’s poorest-performing schools, to mixed results.

In the rare success stories, researchers have attempted to determine what went right, only to conclude that different strategies have worked in different places for idiosyncratic reasons. From replacing leaders or staff to turning a school over to a successful charter network, nothing has worked consistently. Sometimes when measures of academic success go up, it’s with a different student body.

By the time she came to the attention of Dugsi’s leaders, Stafford had spent more than two decades starting schools and restarting struggling ones, most recently in Chicago with the nonprofit . She had just moved back to her native Minnesota and opened a small school improvement consulting firm, True North, when Dugsi’s charter authorizer delivered its ultimatum.

Pillsbury recommended that Dugsi’s Somali-dominated board engage a small consulting firm, the , to help a committee solicit and screen proposals from groups interested in leading a turnaround. Representatives from the school held interviews and toured schools run by the groups they were most interested in.

Dugsi family liaison Aden Ahmednur was a member of the committee. Stafford, he said, did as much listening as talking: “When she came here, she asked the community, ‘What are some words that are important?’”

The committee was impressed that Stafford’s first act was to ask about the community’s values, and gave her a unanimous response: A Somali proverb that says, “Without education, there is no light.”

“We chose Miss Mary [because] she would not do anything less, but to add,” said Ahmednur. “The community will stay, the name will stay, the school will function as a community school.

“As Somali people, we are new to this country,” he added. “We are a Muslim community. We have an ancient culture and we want to hold our culture.”

Indeed, the school’s commitment to finding ways make traumatized students feel safe prompted TPT, Minnesota’s PBS affiliate, to feature the school in a recent documentary, Whole People (the portion about Dugsi starts around 16:10). The presence in the school of so many people who understand students’ trauma and are committed to keeping children connected to their native culture serves as a protective factor.

Turnaround contract inked, Stafford spent the summer of 2017 visiting families in their homes and meeting with teachers. Instead of cleaning house — something many turnaround agents believe must happen to allow a new culture to grow — she held individual conversations with every adult at Dugsi to lay out the scope of the challenges to come and arrive at what she described as a mutual decision on whether staying would be a good fit.

“People believe that to turn around a school, you need different leadership and different staff,” she said. “But then you displace the community and the people who had the relationships with the community. I wanted to empower the people who were there.”

The makeover was needed at two levels. The school building was a mess, with graffiti on the walls, holes in the drywall and closets packed with unused supplies and learning materials. And, the adults in the building needed a motivational boost.

Stafford treated the school’s physical overhaul as a team-building exercise. For a solid month before students arrived in 2017, she and the staff alternated between painting and replacing every surface in the school, and engaging in intensive training in personalized learning — a strategy Stafford believed would enable Dugsi’s teachers to tailor lessons to each child.

“We have kids who came here two months ago and have never held a pencil, and kids born here who are high achievers,” she explained.

To help newcomers catch up fast, Stafford devised a schedule offering 90 minutes of literacy and an hour of math each day, plus time for individual lessons to address skills gaps. She sent four teachers to learn new math instruction techniques. She found an online, self-paced curriculum that can be used in numerous languages, including Somali, called Imagine Learning.

Stafford tried to make the work fun. On long days, she persuaded drivers of food trucks to visit the school, which is located in an isolated industrial strip.

Another challenge, and a surprising bonus, was found in Dugsi’s financials. Stafford was able to tap surplus reserves to hire a “dream team” for the first year of the turnround that included experts in personalized learning, school culture and use of classroom data. In addition to helping to implement the new strategies, they passed their expertise on to the rest of the staff.

Some of the cash in the rainy-day fund had come from substandard teacher salaries. Many talented but underpaid educators had quit, further demoralizing those who stayed. The school’s past leaders didn’t track turnover, but an annual exodus of frustrated teachers was the school’s biggest issue, in the opinion of Sam Pfeifer, a sixth-grade social studies teacher who left and came back before Stafford’s makeover began.

“Every year there was a feeling of, ‘Am I making the right decision to stay?’” said Pfeifer. “They deeply cared about the school and loved the community. They just didn’t see the school going anywhere.”

Stafford tracked down and lured back a number of those who had left, emphasizing the focus on personalized learning, and boosted pay for licensed teachers to a competitive level, using a survey of salaries at other local schools. Non-credentialed staff got more modest raises.

Kindergarten teacher Joanna SanCartier is one of those who came back after hearing about Dugsi’s renewed vision. Under past leadership, she said, staff often found themselves in a tug-of-war over which culture — Somali or U.S. — would shape what happened in the school.

But now, SanCartier was drawn by school leaders’ commitment to fostering cross-cultural understanding and compromise. “Our school model incorporates culture into what we teach,” she explained. “But we’re also bringing in new ways” to prepare kids for mainstream U.S. schools.

Stafford staggered staff schedules to create a longer school day and make up for afterschool programming she couldn’t afford. And, she hired Pfeifer to work alongside her as a principal-in-residence. He took over full responsibility for the school in the fall of 2018.

Staff surveys show high teacher confidence in areas ranging from peer culture to planning for student growth. Equally exciting to Stafford: Not only was she able to recruit back or retain 80 percent of teachers, but once word of mouth about the changes during the first year of the turnaround got out, she had an unusually strong applicant pool for year two. Some are Somali — a rarity in a state where 96 percent of teachers are white.

One big change from year one to year two of the turnaround is a focus on multilingualism as an asset. Minnesota has a unique law designed to encourage schools to see the native languages of English learners as assets to be celebrated and preserved. Students who meet the goals earn bilingual seals on their diplomas.

Realizing that a linguistic gap was opening between Dugis’s Somali-speaking parents and their English-speaking kids, Stafford this year began using the goals in the law to organize intensive parent engagement. Families come to the school for math nights, for example, where parents and children together engage in projects designed to build math skills for both. The school has also developed a 16-week course to train parents to teach their children to read in Somali.

The cheapest part of the extreme makeover is the first thing visitors to Dugsi see. The Somali Museum of Minnesota provided Stafford with prints of paintings by Somali artist Aziz Osman that now hang on freshly painted walls, next to maps, flags and photos of Somalia, and a rendering of the school mascot, the cheetah.

The proverb she heard at that first committee meeting is stenciled on surfaces throughout the building: Aqoon La’aan Waa Iftiin La’aan — the absence of education is the absence of light.

Some early successes

At the start of the makeover, the goal spelled out in Stafford’s contract with the board was 65 percent of students on track to make a year’s progress in reading and 45 percent in math. Four months in, 83 percent of students had grown a year or more in reading and 61 percent in math on a test administered periodically to track progress toward passage of the required state year-end exams.

This year, the number of elementary students performing above grade level has risen dramatically in every grade, with some elementary classes boasting 20 to 30 percent of students exceeding expectations. While 2018 scores on statewide assessments were still low, for the first time in recent memory, Dugsi was not among the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the state.

More than 90 percent of families participate in parent-teacher conferences. Suspensions have plummeted. And everyone in the building, adult and child, has a personalized plan for growth.

As a senior researcher and education policy chair at the RAND Corp., Rebecca Herman has studied school turnarounds for more than 20 years. Quick wins like the ones at Dugsi are always a goal in a school reboot, she said, not least to buoy staff and families for the harder, incremental work that will inevitably follow.

“You have to do something to jolt people out of complacency,” she said.

Strong leadership is a crucial element of a successful turnaround, as is setting and maintaining high goals, said Herman. Intensive teacher training can also play a major role, and Stafford and Pfeifer will need good information about individual teachers’ strengths and weaknesses, she said. Stafford is likely to find some strong mentors among the faculty, and possibly some who won’t cut it.

“If you want to turn around in one to three years, you have to make some hard decisions,” said Herman.

Dugsi’s staff would need to learn to use data and prioritize making sure kids learn English as quickly as possible, she added, because by third grade, students frequently begin missing out on academic content if they aren’t yet fully bilingual.

In theory, the flexibility that allows charter schools to be nimble in making changes could make a turnaround’s success more likely. But while improvement strategies in traditional district schools are much studied, there isn’t much research on charter school turnarounds, said Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president for state advocacy and support for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

“What we know is more anecdotal than empirical,” he said. “What we know is they are very difficult, just like in traditional public schools.”

Mastery Schools has had success with turnarounds in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, he noted. And there are organic success stories, such as Denver Public Schools’ decision to ask a small charter school operator to take over a failing campus.

Leaders of Denver’s University Prep spent an entire year getting to know the teachers and families in the school before it took over, enabling rapid growth right out of the gate.

But research released by Stanford University’s CREDO center last year found that charter turnaround models implemented in New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville . Wholesale school restarts, in which all or most of the faculty changes, were somewhat more successful.

Ziebarth has seen elements of Dugsi’s story play out in many communities. “Rarely do the people in the school — the staff, the board — see that there is a problem,” he said. “Rarely do they think to reach out to an association or someone to ask for help.”

Often, it takes a charter authorizer or a local association to get a school community to grapple with evidence that’s been hiding in plain sight, said Antonio Cardona, director of the . His organization, he said, has had practice simultaneously delivering bad news and offering a lifeline.

“We usually present a whole bunch of data,” he said. “They often ask, ‘Why didn’t you bring this to us before?’ We say, ‘This is your data. You pulled these numbers together and sent them to the state.’”

Confronted with similar data, another public charter school in Pillsbury’s portfolio underwent a process like Dugsi’s and hired Stafford to lead an overhaul. Will the strategies that seem to be working at Dugsi transfer wholesale to Loveworks Academy?

Not a chance, said Stafford. There were be bits and pieces, of course, but that turnaround, too, started with what the school community valued most.