Dulcie and her family, who live in the Twin Cities metro, are afraid every day when they leave for work and school.

“All of my friends are staying at home. No one comes out. It gets to me,” said Dulcie, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution from federal agents, who have been detaining citizens and legal immigrants.

Recently, Dulcie began driving her parents to work every morning before school, as early as 4 a.m. — because she is afraid they might disappear.

“I would rather do that than never hear from them. I’d rather know at least where to look for them then never hear a single word from them probably,” she said.

Like many area schools, Dulcie’s school is offering an online option for students worried about coming to school, but she has continued to go to school in-person, even if she doesn’t always feel like it.

“Most of the time I don’t even want to go because everything just feels so depressing,” Dulcie says.

The nation’s conscience has been shocked by high-profile incidents of federal immigration enforcement agents engaging children, including apprehending on his way home from school.

But the impact on children and their families extend beyond these viral incidents, affecting the lives of children and families broadly across race, immigration status and economic class in the Twin Cities. The ongoing immigration surge of around has created a climate of fear — not just for the criminals and undocumented immigrants they claim to be targeting — but for ordinary families trying to maintain the routines and normalcy of childhood.

“We are just kids, and instead of being kids and living our lives as kids, we have to step up and support our community,” said Taleya Addison, an 18-year-old senior at FAIR School for Arts in downtown Minneapolis. She said her best friend’s father has been in ICE detention for weeks, and his mother is a stay-at-home mom. The family is struggling, so Addison has been picking up groceries and running errands for them.

With a Trump executive order in hand allowing stepped up immigration enforcement around schools and churches, federal agents have detained at least nine students in Columbia Heights, which canceled school Feb. 2 after feds were observed stalking bus stops and schools around arrival and dismissal.

Duluth Public Schools, Fridley Public Schools and Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union, against the feds, alleging the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedures Act by rescinding the sensitive areas policy that had previously protected schools from immigration enforcement activity.

Among the many incidents around schools:

On the day of Renee Good’s killing, immigration agents deployed chemical irritants and smoke outside of Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. After the murder of Alex Pretti, federal agents deployed smoke outside of an elementary school in Minneapolis.

On Jan. 14, federal agents were spotted gathering outside of an elementary school around dismissal time .

Roseville schools reported that on Jan. 21 immigration enforcement agents used a school parking lot as a staging area.

Parents interviewed by the Reformer said immigration agents have lurked outside of schools in Minneapolis, and one said agents in a vehicle concealed themselves in the parent pickup line at a suburban school, while staff scrambled to get students safely inside.

Federal agents have also been confronted after around in the Twin Cities.

On Jan. 14, Area Public Schools reported that a parent waiting at a bus stop had been taken by federal agents. And on Jan. 23, Public Schools reported that two students and their parents had been taken by federal agents in an incident witnessed by another parent in the district.

On Jan. 15, transporting students and staff from St. Paul Public Schools were stopped by federal agents.

On Jan. 27, Public Schools reported that two of its vans had also been stopped by federal immigration agents while students and staff were on board. And on Jan. 29, reported that federal agents had boarded a bus while students were on board.

TheĚý¸éąđ´Ú´Ç°ůłžąđ°ů spoke with more than a dozen Twin Cities teens, parents of younger children and teachers to understand the impact on the daily lives of children. Their experiences range from the minor inconveniences of having extracurricular activities postponed or canceled, to fearing for their own safety leaving the house for school or work.

Students have gone missing from school

Heather, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution against her students and school, teaches English learners at a middle school in the Twin Cities. Since her district introduced an online learning option, her typical class of 20 students is down to just four or five students in person. Many students are also not showing up online either.

Although absenteeism has been worse since the killing of Good on Jan. 7,  Heather has had students regularly missing school because of concerns about immigration enforcement since November. One student has temporarily moved in with family out of state because their parents believe they are safer there.

Heather said she is concerned that many of her students who have moved to online learning might never come back to the classroom.

Student absenteeism is also putting some funding at-risk for Minnesota school districts. When students miss more than , districts are required by state law to drop students from enrollment. Most K-12 school funding in Minnesota is tied to , averaged over the school year, so as students remain absent for extended periods, districts will start to lose funding.

Significant short-term and long-term consequences for children are already well documented

Researchers have previously shown the impact of intensive immigration enforcement, beginning with short-term effects like missed school and increased anxiety.

When immigration enforcement increased in last year, students missed 22% more days of school, with the youngest students missing the most days. Missing school is tied to lower academic outcomes.

But the long-term impacts extend beyond academic outcomes. In the year following an on a meatpacking plant in Morrison, Tenn., in 2018, researchers found consequences for children’s wellbeing up to a year after the raid.

They documented more suspensions and expulsions from school for student behavior, and a doubling of serious mental health disorders including substance use disorder, depression, self‐harm, and suicide attempts or ideation. Children were more likely to be victims of sexual abuse in Morrison in the year following the raid.

The Morrison raid was a single incident that resulted in detention of about 100 adults. By contrast, Minnesota has been subject to intense, ongoing enforcement actions that have now lasted for over two months and affected thousands of families.

Recent research in Florida suggests the impact extends beyond families caught in the enforcement dragnet. A recent study of , where immigration enforcement increased significantly at the start of the second Trump administration, found that student test scores dropped for American-born Spanish-speaking students just as much as for those born outside the U.S. They also found a decline in test scores for Hispanic students broadly, not just those who speak Spanish.

The same Florida study also showed that the impacts were more significant for students in middle and high school, among girls and students already struggling in school. And, for schools with higher concentrations of poverty, increased immigration enforcement had a larger impact on students, controlling for other student characteristics.

Once higher rates of absenteeism kick in, the negative effects can spread to an entire school community. Teachers struggle getting students back up to speed after they miss even one day of classroom instruction, data show. And, research during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that students and families can struggle to resume attending school regularly when their routine has been disrupted by time away from in-person learning.

A student alters her daily routines after a killing near her home

Children in the Twin Cities aren’t just facing the threat of federal detention. Hattie, a Black high school senior who declined to use her last name for fear of federal retribution, lives near where federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti. The killing, along with the continuous presence of federal immigration enforcement activity around her home, has created a fearful atmosphere. She and her friends have quit taking their customary strolls around the neighborhood or taking the bus to get around.

Hattie said she doesn’t feel like she is a target for federal agents. As a Black woman, however, she knows they would see her, and assumes they’d read her as an opponent.

“I’m scared to go out there because you really never know when or where or who or why,” Hattie said.

She said she has noticed subtle changes in her school, like more Latino students choosing to attend online and extra security around.

“I can definitely see the difference in who takes the bus, who’s walking home,” Hattie said.

She’s struggled to manage the stress.

“At least for me, personally speaking, I’m not really coping. It’s just like, let’s just make it to the next day and not be targeted,” Hattie says.

Like many others around the Twin Cities, Hattie has also been spending her time helping to organize donations and support for people staying at home for their own safety. She said that while people definitely need food, households sheltering in place also need toys and activities for children stuck inside, assistance getting medical care, and even help taking laundry to the laundromat.

Effects of immigration enforcement felt in suburbs

Eve, who has one parent who is an immigrant to the United States, attends high school in a suburb of the Twin Cities. Although she and her family haven’t had direct interactions with federal agents, she has been impacted in smaller ways: A friend’s birthday was moved out of Minneapolis because the friend group comprised a diverse group with many immigrant parents.

Eve, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution from the feds, said that despite the challenges, the crisis has yielded some positive outcomes, like seeing small gatherings outside of her school at dismissal expressing opposition to ICE, and demonstrators on overpasses and street corners regularly expressing similar sentiments.

Eve’s school has also had ongoing fundraisers to help support those more impacted by immigration enforcement. Seeing people come together and express opposition to what is happening has been a silver lining for her, she said.

Eve’s mother said that she has expressed concerns about her father, although he is a naturalized citizen. Although Eve said she thinks most of her classmates and teachers are opposed to what is happening, her mother said Eve has expressed concern about a few students expressing racism and hatred of immigrants at school.

Dulcie is the only person in her friend group of Latinas that is attending in-person school. She said almost all of the Latino students at her school have chosen the online option. The school’s Latino Club has moved its meetings online.

She said some of her teachers struggle to simultaneously manage classroom and online instruction. Some of her classes have a Spanish-speaking co-teacher or aide, which she said is helpful for keeping the online students on-track. But most of her classes lack this additional support.

Her friends are doing their best to log into online classes, and keep up with the teacher. In her classes without an aide, Dulcie said, she has started using her cellphone in class to text with her friends online to help them keep up. Her school, like many in the Twin Cities, has a strict no cellphone policy. But she said her teachers understand.

Counselors at Dulcie’s school, which is racially and economically integrated, have been collecting donations for students and their families impacted by the federal siege. Dulcie said that she hasn’t asked for any help though because she feels guilty when others need more. She is also concerned that students attending online are feeling more disconnected from school, and are not aware of the assistance available through the school.

Most of her friends are no longer leaving their homes. While online school allows them to stay safely inside, she said that many are growing restless and bored, spending too much time on their phones or screens, like during the early days of the pandemic.

But in some ways worse, because at least during the COVID pandemic, her friends were leaving the home, Dulcie said.

Dulcie said she worries that if the intensity of immigration enforcement activity continues, she and her friends could miss out on important milestones, like prom and graduation. It is already keeping her friends from celebrating their birthdays.

“I’ve gone through two historic moments already,” Dulcie said, referring to the COVID pandemic and murder of George Floyd. “It’s like, too much.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

Wine moms? Try PTA moms. 

It is indeed mothers who, throughout the Twin Cities, form the vanguard of community organizing to keep their kids’ classmates and educators safe. But many of their efforts to supply food, rent money, medical treatment and even veterinary care to people too endangered to leave their homes are ad hoc, emergency extensions of the parent networks that, in normal times, raise money for the things not in their school’s budget, organize events and fulfill teachers’ school supply wish lists.  

Over the last month, parents who belong to PTAs and other Twin Cities school support groups have tapped their collective organizing and fundraising expertise to meet extraordinary needs that school systems and local governments are hard-pressed to address.   

When COVID forced students and teachers online six years ago, schools were pressed into service to meet families’ basic needs. Now, as some 3,000 federal agents target bus stops and school playgrounds in search of immigrants, the need is more profound, according to Minnesota parents who are trying to help. 

This time, there is no federal relief funding, no government infrastructure to coordinate ordering Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots for students forced into distance learning, no eviction moratoriums for those who can’t work, no meal box deliveries and frequently no secure way for principals and educators to communicate to their broader school communities.

Instead, there are dozens of GoFundMe campaigns, organized by parents who, in the last three weeks, have tapped their networks to organize patrols to keep children safe as they move from home to school and back, to deliver diapers and formula and, as Feb. 1 draws near, to crowdsource rent money.

Because many of these fundraising campaigns identify vulnerable school communities and individual parents and educators — and because so-called mutual aid networks have become a prime target of federal agents — ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ is not linking to them. In addition to K-12 schools, some of the funds are intended to meet needs at day care facilities and afterschool programs. 

Not all the funds show how much has been raised, but many have running tallies. Some have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars — eye-popping, but, according to organizers, not nearly enough to stave off the anticipated wave of more than 1,600 evictions expected when February rents go unpaid.        

Contrary to the “wine moms” trope, these parents say their efforts are a natural, if unfortunate, extension of the ways in which school-based groups normally attempt to fill gaps. Some of the funds are specifically dedicated to paying for diapers or prescriptions, while the largest are for rent.  

The parents are also screening people who want to join secure neighborhood online communications channels to try to stop federal agents from identifying and following people delivering supplies. Network members hope the same vetting processes are helping recognize opportunists posting scam solicitations.   

“We’ve seen [federal] agents posing as parents to try to infiltrate some of these safety patrols that are happening,” says a mother with two elementary school pupils in Minneapolis. “The level of vetting happening in these virtual spaces is really something.”   

City residents mobilized online to support one another in the chaotic days after George Floyd’s murder by police officers in 2020. The outside provocateurs identified by state officials then were , Proud Boys and other far-right militants who circulated in neighborhoods, sometimes planting homemade explosives in alleys and hedges and setting fire to gas stations, and public buildings such as . Neighbors teamed up to patrol and to alert one another to the presence of outsiders.   

The skeleton of an infrastructure, then, already existed when heavily armed federal agents poured into residential neighborhoods — haunting their schools — over the course of the last month.  

Some districts, such as suburban Fridley Public Schools, have publicly acknowledged that they are accepting donations to distribute to struggling families. Others, though, are quietly letting parent networks know which families staff have been in contact with, and who has the greatest need. 

“We have had schools call our organization and say, ‘We know this family hasn’t been coming to school, can you step in,’” says a Minneapolis mother and advocate whose child attends school in the neighborhood where ICE and Border Patrol agents recently killed two legal observers. 

“The power that is coming from PTAs and school site councils and neighborhood organizations is just considerable,” says the mom. Her two children go to affluent schools where some parents have written five-figure checks.

“We’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that’s hardly the actual cost to our city,” said another mother with three children in high-poverty Minneapolis schools. “Public schools are on the front lines of everything ill facing society — and that’s no different now.”

Demonstrations are taking place throughout the Twin Cities, she continues, but the parents and educators finding health care providers who can make home visits or locating someone to take in children whose parents have been detained didn’t ask to be the spine of the resistance.  

“I wish they would stop calling us protesters,” she says. “Far from being ‘paid agitators,’ we are paying for it, literally.” 

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.

“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 … ˛őąđ˛ľ°ůąđ˛ľ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô,” 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.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ 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.