Tag Archives: national school walkout

Minneapolis South High Students Walk Out, Then Face Budget Realities

March 15, 2018

On March 14, hundreds of Minneapolis South High School students quietly walked around the school’s perimeter for seventeen minutes as part of the National School Walkout. 

Today, they are nervously waiting to see which of their teachers will get the ax as budget cuts roll through the Minneapolis Public Schools. It’s on everybody’s mind, according to my daughter, who is a student at the school. She is wondering if there will be a list of those who get laid off. How will we know who it is, she asked me.

“Everyone is trying to figure out who will be gone from each department. People are worried about (a favorite English teacher whose name I will leave out) because he’s pretty new to South.”

“They are cutting at least one full-time teacher from each department,” she insisted. “This is crazy. How can they do this?”

She is pretty sure her language teacher this year will be on the list. 

This is the teacher that my daughter has come to respect immensely this year, for teaching the kids not just French–her official job–but for talking a lot about gender equality and justice, and about the cultural and racial tensions that exist within the traveler’s paradise of Paris and France. She’s a fun teacher who has the misfortune of being new to the Minneapolis Public Schools.

I feel sick, Mom, my daughter wrote to me. 

On March 14, I went to South to observe the student walkout. It struck me as a solemn thing of beauty, as sort of an unexpected picture of what an integrated public high school looks like.

There were kids in letter jackets and hijabs, parkas and shorts. Some had hair dyed blue; others sported afros or up-dos. There were students in khakis and some in chunky high heels, moving as smoothly as possible down the icy sidewalk. There were ear buds, ripped jeans, and a woman dressed as a butterfly, riding beside the kids on a bicycle decked out with orange and black wings. 

Two blind students walked with the help of classmates and canes. A teacher in a plaid shirt huffed along alone while a girl in sheer black tights and pink high tops bounced ahead of him. Three girls in long skirts marched close together, forming a barrier against the early spring wind. A car barreled past, honking in support but missing the point that this was a mostly silent walkout in honor of victims of gun violence.

There were black hoodies and someone in a shimmery purple coat. A student in a gray fedora was pushed along in a wheelchair. 

At 10:17 a.m., the school’s bell pierced the quiet. Kids started to peel off and duck back through the school’s double doors, painted in bright orange (half of South High’s orange and black colors). As I drove away, I noticed blue plastic bags tacked onto the scrawny looking trees surrounding South.

They are there as part of an “integrated economics/science lesson,” according to South’s Twitter feed. Mr. Patton, a teacher in the school’s American Indian All Nations program, is teaching kids how to turn sap into maple syrup.

The bright blue of the syruping bags struck a sweet note amid the beige block windowless world of South.

I hope this teacher can stay at South. I hope the maple syrup lesson will be here next year. I hope people in Minnesota begin to understand, as Governor Mark Dayton said on March 14, how “badly the state’s financial support…slackened” when it comes to public education.

Minnesotans understand the importance of education, but what most don’t realize is how badly the state’s financial support had slackened in the years before I became governor.

When I started, the state’s funding for elementary and secondary education per $1,000 of personal income, was in the bottom half of the fifty states. Most recently, we ranked 18th, according to the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence. That’s better, but it’s not good enough.

And it explains why our public schools are constantly having to hold special property tax referendums to ask for what should be funded by the much more progressive state income tax.

–Governor Mark Dayton,State of the State address, March 14, 2018

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