March 17, 2020

Just when it seemed the Covid-19 scare might lower the temperature of all things connected to the Minneapolis Public Schools and its controversial Comprehensive District Design (CDD) plans, Superintendent Ed Graff and school board chair Kim Ellison released a statement outlining their intention to keep pushing the CDD forward.

The district’s schools are closed now, along with those across the state, and are not scheduled to reopen until April 6 at the earliest. It is also possible that physical school buildings will not reopen this school year, with teaching and learning conducted online instead.

Still, the statement released by Graff and Ellison indicates that the school board will be asked to vote on the CDD at an April 28 meeting, with May 12 suggested as a second option in case the first meeting gets canceled.

This amounts to barely a blip in the previously noted timeline for a board vote on the CDD and does not appear to make any real provision for the loss of public input on the plan.

Consider this bullet point from the statement released today:

If a prolonged health emergency persists, the April 28 and May 12 board meetings may use electronic meeting protocols to ensure business can continue

This sounds as if the board is prepared to vote on the CDD whether or not the public can be there, in person, to observe or weigh in with comments.

Perhaps this would not be a problem if the board was being asked to vote on a relatively insignificant matter. But the CDD is built around a theory of disruption–one which district administrator Eric Moore said, on February 26, has never before been successfully implemented–that will impact every student and staff member, to some degree.

Here’s why, briefly:

• The CDD promises to reconfigure many existing schools by the year 2021, sending thousands of students and teachers to new school sites

• New magnet schools are being proposed, with no identified roll-out plan, while existing ones are slated to be dismantled

• Students, largely from north Minneapolis, who are currently bused out of their own neighborhood to community schools elsewhere stand to be uprooted and put in newly reconfigured schools with new staffing teams

• Teachers, support staff and building administrators have reportedly been told that their jobs are up in the air, meaning no one knows for sure–under the CDD–where they will end up working

While some community members are rooting for these changes, many have lingering concerns over who will be displaced and how, exactly, a projected $4.6 million in transportation savings will be enough to bolster struggling schools–especially in light of what MPS says is a projected $19 million budget shortfall.

In other words, can transportation savings alone make up for the district’s shrinking bottom line?

Politics 101: A Crisis Can Force Change

Aside from the financial piece, many parents and educators from across the city have raised questions about the plan. For evidence of this, look no further than either the February 11 school board meeting, which included impassioned input from a range of parents, or to the highly animated meeting that took place on March 10.

Moving forward with the pre-Covid-19 timeline could be an obvious way to hurry to the finish line and minimize further input, since the CDD has been in the works since at least 2018–when Graff was advised by a consultant to ignore community feedback.

But it could just as easily cost MPS what little public trust and support it does have, by appearing to callously push through a major reorganization plan while families are consumed by fears over job and income losses, not to mention health concerns and the overall stress of suddenly having kids home for weeks and possibly months on end.

Of course, there is also the issue of the current budget cuts rolling across the district. Cuts to the high schools are hovering at or above the $1 million mark, meaning a reduction in programming and staffing cuts–whether or not the CDD goes through.

Frankly, the funding crisis raises the question of whether the district is in solid enough shape to take on a massive overhaul, where schools with strong community support (including schools such as Green Central, Lucy Laney, and Andersen K-8 that serve majority non-white populations) are slated to be dismantled and shaken up–perhaps leading to further enrollment and budgetary losses.

Whose Schools?

This brings to mind a particularly troubling anecdote. On March 10, community members from Green Central school in south Minneapolis showed up at the district’s Davis Center headquarters, in advance of the night’s regularly scheduled school board meeting.

They had reportedly planned to address the board with concerns over the CDD during the public comment period, beginning at 5:30 p.m. Unfortunately, another group–members of the mostly pro-CDD Advancing Equity Coalition–had nabbed most of the first slots allotted to the public.

This coalition, which has ties to organizations that promote and fund charter schools (primarily the Minneapolis Foundation), is clearly well-organized and politically savvy. Before the meeting started, they left glossy literature outlining their support for the CDD on every chair in the Davis Center board room.

(There was a rival rally held outside the Davis Center on March 10, by another organized group–loosely known as Kids First–that is managed and minimally funded, to my knowledge, by district parents with PR chops.)

The Green Central families couldn’t wait for their chance to address the board, however, as their bus had to leave by 6:30 p.m., and so they left without having their voices heard.

Given the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, wouldn’t it be wiser for MPS to indicate care and compassion–as it has through the distribution of food and schoolwork to families in need–by slowing down the CDD timeline and ensuring true community input?