Star Tribune
Minneapolis school district eyes $115 million in cuts. Here’s what to know
The equivalent of as many as 200 full-time jobs — both in the classroom and at district headquarters — and several programs could be cut as Minneapolis Public Schools leaders look to close a historic $115 million gap in next year’s budget.
That projected shortfall is largely due to the sunsetting of $250 million in one-time pandemic relief funds and rising operating costs in a district that has continued to lose students in recent years. Despite falling enrollment numbers, the district has not made proportionate changes to its operations over the last decade. It has the building capacity to serve about 45,000 students but now enrolls about 28,500.
District leaders have announced some of the cuts likely coming to schools and departments next year, triggering a fierce wave of opposition from parents, teachers and students.
Here’s what to know about next year’s proposed $966 million budget:
Staff and program cuts
The budget crunch will affect staffing, eliminating some existing positions — or in dozens of cases, not filling vacant jobs.
The proposed budget sends nearly $46 million less to individual schools compared to last year. Elementary schools will no longer have dedicated funding to support fifth-grade instrumental music, which was implemented in 2021 as part of the district’s controversial redistricting plan. Principals have the option to fund a music teacher with other discretionary money.
Eight schools, each with fewer than 450 students, will lose funding for an assistant principal. The district will shutter eight preschool classrooms, which were funded with pandemic relief money. The district budget also calls for the elimination of 36 vacant bus driver positions, six fewer school nurses, and a $100,000 reduction in the athletics transportation budget.
The district also proposes the elimination of some tutor positions and the central office-based executive director and department support positions for the city’s magnet schools, which were another central element of the district’s redesign in 2020.
Pandemic aid dries up
The bulk of the proposed cuts to school budgets will come by reducing an academic interventionist program funded with pandemic relief money. Those positions at every school in the district were meant to help kids who were struggling academically catch up.
Schools that serve a large population of low-income students will continue to have some interventionists, paid for with other federal grant money.
Leaning on reserve funds
Ibrahima Diop, the district’s senior officer of finance, said many of the proposed reductions are offset by rising costs.
Diop recommends using $55 million from the district reserve funds to act as a “bridge” to the 2025-2026 school year. By then, district leaders hope to bring in more revenue through a tech levy increase and have “transformed” the district — a process that may include closing or consolidating schools — to be more financially and operationally sustainable.
“This is our one and only opportunity to use that,” Diop said. “So we must approve a budget for next year while also simultaneously beginning the work of transforming the district to move to a more sustainable structure.”
Reaction and reversals so far
New Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams has started the last few board meetings with an apology to the staff and students affected by the reductions and recently thanked those who’ve reached out with ideas to bring in alternative funding.
At a board meeting last week, she also apologized and announced a reversal of a proposed cut to the district’s heritage language programs after pushback from Hmong and Somali families.
Sayles-Adams said she hopes for more ongoing state and federal funding. “But until that point, it is our duty to propose a balanced budget that will best serve our students with the resources we have,” she said.
Several school board members said they’ve lost sleep over the proposed cuts and have received many messages from parents and teachers.
“This is not an easy hill to climb…and it’s just starting,” board member Ira Jourdain said.
Teacher contract uncertainty
The budget, which must be approved by June, could be reopened depending on the salary increases agreed upon during contract negotiations between the district and teacher and support staff unions.
The Minneapolis teachers union began mediation sessions at the end of February. The union representing support staff will have its first mediation session with the district next month.
In a news conference Wednesday morning, Greta Callahan, the teacher chapter president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, said the two sides “are not close” to reaching an agreement. Another mediation session is set for next week.
“What we are desperately trying to avoid right now is another strike…we don’t want that to happen again,” she said. Callahan is running for a seat on the School Board against Minneapolis parent and Montessori educator Lara Bergman.
The district said in a statement Wednesday that it would like to update the community on negotiations but noted that “we honor the confidentiality required by mediation and therefore cannot share more specific details at this time.” It added that it hopes “to reach a contract settlement soon.”
What’s next?
Budget recommendations will be presented to the full school board March 26. The first reading of the budget is set for May 14, and final approval will come in June.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
