Star Tribune
Teachers approve new contract in Anoka-Hennepin school district
Teachers in the Anoka-Hennepin school district have approved a compensation package that will eat up virtually all of the money the district received from the state Legislature last year as part of a $2.2 billion boost for public education.
Under a compromise agreement reached through mediation last month, the district’s 3,200 teachers would see average pay climb by 5% in the first year of the new two-year contract and 3% in the second year. The deal is retroactive to June 30, when the last contract expired.
The deal still must be approved by the Anoka-Hennepin School board and the executive board of the union, Anoka Hennepin Education Minnesota. With more than 36,000 students, Anoka-Hennepin is the state’s largest school district.
School board leaders did not return calls Monday.
“As is always the case in negotiations, we didn’t get everything we wanted, but we got a lot, and this contract includes important building blocks to reach the schools Anoka-Hennepin communities deserve,” said Val Holthus, president of the Anoka-Hennepin union.
Under the new deal, Anoka-Hennepin teachers would start at $50,000 a year while veterans could earn as much as $100,000 annually.
The pay raises would cost the district $35 million more than it had budgeted for teacher salaries over the next two years, district spokesman Jim Skelly said previously. Anoka-Hennepin received $66 million from the state Legislature last year, but union leaders said $64 million is needed to fund the various parts of the teacher deal.
The union said the district has more than $122 million in its savings account to support the contract and to also support other staff in the district and address student needs.
“The district is the one in charge of their budgeting and we did our research to know that our contract demands were within their fiscal capacity,” Holthus said. “They said yes to this tentative agreement and the parameters.”
Among the highlights of the contract: A $750 bonus for all educators this year, increased 403(b) contributions and increased pay for early childhood and family education teachers, adult basic education teachers and physical education teachers and others who have large class sizes.
The district also agreed to boost its contribution to health insurance by 5% this year. Next year, that contribution will increase another 5% for individuals and 10% for families.
As of Feb. 13, 200 school districts have reached tentative or final agreements with local teacher unions, representing 61% of the 328 regular school districts that are negotiating new contracts this school year, according to Education Minnesota.
Districts already have agreed to pay increases of 2% to 8% this year, according to officials with the Minnesota School Boards Association.
Last week, St. Paul teachers authorized a strike against the state’s second-largest district after school leaders offered raises of 2% to 3% this year. In Minneapolis, where teachers are seeking an 8.5% salary increase this year, the union has requested a state mediator.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
