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Minneapolis’ Stable Homes, Stable Schools program in 5th year
Homelessness and housing instability is something that has been a part of the life of one in five students in Minneapolis. It’s something the district, the city, and the county have come together to try and change so that kids can focus more on school and not where they will sleep.
The program is called Stable Homes, Stable Schools. It started in 2019 after the former director of public housing for the city of Minneapolis watched a documentary about the instability homelessness was causing at Lucy Laney Elementary.
Minneapolis Public Schools director of Homeless Highly Mobile Student Support Services, Charlotte Kinzley, said that he went to the mayor and suggested the idea of creating a partnership. The program launched to help the schools with the highest levels of homelessness in the district.
Kinzley said last year, the district had a little over 3,200 students who experienced homelessness, which is about 9% of the student body. When looking at the entire student body, she said 20% have at some point been homeless.
“The effects of homelessness last much longer than even just getting stable,” she said. “We know it impacts beyond that experience.”
She said she doesn’t love looking at statistics, because so often students are resilient.
“Every day we see the resiliency of our students, and rising above all the odds and those statistics,” she said. “I just wish they didn’t have to.”
Stable Homes, Stable Schools
Improving student outcomes through housing
Stable Homes, Stable Schools manager Sharmika Riddley said the program has two pathways.
The first, The Housing Stability Fund, focuses on preventing homelessness in the first place. With this pathway, families can get emergency help paying down balances on late rent, late utilities, and eviction court settlements. Riddley said in some cases people can get help with car payments and bills as well. It comes down to getting a family what they need to prevent them from losing their home.
Any time they can prevent a family from becoming homeless, Kinzley said, that is something they want to be doing.
The other pathway helps families pay their rent to escape or avoid homelessness. This program offers a voucher for three years along with case management, which gets families into stable and long-term affordable housing. The family pays 30% of their income toward rent, and Minneapolis Public Housing Assistance pays the rest.
Stable Homes, Stable Schools started off working in 15 schools. Today, the homelessness prevention arm is in all elementary schools, Kinzey said. The rental assistance arm is in the 24 schools with the highest rates of homelessness in the district.
1,627 families with 4,580 children in 24 MPS elementary schools have received help from the program between April 2019 and Dec. 2023, according to the City of Minneapolis’s Way Home report.
In 2023, the Stable Homes, Stable Schools grow from a pilot to a permanent program.
The challenge of finding affordable housing
For housing to be considered affordable, a family has to be paying no more than 30% of their annual income towards rent or a mortgage, according to Lutheran Social Services. Finding housing that fits into that cost can be a challenge. The City of Minneapolis website states almost 75% of renters are paying more than 30%, with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color disproportionally impacted.
Kinzey said finding affordable housing for families to live in can be the biggest challenge of the Stable Homes, Stable Schools program.
“It’s a barrier that we face,” she said.
Investing in the wider housing strategy
The Stable Homes, Stable Schools program is a partnership between the school district, the City of Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, and Hennepin County. It also sees support from The YMCA of the North and the Pohlad Family Foundation.
Director of Housing Policy & Development for the City of Minneapolis, Elfric Porte, said the city’s investment in the program is financial. He said the city has invested $15 million to run the program, and in the mayor’s most recent budget, another $2.2 million was allocated.
The city has numerous core values as it describes its housing goals. Those include advancing racial equity, preventing displacement, and investing in households facing the most severe housing instability. The strategy to reach these goals is pretty straightforward: increase housing supply, diversity and affordability in all neighborhoods, as well as produce more affordable rental housing.
The investment from the city into the Stable Home, Stable Schools program is important, Porte said, because it’s part of the city’s housing strategy as it looks to a future where all Minneapolis residents can afford and access quality housing.
Helping students now and in their future
When thinking about Stable Homes, Stable Schools at its best, Riddley thinks of a family that benefitted from the program last school year. She said the family was a mother and son who were living in a car that did not lock.
“Not only was it not inhabitable, it wasn’t safe,” she said.
The child was experiencing behavioral issues at school, she said. The mom was able to get support from school social workers to get rental assistance and eventually, a place to live. Riddley said behavior issues didn’t disappear but lessened, and the child began to be more open to talking about his emotions with social workers and has been focused on school.
According to the American Psychological Association, the impact of poverty on young children is significant and long-lasting.
“Children experiencing homelessness frequently need to worry about where they will live, their pets, their belongings, and other family members. In addition, homeless children are less likely to have adequate access to medical and dental care, and may be affected by a variety of health challenges due to inadequate nutrition and access to food, education interruptions, trauma, and disruption in family dynamics,” the APA says.
According to Kinzey, the program hopes to help achieve higher attendance among the student body, a decrease in behavior issues, an increase in parent engagement, and eventually higher graduation rates.
“We think of removing barriers obviously as making sure kids have school supplies and transportation and all those things but if we really want to get to the heart of removing a barrier, families need housing,” she said.
Porte echoed that sentiment, telling KARE 11 he hopes the program can be expanded to the entire school district.
“The hope is that at the end of the day, all children will be in a place where they experience housing stability,” he said.
Kim Potter was convicted of manslaughter after she shot and killed Daunte Wright in 2021.
BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. — An upcoming training session with officers at the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board was canceled after they learned Kim Potter was a part of it.
Potter, a former Brooklyn Center police officer, was convicted of manslaughter after she shot and killed Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in 2021. She served 16 months of a two-year sentence.
Daunte’s mother, Katie, said she had no idea Potter would be a part of a training session until after it was canceled.
“I was mad and hurt at the same time. I don’t understand why she would have the audacity to feel like she has that right to even go into a community and benefit off our tragedy,” she said.
Katie said she was relieved they canceled it out of respect for her and her family.
“Whenever I hear Kim Potter’s name or hear her doing anything like this it’s like tearing a band-aid off a forever bleeding wound,” she said. “She doesn’t get to triumph off of our tragedy.”
Potter was supposed to speak alongside former Washington County Assistant Prosecutor Imran Ali.
In an email, he said “We have presented before, but minimally. Her participation is usually between 5-10 percent of any training.”
He said money isn’t her objective.
“Most of the speaking has zero compensation. If the travel is out of town, I make sure her travel costs are covered and a small stipend,” Ali said in an email.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said it’s unfortunate the planned training was canceled and hopes they reconsider.
“We should all support and at least respect how victims feel. At the same time, as attorney general, we’re trying to reduce deadly force encounters between police and community,” he said. “I think it is admirable that Kim Potter would want to come forth and tell her story to help other people learn. I mean she has a cautionary tale to tell.”
Ellison believes Potter’s past could help improve policing.
“I think it could be beneficial for public safety, and it could improve policing,” he said. “She can tell them that she spent decades as a police officer, believed in what she was doing, and committed, and still despite that training and that experience committed a lethal error when she killed Daunte Wright.”
However, Katie just doesn’t see how Potter being a part of training sessions can improve policing.
“Nobody can learn from that,” she said. “I don’t think she’s learned anything. If she’d learned anything she would have written us a letter. I haven’t heard anything.”
Katie said she visits her son’s memorial three times a week to feel close to him.
“I talk to him every time I’m out here, and I feel like he hears me,” she said.
A metal sculpture details his face with different symbols crafted into the metalwork.
“This is Daunte’s face with his crown. We have a couple fists embedded into his crown,” she said. “We have the No. 23 which symbolizes his favorite number because of basketball and Michael Jordan… the infinity just means he’s just going to live on forever. His story will forever be known and told.”
A memorial sits next to the artwork that has a picture of Daunte and a copy of his death certificate.
“The death certificate was really important to me because of the fact that it shows he was, it does homicide and gunshot wound. And I want people to remember that he was killed by law enforcement,” she said.
They also planted a flowerbed by the memorial that is currently blooming with red flowers.
Katie said she is more than willing to visit police departments and explain the impact deadly force has on families.
A fundraiser aims to collect around $25,000 to cover the “upfront costs” of constructing the popular winter attraction.
MINNEAPOLIS — A local winter tradition is in jeopardy, forcing two sculptors to ask the public for help.
Austin, Trevor and Connor Bartz, the Bartz brothers, have crafted giant snow sculptures in New Brighton since 2012. Their first creation was a puffer fish, followed by a shark, an octopus, a sea turtle, a whale, a walrus and more. In 2024, the brothers created a 21-foot-tall “Sparky” the sea lion, their biggest creation to date.
Last winter the brothers told KARE 11 they had to harvest snow from parking lots across the metro and build the behemoth inside a shed at Brightwood Hills Golf Course.
“We’re taking sleds of snow from outside on the pond, we’re sledding it inside, bringing it around this way and into the snow factory,” explained Austin Bartz.
Earlier this month, the brothers started a GoFundMe to raise $25,000 to keep their tradition going.
“We still need another $25,000 to cover upfront costs (lighting, labor, supplies, machine costs, gas, lumber, rental costs). Due to the growing popularity this is NOT a cheap event to run.”
The brothers plan for all the proceeds raised by their sculpture to go to the charity World Vision to provide clean water to people in need. If they aren’t able to reach their fundraising goal to build another snow sculpture, the brothers wrote on the GoFundMe that all of the money raised will go to the charity.
Police were first called to the area for a welfare check on a person in Clarkfield, a city around 2 and 1/2 hours west of Minneapolis.
CLARKFIELD, Minn. — The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal (BCA) is investigating an incident in Yellow Medicine County after a suspect shot at law enforcement on Saturday night.
According to information from the Yellow Medicine County Sheriff, the office got a call around 3:15 p.m. for a welfare check on a person in Clarkfield, a city around 2 and 1/2 hours west of Minneapolis. Deputies learned the person had left the city while en route to the call and were told he was in a farm field with a rifle.
As deputies were evacuating people from the home next to the field, officials said the suspect pointed the rifle at them and then fled into the home. Officials said officers set up a perimeter around the house and deputies tried to contact the man.
Officers were not able to convince the man to leave the house and called a SWAT team as backup. The Kandiyohi-Meeker-Willmar SWAT team arrived and they tried to convince the man to leave the house. During the standoff, officials said the man fired a long gun at the team and SWAT returned fire.
The man was struck in the leg, officials said.
After eight hours on site, the SWAT team was relieved by another crew from West Central SWAT and BLR SWAT.
Around 6:15 on Sunday morning, the man left the house and shot a long gun at the SWAT team. One of the team returned fire and struck him.
The extent of the man’s injuries has not been released as of Sunday afternoon, but officials said the team gave the man medical attention and was taken to Hennepin Healthcare via Air Ambulance. He is in stable condition, according to officials.
No other people were injured in this incident, officials said.
The BCA was asked to investigate the use of force by officers.
KARE 11 will update this story as more information is made available.
