Star Tribune
Minneapolis teachers union rallies at district headquarters
Hundreds of educators gathered before the Minneapolis Public Schools board meeting Tuesday to rally for higher wages for teachers and support staff working in the district — nearly two years after the city’s teachers went on strike.
The teachers chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers has held 11 negotiation sessions with the district and last month requested a state mediator in its contract negotiations. The previous contract expired at the end of June.
The union is asking for an 8.5% salary increase for teachers in the first year of the next contract and 7.5% in the second — raises that its leaders say will stabilize staff turnover. But district leaders are warning of a fiscal crisis and a $121 million hole in the general fund when one-time pandemic relief funds dry up in the fall.
Union leaders said they’d hoped to wrap up negotiations before Lisa Sayles-Adams became the district’s new superintendent last week. Tuesday marked Sayles-Adams’ first school board meeting. As she shared about her first week in the district, a group of educators outside the board room (which was at capacity) continued yelling chants, including “What do we want? A contract! When do we want it? Now!”
Teachers contracts across the state have taken longer to settle this year and more districts than usual have turned to help from a state mediator.
The St. Paul Federation of Educators, the union representing teachers in St. Paul Public Schools, is set to vote Thursday night on whether to authorize a strike after months of negotiations. Its members are also pushing for higher wages and increased mental health support in schools.
Even if members vote to approve a strike, union leaders would still need to decide that a strike was necessary, set a date and notify the district. State law requires the union to give the district at least 10 days’ notice before the first day of the strike.
“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.
