Star Tribune
St. Paul school district’s Joe Gothard named National Superintendent of the Year
St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard was recognized Thursday as the 2024 National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators.
Gothard was one of four finalists for the award, announced at the association’s National Conference on Education in San Diego. He became eligible for the honor after being named Minnesota’s 2024 Superintendent of the Year in October by the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.
The criteria used in judging the applicants included leadership for learning, communication, professionalism and community involvement. Gothard will receive a $10,000 college scholarship to be awarded in his name to a student at the high school from which he graduated.
State Education Commissioner Willie Jett said in a news release that he admired Gothard’s “hard work, community participation and student-centered focus.”
“This well-deserved recognition is a testament to his passion for student achievement; and we applaud and thank him for his tireless work,” Jett said.
Gothard did not immediately return a call seeking comment Thursday night.
Gothard, who came to St. Paul in 2017 after four years at the helm of the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District, is among the nation’s longest-serving urban school leaders and a veteran of public appearances with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
His administration has earned praise for how it handled its $319 million COVID-19 pandemic funding windfall. Under Gothard’s direction, the St. Paul district created an innovation office to direct the use of federal American Rescue Plan money.
Gothard has worked closely with parent advisory groups, leading to this fall’s opening of the East African Elementary Magnet School. He has been credited with boosting four-year graduation rates for Black and American Indian students and those who identify as biracial.
In January, he was announced as a finalist for the top schools job in Madison, Wis., where he was born, raised and began his career as an educator. Gothard, in the first year of a three-year contract in St. Paul paying his $256,000 this year, said in October there was work to do in the area of student achievement “and a lot of aspirations.”
“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.
