Star Tribune
St. Paul Public Schools teachers authorize strike
St. Paul educators agreed again Thursday to authorize a strike against the state’s second-largest district, the fourth time they’ve done so in as many bargaining cycles.
A walkout now can be called with 10 days’ notice, but the two sides are in mediation. Under those rules, the earliest that St. Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) leaders could launch a strike countdown would be Feb. 26.
Superintendent Joe Gothard said Monday that teacher talks have always been dynamic and sometimes volatile, but they’d yet to get heated during this round of negotiations.
“I feel like there’s a commitment both from the district administration and SPFE bargaining team to get this contract settled,” he said, ahead of two mediation sessions this week.
On Thursday, Leah VanDassor, the union’s president, described this week’s talks as productive.
“We are making progress. We are not just sitting there staring at the wall,” she said. “But it’s not enough. We need to see a lot more happen.”
The district and the union have been wide apart on total dollars. Patricia Pratt-Cook, the district’s executive chief of human resources, said the school system budgeted $12.4 million for a new contract and that the union’s requests total about $112 million.
This comes at a time when St. Paul is facing a $107.7 million deficit in 2024-25.
On the wage front, the SPFE is pitching teacher pay raises of $7,500 in 2023-24 and 7.5% in 2024-25. The district is offering 2% to 3% in the first year — with its lowest-paid teachers getting the 3% — and 1.75% in the second. Statewide, average salary increases have been 4.3% and 3.4%.
Wages and benefits are expected to be the focus of mediation sessions on Feb. 23 and March 1.
In addition to compensation increases, the union wants greater staffing on mental health teams, lower health insurance costs and reduced caseloads for special education teachers — the latter of which did see “some forward motion” in this week’s talks, VanDassor said.
Hannah Riederer, a special ed teacher at St. Paul Music Academy, was among the steady stream of educators who went to cast their votes Thursday afternoon at Carpenters Local Union 322. She’s supposed to have 19 students, she said, but her caseload topped that during each of the past two years.
“It is a constant feeling of pressure,” she said.
SPFE also represents educational assistants and school and community service professionals.
Thursday’s strike authorization vote came two years after the two sides narrowly averted a strike, and four years after a walkout cut short by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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“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.
