Bright murals and warm hugs greeted students on the first day of St. Paul’s Benjamin E. Mays Afrocentric Magnet School. The sounds of the Jacksons singing their disco-funk hit “Shake Your Body” filled the atrium. As yellow buses rolled up alongside the school, one child strode off the bus with particular confidence.
“Fifth grade coming!” she announced, high-fiving Superintendent Stacie Stanley.
For Stanley, who grew up in the historic African-American Rondo neighborhood that’s home to the school, the first day was emotional. She remembers her mom attending a meeting to advocate for an Afrocentric school in St. Paul in 1976. Fifty years later, the vision has come to life.
“This is the epitome of showing who we are,” Stanley said.
At the recommendation of a workgroup, the school board voted in 2024 to turn Benjamin E. Mays from an International Baccalaureate focus to an Afrocentric program. Many of the teachers and students are the same from last year. Benjamin E. Mays was chosen for the Afrocentric school because of its location in the Rondo neighborhood and its high African-American population.
It follows the introduction of various other cultural programs in St. Paul Public Schools in recent years, including a new East African magnet school, Karen language and culture programs, and a Hmong language and culture middle school to complement the popular elementary school.
The new school focus at Benjamin E. Mays draws from St. Paul’s popular Freedom School summer program and a long-standing effort to bring that programming into the regular school year. The school plans to hold a regular morning assembly for Harambee — the Swahili word for “all pull together” — to start the day with high-energy singing, dancing, and chanting.
Students will also be inducted into four “houses” representing different eras of African history: the Empire of Ghana, the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, the Empire of Mali, and Kingdom of Kush. The school’s teaching philosophy and curriculum is grounded in Nguzo Saba — the seven principles of Kwanzaa — as well as eight Black historical consciousness principles.
For some students, though, the most notable changes were more basic. The biggest difference from last year for 7-year-old De’Marcus McKinney: “Being in second grade.”
Harambee and the house system will begin later this month after students have settled into their routines. On the first day, teachers focused on practicing how their class would walk to Harambee in an orderly way, making nametags for desks, instructing students on classroom bathroom policies, and calming first-day jitters.
Lonnika Barbee, the school’s social-emotional learning specialist, welcomed a group of third-graders into her classroom and gathered them onto a dark brown carpet with concentric circles. She explained that in her class, they would play games, work through their emotions, read books, build healthy friendships and work through conflict.
“We’re going to restore and heal our village together, because when one scholar is struggling, we’re all struggling,” she said.
Barbee invited them to shake out their wiggles and asked them to reflect on how they were feeling.
“I was a little nervous this morning,” she whispered to them. “If you were nervous, put up a pinkie.”
Around the carpet, pinkies went up.
Barbee introduced a book to help them cope with first-day nerves. She spotted a student with a cell phone, confiscated the phone, and asked that child to help her read the first page of the book “The Day You Begin.”
“There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you,” he read.
Barbee repeated the line, and reflected on times she had felt self-conscious about her glasses and her hair.
“Raise your hand if you’ve ever had someone make fun of your skin color,” she said.
A few children raised their hands.
“We can’t change our skin color,” Barbee said. “We were born with this, and so we are going to grow up and be beautiful Black and brown children, and that is a blessing.”
In another classroom, art teacher Lindsay Walker projected the seven principles of Nguzo Saba and asked second-graders to make drawings based on the principles.
One second-grader in Walker’s art class told Sahan Journal he’d been attending Benjamin E. Mays for “many years.” This year, he said, he’d noticed some redecorating.
“The carpet is new,” he said, referring to the brown carpet with concentric circles in classrooms throughout the building. “It’s kind of like a skin color. I really like it.”
The students protested when it was time to put the markers away.
“That is a really challenging piece of being an artist,” Walker acknowledged. “Sometimes we have to be okay with not being done yet, and we have to have Imani” — one of the Nguzo Saba principles that translates to “faith” in Swahili — “knowing that we will finish another time.”
Stanley did not have the opportunity to attend an Afrocentric program growing up in St. Paul Public Schools. But the new Afrocentric program reminded her of her first-grade teacher, an African-American woman who valued her culture.
“That set the stage,” she said. “She believed I could learn. There were no questions about that. She knew that my family cared about me. And I was a talker. To have been in a collectivist classroom where talking is encouraged and embedded into the curriculum and socialization made such a difference.”
She observed the warmth and energy, or “verve,” with which teachers were greeting students, and noted how meaningful it would be for students to have so many African-American teachers. And for some of those teachers, like Stanley, the first day at St. Paul’s Afrocentric school after such a long advocacy campaign was emotional.
“It’s taken half a century,” Stanley said, “but it’s so important.”
