Name: Christin Crabtree
Age: 46
Neighborhood: Corcoran
Christin Crabtree studied education in college and student-taught at South High School. She spent about three years teaching, including substitute teaching in Minneapolis Public Schools, before leaving teaching for a more stable job for her family. She spent 20 years as a supply chain planner for a medical device company. It’s a field that receives many audits, both internally and from government entities, she said.
“That lens is something that I bring to the school board and something we need,” she said.
Crabtree has also volunteered for years as a community organizer working on sexual violence and homelessness issues. Last winter, she patrolled outside her daughter’s high school every day as immigration enforcement escalated in Minnesota.
Hours after an ICE agent killed Renee Good 2 1⁄2 miles away, Crabtree watched as a caravan of Border Patrol vehicles rolled up at Roosevelt High School, led by Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino. Agents shoved school staff and deployed chemical weapons on students. One school staff member, a Black man, was tackled and held down like George Floyd had been. She saw students of color witness the scene, and she recalled that a Roosevelt student had filmed Floyd’s murder.
“I was face to face with Greg Bovino, and that moment just solidified it for me,” Crabtree said. “It just was this moment of clarity for me, where I’m done letting our kids be traumatized.”
She reflected on how parents and community members came together to patrol schools to watch for immigration enforcement.
“We were physically protecting our schools at that time,” she said. “Those schools were lifesaving in that moment during Metro Surge. It’s how we got mutual aid out. It’s how we were able to keep kids safe and families housed. And we need to take that energy and apply it to our district. Our district has been struggling because public education is chronically underfunded by higher levels of government, and we need to bring that same energy that we use to keep each other safe to protect this district.”
Sahan Journal spoke with candidates in late September, after the district announced three “transformation” proposals to close up to 16 schools and before the superintendent and school board announced they would withdraw those proposals. Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams warned difficult decisions would still lie ahead. Those decisions will fall to the next school board.
Crabtree is running for an at-large position on the school board, which represents voters in every part of the city. Voters will elect two at-large representatives. She spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 23. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for Minneapolis School Board?
Metro Surge is what really firmed my decision on it. Public schools are, in my view, critical to a healthy and strong city, and they are also foundational to democracy in general and being in a society together. We saw that value so tangibly during the surge, and that was what really solidified it for me.
But I’ve been a parent in the district for 22 years. I’ve been here through the cycle: reorganize, close schools, disinvest, and then lose students, and then feel the need to reorganize, close schools, and disinvest again. And we need to break that cycle. So that is why I’m running.
I was here during the 2007 changing school options, and then again during the [Comprehensive District Design], and have witnessed this pattern. And it is my hope that we are able to build stronger solidarity across Minneapolis, so that we can invest in our public schools, because we know that that is foundational to everything that we need in our community, and we’ve seen how important they are.
Let’s start with the transformation process. What were your initial reactions to the proposals?
I am really disappointed. Our board directors asked for plans, and I’m not sure that what they meant was three plans with very similar closures, and I find that really frustrating.
We know that school closures often do not save money, and sometimes they contribute to further disinvestment in public school districts. And that’s just not the vision that our families need.
This is a community that really rode hard for our schools, especially in this past year. It tells you how important they are to our community. This is a time where we need to take that energy and develop a positive vision for MPS, which looks like a real, organized, concerted effort at the Legislature to advocate for our schools.
We do have a district lobbyist and board directors and staff that advocate for our schools, but I will be there 10 times harder, and I want to do that with our community. I know we can do that.
I want to see us really work on bringing students back to MPS. We know that roughly 47% of kids eligible to attend Minneapolis Public Schools are enrolling elsewhere. We need to do a better job of understanding why and attracting people back. When I talk to caregivers and neighbors and kids about their schools, people love their classroom teacher. They love their school. We need to be able to tell that story rather than one that scares people away. A plan of shrink is not a winning plan to bring people back to Minneapolis Public Schools. And I believe that we have so much more to offer, and that we need to be telling that story.
Where do you see opportunity in the transformation process, and what concerns do you have about school transformation?
I have concerns around the building utilization process. There were district administrators that walked around different buildings with people that work in those schools and attend those schools. But that was before the newer teacher contract, where we have more appropriate class sizes and smaller special education caseloads. I’ve been hearing from people that will say, “Oh, the district utilization plan says that we have 27 classrooms, but that’s not really what we have, unless you’re counting this closet in the back of the library.”
Also, we need to talk about transportation. Some of the boundaries these new pathways identified in transformation require our kids to walk across really busy roads like Olson Memorial, 35W, across Highway 55 down here on the South Side. How does that contribute to safety?
I’m also curious about work across jurisdictions. What role did talking to council members who will now have closed, empty buildings in their wards — were there conversations about that? What conversations happened with our legislators? How was the park board brought into this? Because we know that our programming is interdependent, involving Rec Plus, Minneapolis Kids, afterschool activities, how we activate parks. We know that empty buildings contribute to blight in our community. So that is a message to communities — whether we want to be giving that message or not — that is a message of organized abandonment, and that’s unacceptable.
I think it’s great that we’re having these conversations. I’m hearing such hunger for community members that want to see what is possible in MPS. I think it’s really exciting that people are paying attention right now. I see opportunities for us to have more in-depth conversation with people in our schools and the surrounding neighborhoods about what transformation can mean and what does that look like. I think it’s good that we are thinking about constructive ways to bring different programs together. I definitely want to see investments in programming that’s available for our students, equity across our schools. Those kind of things are really exciting to me. I’m just not sure that closures is the way to do it.
The board had previously discussed expanding the Spanish immersion program as part of the transformation process, but it was left unchanged in the proposals. What do you think is the current status of the Spanish immersion program, and would you like to see any changes there?
I love dual language. People love dual language programming. That is one of the most popular programs in our district. I know people who have been trying to get their kids in and can’t, so they’re open-enrolling outside of MPS. So I would love to see that expand. I was disappointed not to see that expansion in the plans, honestly, because I know how popular it is, and it’s also a really great way to bring different types of people together, people who have language barriers. It really is the heartbeat of some of our schools, and so I’d love to see it grow.
If you had to vote today on whether to move forward with the presented transformation plans, how would you vote?
I would vote no to all three.
If this process were delayed until you joined the school board, what would you need from a transformation plan to vote yes?
I need to have a finance outlook for the coming years, as well as projections on impacts to enrollment. I want to have the community see themselves in the plans. Lots of people have asked for things like you just mentioned, dual language. I didn’t see that in the plan. I want our community to feel like they understand what’s going on and that their voice is being heard. That means real, meaningful engagement — not development of three plans and then marketing them out to the community to hear feedback. I also would like to see stronger partnership between caregivers, our educators, and district administration in the development of those plans.
Minneapolis Public Schools has been in the news a lot lately over the district’s handling of its troubled finances. What steps do you think need to be taken to get the finance department on track, and what is the school board’s role in that?
The school board has a huge role in that. Annually we receive an audit from an outside firm, and oftentimes the findings of those audits have been similar or the same year after year. I would like to see an internal process around audits, so that we can catch things before they become a problem and prevent problems. I’d really like to see that increased oversight happen.
I’d like to be able to go through our budget and understand some of the outside contracts that we have. I’d also really like to be able to do better engagement with community on school finance because school finance is really complex and it’s hard to understand. Being able to empower people to have better information would be really useful, I think, to community members because I think there’s a lot of people who do want to see strength in our finance department, but don’t necessarily have the information to be able to do that kind of work.
I’d like to see more consistency in our staffing, and I want to improve the culture at the Davis Center, because one of the things that has come back as well is concerns about the culture of the department. So, how do we transform that and build something a little more powerful?
I’d really like to see an improved transparency and process around how we talk about finance, because we have a responsibility to have a budget that is balanced at the end of the school year, but every year we go through a process of having a pro forma [annual multi-year financial projection] that comes out that projects a huge deficit, and then there’s chaos, confusion, conflict, and then schools are faced with really difficult cuts. Then we somehow manage to balance the budget at the end of the year, whether that is at the expense of our children or because we got unexpected funds from somewhere. That’s just not a healthy way for us to be working together. It’s a really difficult and toxic dynamic for our community, and I’d rather be able to work together to advocate for the funding that our students deserve.
Going back to those painful budget cuts, which have been a feature of each of the last three years, what do you think is the root cause of those budget deficits, and what does the district need to do to become sustainable?
Chronic underfunding of public education, as well as unfunded mandates, are what I would say are the primary cause. Then from that, when we see that we don’t have funds, we oftentimes become reactive and do this disinvest-and-shrink thing. That leads to instability and more students leaving the district, which results in even less funding coming into our schools.
For example, when students open-enroll to another district, the dollars follow that kid, which makes sense. However, if a student has any kind of a specific need, the district is responsible for funding those needs to be met, but oftentimes the reimbursement we get from the state does not match it. So it actually costs us a lot to open-enroll kids out of MPS. Even without that, if people are choosing a different school, there’s less resources to go around. So we need to really focus on keeping the families that we have. We need to focus on bringing back more students. And we need to have a really strategic and powerful amount of work happening at the Legislature to close some of these gaps. I want to make funding our children inevitable, the way that so often we see police budgets as inevitable.
What’s another issue that’s important to you that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?
I care deeply about making sure that our students have their needs met. So I care deeply about affordable housing and addressing unsheltered homelessness in our community. I care deeply about public safety.
I don’t want our school district to be like a Starbucks where you get the same thing everywhere you go, necessarily, because these are human beings, and different kids have different needs. So I want to make sure that we’re valuing our schools, that FAIR and Longfellow and our contract alternatives [alternative MPS schools run by community agencies]. Those are schools that meet specific needs for kids. They are in and of themselves transformational, because those are schools that break generational cycles, that set students up for success, and those are long-term solutions to all kinds of issues that we face collectively as a community.
I hope that people can see that even if you don’t have kids in our district, our well-being is connected to each other. Having a strong public school district has incredible dividends in so many other spaces where we face challenges in Minneapolis. And so this is a great place for us to be investing in Minneapolis.
