Name: Kris Taylor
Age: 43
Neighborhood: Macalester-Groveland
Kris Taylor is founder of an AI startup. He has previously worked as a job coach for Focus Beyond Transition Services, a special education program that works with adults ages 18 to 22 with special education needs. He has children who attend St. Paul Public Schools.
Taylor’s priorities include introducing AI as a tool for students through a collaborative research approach with trustworthy vendors; offering students an opportunity to work with younger students as a pipeline for teaching; finding savings in spending that overlaps with other city departments; and fostering pride in the schools.
“The district as a brand is not as important as people being very passionate about the schools that their children attend,” Taylor said.
The candidates are competing for three at-large positions on the school board, which represent voters in every part of the city.
Taylor spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 29. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you want to be on the St. Paul school board?
Given the complexity of issues around technology, I have a unique perspective given my background in education as a veteran, as a coordinator in a college teacher preparation program, to think about how the school district is working on several problems.
These issues include adapting to a world in which we have AI, reconciling some of the issues associated with social media use and how we work with our relationship with technology, and improving and building a pipeline for teachers by offering opportunities for students in the district to work with younger students to gain experience.
When somebody says, “Well, we need a moratorium [on AI],” I don’t think that having a moratorium is a positive way to go about things. I think it sends a message to people and to the technology industry that we don’t want to work together. It doesn’t work for students who are in high school and are going to have access to it already and are expected to have some foundational knowledge.
This is where my startup comes in. I spent the better part of two years really trying to think about how our relationship with technology existed pre-AI but now you have this other agency that acts as if it’s another person. We already struggle to adequately support students from a social and emotional learning standpoint because we are so focused on factual content or reading and math skills.
I think we’re in a good position as a larger school district in this country to say, it’s not a moratorium, but let’s work with a company that seems most trustworthy. Let’s work together on what this looks like from a standpoint of a research project, and have all the stakeholders participating, doing it in a collaborative way that doesn’t just end up five years down the road with the school district wondering, “All right, which vendor are we going to use for this service?” I think we should have some actual discussion before it’s just something that children have to do.
St. Paul, like many districts, has seen a decline in English language learners since Trump’s second term began, and lost nearly 500 students following Operation Metro Surge. What impact does that have and how should the district respond?
The district is in a difficult situation from a standpoint of having a federal administration who is so xenophobic, right? So, how the district positions itself has to support the children of the district and the children who could potentially be in the district, and to stand tall about the values of this district and community.
Not everyone in the community is as vocally supportive of English language learners as I would like them to be, but we have to work with them, too. How we respond to the threats is a strong signal for those English language learners and their families to say, we understand why you felt the need to leave. We’re doing our best to be here. We want to be better, and we want to work together to make this as positive an experience as possible in a truly unfortunate set of circumstances.
The other tricky part is the unfortunate fact that those students who are counted as leaving the district, we can’t verify whether they did so by choice, or were deported forcefully. It’s unclear to me that we can differentiate between the two. For those who have simply chosen to leave the district, do they want to reengage and let us know why?
Last year St. Paul cut ELL funding after a decline in ELL students. How can St. Paul best support those remaining students?
First, can we say that the ELL teachers and staff that we had prior to the loss of those students were more than we needed, or just enough? Is the student population now actually in a good position to be strongly supported?
We can always be doing better for students who have special needs, like English language learners, because those support services typically require people, and people are expensive from a standpoint of organizational expenses, but you can’t really have a school district without the people.
There’s a lot of opportunity too, to take secondary education students who may be interested in becoming teachers and putting them down with elementary students. If you now have someone coming from high school who maybe speaks the same home language and has been through this with you, it does two things: It reinforces the secondary education students’ learning because now they’re engaging their skills in a slightly different way by trying to then rearticulate it to the elementary student. It also provides a role model in the sense of somebody who has been through this process, and I think the district needs to really look at how you give experiential learning to secondary students.
The district has grappled with some major budget challenges in recent years leading to cuts in 90 school-based positions in the most recent budget. Looking ahead, what challenges do you see in keeping the district on track financially? How do you think the district can address those challenges?
Well, the drying up of federal funds is a big one. It’s really easy for public schools and communities to slowly have become used to federal dollars trickling down through the state, and then pulling back on their property taxes. The current administration has given us a cold-turkey stop to that, in a way that really forces the community to have to think about what it wants, how it values its public school system, and then understand how it wants to fund that, regardless of what money may come from the state or from the federal government.
Now that this district has a portfolio of school buildings, that gives it a financial burden from the standpoint of upkeep, but it also gives it flexibility to take students, move them to one building, renovate for things like HVAC or asbestos abatement for really old buildings, and then bring students back in. Not many districts can say they’ve got space to put people, and I think it’s important to think about whether some of those buildings may eventually have to come off the school district’s books, or find better ways to use them.
The biggest one [challenge] I think is synergy with other departments, because the school board budget is a piece of a pie in a city that is in budgetary trouble. So we’re not the only entity in the city of St. Paul that has to deal with this. Reaching out to parks and recreation, the libraries, other groups who have programs to support youth and figuring out where the overlap is and how the spending there can be cleaned up, streamlined, so that the the support to the children and the individuals isn’t reduced, but the spending might be.
Last year, parents raised concerns about overcrowding at Txuj Ci Hmong Language and Culture Lower School. The school board rejected their proposal to address the overcrowding, and the parents’ concerns remain. Now there is no Hmong member of the school board. How will you make sure this community feels heard and their needs are met?
Meet them where they’re at. There may not be a member of the Hmong community on the school board, but there’s still members of the community meeting those students, meeting family members, where they’re at, and seeing the school. It’s a good problem to have, in the sense that it means that the program is not just offered but desired. How do we work as a school district to support that growth? It may have to be two schools, two buildings that support that, and then merge into a middle school. Because there is a very nice large building along Snelling that’s a charter school for Hmong, and so for people to say, “Hey, we want more of this offered within the St. Paul Public Schools” … It’s a good problem to have, and an even better one to solve soon.
What’s another school board priority of yours we haven’t talked about?
So many of them tie into the budget. The question of how do you deal with budget, and how do you deal with things like discipline, and social-emotional issues – those are issues the school district deals with, not necessarily creates.
My children go to Jie Ming Mandarin Immersion Academy; one just left and is now at Highland Park Middle School. When I tell people that, they’re often surprised that that’s a public school. They assume it’s a charter. I say, no, that’s a public school. If I were to talk to a buddy of mine who’s a Central High School grad, he wouldn’t say, “I’m a proud SPPS grad.” He’s a really proud Central High School grad. We need people loving and supporting their schools and having those school identities. So when we want to build that sort of community, the district as a brand is not as important as people being very passionate about the schools that their children attend. That’s one thing I see that we miss, is just changing the focus of how the brand is enhanced.
