Name: Becca Dryden
Age: 37
Neighborhood: Hale
Becca Dryden, a program organizer at a local LGBTQ+ nonprofit, got involved with organizing with Minnesota Families for Public Schools during teacher contract negotiations last year. Dryden collected surveys from parents at her kids’ elementary school. Those surveys showed that parents, like teachers, wanted to prioritize smaller class sizes. Hundreds of parents then showed up for a school board meeting in support of teachers preparing to strike.
“That really, I think, caused the district to see that parents do have power in this process and that we do have a voice,” she said. When the district settled the contract — without a strike — enforceable smaller class sizes were the marquee result.
Operation Metro Surge started just months later. Dryden’s organizing at her kids’ school evolved into mutual aid, patrols, neighborhood watch for ICE and food distribution. Now, Dryden wants to take her organizing experience into a role on the school board that brings parents and students more into the decisionmaking process. She is running to represent District 5, an area of south Minneapolis that includes the Longfellow neighborhood, Lake Nokomis and Diamond Lake.
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.
Dryden spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 22. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for Minneapolis school board?
I am running because I, over the last few years, have seen the power that we have as a collective when we work together, especially parent power. In the contract negotiation fight, and then during Metro Surge, we were able to support students and educators in the district as a whole by uniting across the district. As a community organizer, I really want to see the community brought more into the decision-making at MPS to make sure that we are working in collaboration with one another, so that parents have a voice and students have a voice as well.
Let’s start with the transformation process. What were your initial reactions to the proposals?
I wasn’t surprised to see closures. I was surprised and pretty appalled to see such an amount of closures in every single plan, and pretty frustrated that the district really brought us three versions of the same plan with the same end result and seemingly the same vision, and didn’t really offer us different proposals that we could mull over and think about the different pros and cons of each, and have conversations with one another about what we really want to see from our district. There’s really no room for that in what they’ve provided us.
So, frustration and disappointment and a bit of shock because of the vast expanse of closures across the district and the timeline and the lack of true community engagement. And feeling a little bit misled in the process too, I will say, because I went to listening sessions. I remember one at a high school in the winter where Lisa Sayles-Adams started the session by saying, “I know there’s been a lot of talk about transformation. The transformation plan is not about school closures, so we’re not going to be discussing school closures here today.” And I, in retrospect, feel like that was very misleading, and feel a little manipulated from the way that that played out, and that it seems school closures was always what they thought of when they said “transformation” but didn’t communicate that to the community.
Where do you see opportunity in the transformation process, and what concerns do you have about school transformation?
The biggest opportunity I’m seeing in this transformation process is the citywide response from people who may not always align on what they think is best for the district or what they think should happen, but have pretty much in a unified manner said this is not what we want, and this is not what real community engagement looks like. We are seeing a lot of unity across the district, in a way that maybe hasn’t been the case in previous big decisions the district has had to make, because we can all pretty much see that this is not the way that a district earns trust or shows that they’re working with and for the community.
My biggest concern is that this will end up costing us more than more than any possible benefit could come of it. My concern is that we are rushing through a plan to supposedly rightsize and reallocate resources, but in closing and disinvesting from schools and doing it in a way that causes a lot of disruption, we are going to most likely lose a lot of families. It’s so easy to enroll anywhere else, and so for families that have already been through this once, the constant turmoil is exhausting. I’ve already talked to a lot of families who have said that they’re just going to go to a different school, a charter, or leave the district. When we lose a lot of enrollment, as we did after the CDD [Comprehensive District Design], and as we are inevitably going to if we push through this plan, that means we lose funding, and then our resources — though we’ve concentrated them — will once again be spread thin, and then we’ll be back at the exact same position and potentially worse. The neighborhoods where we’ve closed these schools won’t have the same level of community connectedness and support that they’ve previously had, and it overall just weakens our city bit by bit. Disinvestment just continues a cycle of further disinvestment, and so I think that’s my biggest concern.
They’ve not really identified any sort of financial benefit really, and no evidence to really support any other sort of benefit. It was all just conjecture and the assumption that putting a bunch more kids in a school will automatically mean things go better for everyone because they have more teachers. But that’s disregarding the individual nature of our different neighborhoods, our different community groups. We have very unique specialized programs that can’t just be rolled into a giant high school and be able to provide at all the same sort of environment that those specific students need when they enroll in a nontraditional school, a smaller arts school, things like that. We’re going to lose a lot of what makes MPS great in the name of optimization, and that’s not what a public good should be. That’s not what the goal of a public good should be.
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?
That and pre-K, I was particularly frustrated and disappointed to see not really expanded in any meaningful way. The guidance for the transformation plan lists those as things that parents have given feedback for. That was part of my listening session I was in. So many people talked about needing more pre-K and needing more Spanish immersion. I personally have neighbors who send their kids to other schools for Spanish immersion outside of MPS. For that to not even be a piece of the conversation, I found to be a major oversight. It was further evidence that this plan was not really concerned with growing our school district in any meaningful way — growing enrollment through these programs that parents have specifically asked us they’d like and have specifically told us they’re looking outside of the district for more options because there’s not enough in MPS. It felt like a real lack of any future vision for the district to me.
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If you had to vote today on whether to move forward with the presented transformation plans, how would you vote?
I do not have enough information from the district that I would feel like it was a responsible thing for me to do to vote for this plan. And given the feedback I’ve heard from across District 5, I would not vote to move forward with the plan as currently presented.
If this process were delayed until you joined the school board, what would you need from a transformation plan to vote yes?
I would need a lot of community engagement. I think we would need months of working with communities, working with schools where there was any need for consolidation or anything like that. The biggest thing is we need to make sure that communities feel good about any plan that moves forward, or else we’re going to continue to deteriorate trust in the school district — which means losing enrollment, which means losing funding.
I think a clear financial picture is also part of it. Right now, we don’t have a deficit. But the narrative is so that we’re just always millions and millions in a deficit. Having a better picture of the real financial health, and financial state of the district: I want that to be very, very transparent and understood by everyone before voting on a plan that could have huge impacts for people who to this point don’t feel like they understand what the financial state of the district is. So those are the big parts: community buy-in and real engagement and feedback, and making sure that we have a plan that does not impact one part of the city — especially parts of the city that are underinvested in — greater than other regions of the city.
I also want a really robust plan for enrollment increase, such as outreach, things that the district currently doesn’t do, as well as an increase in pre-K offerings — not just shuffling things around to be in all of the pathways, but actually increasing the number of pre-K seats we have available — and an increase in programming that parents have specifically said that they want, and that we know they leave the district for, such as Spanish immersion and dual language options. I want to see all of those things in the transformation plan, and I want to see actual different options that have different outcomes, and that those outcomes have been assessed and presented to us in a way that we can understand how this would shape the district. And more concrete actual information and plans, financial projections and analysis. A racial impact analysis is really important as well. So there’s a lot of things I feel missing from this that I would like to see.
I’m not against transforming the district. I am against doing it irresponsibly and without communicating or collaborating with the community to actually meet the needs that we are seeing in our school district.
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?
I think that we need a full audit of the finance department. We need to have a full picture of what all has been lost: what we’ve missed out on, where the errors have occurred, what the time frame for all those errors are.
At this point, we have some pieced-together news stories, basically, and I’ve seen some disciplinary reports that indicate to me that it was a pretty toxic work environment. I think that we need to have a refreshening of the finance department, get a strong finance director that can right the ship and put in place some better oversight and protocols for that.
I know that the Davis Center has at times tried to [cut] staff to not have to cut in other places. But the finance department is somewhere we need enough staff so that there can be checks and balances, so that we don’t lose millions and millions of dollars.
I’m grateful that the district has unveiled this toolkit online for the budget. In general, more communication and more transparency with the public is helpful for oversight as well. They need to be able to answer questions and need to be available for the public to be able to have a greater understanding and ask questions when they arise.
As you mentioned, painful budget cuts have been a feature of each of the last three years. What do you think is the root cause of that budget deficit? And what does the district need to do to become sustainable?
I think it’s a combination of setting certain priorities, of not using our budget as efficiently as it can be used, and of mismanagement of our funds. And the aforementioned finance department woes: not filing things correctly, not filling things out, not completing reports on time, where we’ve lost tens of millions of dollars. That’s a lot of jobs. So I think that’s a large cause of cuts.
And I think there are ways in which our finances are not used super efficiently. For example, with this particular transformation plan, I know one of the schools slated for closure, where one of my children goes, got a brand new kitchen installed a few years ago, and a brand new playground a few years ago, and brand new paint year before last, and brand new lockers this year, and now they want to close that building. It’s things like that where we need a better understanding of why some of the financial choices are being made.
Outside of transformation, because I do think that’s kind of a drastic example, I want to have a better understanding of some of the outside contracts that we have. I have some questions about how the bidding process has gone for some of those contracts, or if it didn’t require a bidding process, how that decision was made, where we’re using contracts instead of sourcing in-house.
Ultimately, I think for bigger picture fixing things, there are a lot of things that I don’t feel like the district has pursued that seriously, including increasing enrollment for the reasons we already talked about.
We need to have programs that draw people to Minneapolis. We need to have Spanish immersion. We need to have more pre-K. We need to continue with smaller class sizes. As someone with elementary-age kids, that is a big talking point for people choosing to come to MPS for kindergarten or not, I heard that all the time as an elementary parent. We haven’t even let this year of the smaller class sizes ride out to see how it goes. It was going so well. Everyone was talking about how great it was going in the first two weeks, and then we got this news.
So I think that those are things that will push enrollment, and with enrollment comes per-pupil funding, and that allows us to grow our budget. We also need to address some gaps at the state level. That’s state-level partnerships that I’ve already been building, conversations I’ve already been having with state legislators around some really serious concerns like the special education cross-subsidy billback which particularly harms Minneapolis Public Schools, and some other gaps in funding, where the state could step in and tweak some policies, or allocate more resources — things that if we win a trifecta could be realistic to pursue, but requires investing time and energy, and isn’t a quick fix. I haven’t seen the school board investing that time and energy toward that longer-term solution. But it feels really important to me personally.
What’s another issue that’s important to you that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?
Protections for students that are being targeted by the federal administration and by the culture wars. Being able to really protect specifically our immigrant students and our LGBT students through policy and through the culture of our schools is a really important thing that the board and the district need to be pretty resolved in doing. I am very committed to standing 10 toes down for students that are more marginalized in our society and particularly targeted by the federal government and frankly some of our own state legislators and politicians. Making sure that we do not pre-comply with things that harm those students. Making sure that we work with the attorney general and work with other state leaders and local leaders to ensure that we do everything in our power as a school district, as a place where students should be safe and should feel seen and valued, that we work together with whoever we can to make sure we’re protecting those students who are especially vulnerable to bullying and to other negative mental health outcomes because of messages they’re getting from the president or from society or from pop culture. Just using policy and using our position to make sure that we’re always standing up for those kids.
