Name: Collin Beachy
Age: 55
Neighborhood: Harrison
Collin Beachy first ran for the school board in 2022, when he was a Minneapolis special education teacher working with students with developmental cognitive disabilities at the Center for Adult Learning. He got involved in the Minneapolis Federation of Educators’ 2022 strike and ran for the board to give teachers a voice.
Now he has a different vantage point as the school board chair — and still teaches special education, though he’s now at Kennedy High School in Bloomington.
He recalled that as he transitioned into a school board role, he learned that parts of the district were more interconnected than he expected. “Sometimes when you think something sounds like an easy solution, it’s not necessarily that simple when you have a school district this large,” he said.
When Sahan Journal spoke with Beachy, he said he was responding to as many messages as he could about the district’s proposed transformation plan that would have shuttered up to 16 schools next year.
“Inbox full, voicemail flooded,” he said. “It doesn’t even matter when I get started. It just starts over an hour later. So I’m responding to as many emails as I can. I’ve been answering as many phone calls as I can.”
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.
At the time he spoke with Sahan Journal, Beachy said he wanted to wait for the listening sessions to make up his mind about the proposals. After the listening sessions, he said he agreed with the superintendent’s revised recommendation not to close schools next year and said that as chair he would not entertain any motion to do so.
Beachy is running for reelection 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. He spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 29. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for reelection to the Minneapolis school board?
It’s kind of a cliche to say there’s more work to be done, but that’s really the truth. I feel like one of the problems for the district since the CDD [Comprehensive District Design, which changed school boundaries and magnet programs], actually even since the strike, there’s just been a lot of turnover. A superintendent, an interim superintendent, a new superintendent. The HR director resigned, a school board member resigned, five new members came in, and then two years later, some new members came in. At one point, you had a board that was nine people, and seven of them were either in their very first year or halfway through their first term. So I wanted to make sure that we had a little bit of stability moving forward.
We’re not done, and I want to see us keep moving forward. I know everybody else does, but I feel like I’ve been in a good position to help and direct the superintendent, and I’d like to keep moving, stepping up for our teachers and our students.
Let’s talk about the transformation process. What were your initial reactions to the proposals?
I expected to see some changes that would make people unhappy. I didn’t expect to see as many school closings. But what I do appreciate is the discussion about what we’re trying to do here is giving this guaranteed experience for all students.
This proposal, people need time to digest it. We as a board have been working on it for four years. The public hasn’t, though. They need time to listen to it, react to it, go to the listening sessions. So there are parts of it that I was kind of pleased with, and parts of it that I was like, “Whoa.”
If you look at the enrollment strategies we have, certainly I’m hearing from people that they’re not going far enough. But also, that’s another thing that we’ve done. This district has never had an enrollment strategy before. So we recognize some things that people have been saying. We have a plan to go and target those families who aren’t going to Minneapolis, particularly in pre-K and kindergarten. We want to show them that we’ve got a system where everything across the board, no matter where you live, your schools are all going to have the same resources.
Where do you see opportunity in the transformation process, and what concerns do you have about school transformation?
The opportunities that I see that I’m excited about are things that we’ve been saying: Elementary schools should not be having to decide between keeping a library open or having a music teacher. Every school should have a full-time librarian. All three art choices should be made available to all of them. I think that this plan is trying to make that happen.
The other one is that this is allowing us to make sure that we have enough high-dosage tutors available to the schools who need them the most. This is an opportunity for us to make sure that we’re providing a more balanced experience for all of our students.
I would say the thing that concerns me the most is that change is difficult, and you’re not sure how people are going to react if this were to go through. But also, we all know for years what’s been happening with our finances and our lack of funding from the state. Doing nothing doesn’t seem like it’s a viable option either.
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?
Like you said, that wasn’t part of this proposal, but it doesn’t mean it’s something that we can’t still be looking at. It is a program that we want to see expand. I was speaking with COPAL [a Latino advocacy nonprofit] about this — we’ve been doing an awful lot of talking about Emerson Dual Language Elementary School simply because of how crowded the place can be. That’s just showing us that that’s an area that could perhaps increase enrollment for us as well.
If you had to vote today on whether to move forward with the presented transformation plans, how would you vote?
People are saying, “You need to come out and take a position on something here,” but we haven’t even started the listening sessions yet. What’s the point of my going to a listening session if I’ve already made up my mind? First of all, it is good to see this much engagement from our families. Even if it’s people who are concerned and upset, they’re still engaging with us. So I just have more voices that I have to listen to before I can come down on one side or the other on this.
What would you need from a transformation plan to vote yes?
I would like to see what some specific guarantees are of this guaranteed classroom experience that we’re trying to give our students. How are we going to guarantee these things that we are saying we can do, that we are actually going to be able to follow through with them? So I’d like to hear a little bit more about specifics around that. That’s really the big thing.
This is something new, right? And so, change is hard. And part of that is because you’re not necessarily sure what the other side is going to look like until you get there. So I just wanted to be able to hear a few more guarantees about how, if any of these plans work or any iteration of these plans, it’s still going to mean what we said it means. For our students who are homeless and highly mobile, if they have to move from the North Side to the South Side within a week, how are we guaranteeing that they’re going to have that same experience?
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?
This is a situation where I think I can answer this question from a little bit different position than the others. The stuff was kind of coming out drip, drip, drip. But some of the changes that had to be made were made right away — putting up more guardrails, more safeguards on the process, making sure that there are more checks and balances.
I know people were saying, “You’re spending so much money to hire this company.” [The district awarded a one-year $830,000 contract to the Center for Effective School Operations (CESO) to oversee and review the finance department after placing three top staff on leave following concerns that $3 million had been diverted from an employee health fund.] But number one, we needed to have an outside person come and take a look at this because otherwise, it would just be like the police investigating themselves after a crime. So, we want to make sure that somebody was coming in here with a fresh, independent eye and had full access to everything they needed to to figure out what was going on.
If you look at that report that we had from CESO at a finance meeting a couple months ago, as they said, the people who are working here are good people, they’re talented people, they are people who are dedicated to MPS. The internal systems are what need to be clarified and shored up.
There’s so much institutional knowledge by some of these people that when they leave, there’s really no way to fully get the new person up to speed, or sometimes they start doing things their own way. So a lot of those inefficiencies and things are already being corrected. Like I said, we already have those recommendations, and we can call them back anytime we need to if we need an update on what’s going on.
I know that it sounds bad. Obviously, it’s never good to hear negative news. But the superintendent has been on this since almost a year ago. She jumped on it right away and she did what we expected her to, and that was to do the full investigation, get all the numbers in front of us, and let us know what she needs.
That is our role. That’s what we’re talking about when people are talking about accountability and oversight. It’s not always pretty. Doesn’t always feel good. That’s the first thing that we asked the superintendent to come in and do.
Accountability, then, isn’t just the results; it’s about how you see a problem, you go and you tackle it head on, you do it with integrity, and you do it with transparency. And I feel that she’s been doing all of that.
Painful budget cuts 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?
Nobody likes when people point fingers, but our structural problems are larger than just Minneapolis Public Schools. We had a $40 million deficit last year that we had to close. At the same time, the federal government owed us $42.5 million in special education costs alone, and those come out of our cross-subsidies. And so that’s one of the biggest drivers. That, and 75 unfunded mandates from the state.
When we don’t have that money coming in from them, we’ve got to take it from our general fund. Taking it from our general fund then depletes the things that we have to be able to do for our schools that directly affect our students. So that’s a really big problem.
I think too much of what was going on in the district before I got here on the board, the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Now they’re working in tandem. They’re working in cooperation, and the silos are down. All of those things are going to help put things back on track in terms of how we’re dealing with the money we have. But we still have to get money coming in.
We have people talking about advertising for public schools, recruiting and flyers and signs, because charter schools are doing that. But then that just brings in the larger question: What are we doing here that we have to be advertising for students to come to our schools? We’re just chronically underfunded. It’s only going to get worse. I’m concerned about the fact that the Blue Ribbon Panel has not found anything yet that is going to reverse the $300 million in cuts to special education funding over the next two years. [Gov. Tim Walz ordered a commission to develop recommendations that would cut special education spending by $250 million each biennium; recommendations must be approved by the Legislature.] It’s the biggest driving cost from the federal government, and now you have the state government coming in, potentially taking out another $300 million. So on the revenue side, we really need more help from our elected-official partners.
What are you proud of from your service on the school board?
I am proud that we have kept this board together, and we’ve not had any public disagreements or anything like that. I’m proud of the time that I’ve been able to just learn from people, learn from the district. I don’t want to make this sound condescending, but I feel like, as the chair, I’m kind of running things like I run my classroom. I want everyone to feel respected. I want everyone to feel heard. I want everyone to make sure that they have their fair say, and then we come together and make a decision.
Sometimes it’s been a lot of work having to make a lot of phone calls back and forth. But you can get people to consensus when you treat them as equal, and as important as you are, and their opinion matters just as much as yours does. That’s really something I think that has helped keep this board together and keep us focused on the track moving forward.
Sometimes it’s easy to want to react to every little thing that comes up. But we always have to stay focused on, what do we want this school district to look like when families are enrolling in 2036? We’ve got to have the long-term vision that we have here. Despite all the ups and downs of this district, I think that we’ve kept that overall focus.
What’s another issue that’s important to you that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?
I would like to put in a plug for people to vote yes on the constitutional amendment that will bring in more revenue to the public schools without raising taxes. And I’d like to remind everyone that a non-vote is a no vote. So we need at least 50% of the state to vote for this. This is just another way that would bring in some revenue. And it would also not hurt that fund. The fund would still continue to grow at the rate that it’s growing right now. So that’s something I want to get out there to make sure that people are thinking about when they cast their ballots.
