Name: Michael Baskins
Age: 37
Neighborhood: Prospect Park
Michael Baskins, an engineer who works in avionics product development, hopes to send his future kids to Minneapolis Public Schools. Since moving to Minneapolis in 2018, he’s followed local politics closely — including a run for City Council — and felt concerned about the direction of the school board.
“I did not see anyone stepping up,” he said. “I want to make sure that MPS thrives and that every parent feels confident that they can send their students to MPS for the best quality education in the state.”
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.
Baskins 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. He spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 28. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for Minneapolis school board?
The current school board, I believe, has lacked the leadership that’s needed for the school district. We have a district with a lot of challenges, many of which have come to a head over the last few years, including administrative turnover and challenges related to mismanagement of federal and state funding in the administration, contributing to some of the financial problems of the district. We have financial problems continuing year after year with deficits and layoffs that are sporadic and recurring.
Then we have a lot of parents I’ve talked to who are starting to be concerned about the direction of the schools, about the size of classes in certain schools, of the sort of environment and the climate of the schools, of some of the discipline practices within the schools, and whether their students are getting the education that they deserve.
Lastly, I will say that there has been a clear mismatch between what the school board is saying and what they’re doing, and so I think we really need a school board that is transparent about priorities and how we’re going to achieve the student performance and the class size metrics that we desire. We need very clear specifics on long-term goals and strategy. Unfortunately, over the last five years, the school board has not provided clarity on a lot of its strategic objectives, nor has it provided transparency to the parents or the public about what those are, and that includes financial objectives as well as student performance objectives. We need better leadership, more clarity, and decisive leadership, and that’s why I’m running.
Just to clarify, you mentioned class sizes a couple of times. Is that this school year? The last three weeks of school, the new class size caps have gone into effect, and so I’m wondering if you’re hearing from parents who think the class sizes are still too large, or if those concerns are from prior to the start of this school year.
That was prior to the start of the school year. I’m not sure if that’s changed since the start of the school year. But yes, I do think that we need to look into whether further decreases in class size are warranted.
Let’s talk about the transformation process. What were your initial reactions to the proposals?
My initial reaction was that they lacked a lot of transparency and detail. It’s hard to judge them because they lack the substance that would be needed to understand why they are necessary. Even after the last information tranche was released, it still was very unclear exactly why these schools in specific were chosen to be closed.
I think the district owes it to the parents and community to provide a lot more transparency and a long-term view on their vision for the district. The school board has certainly dropped the ball here. I think the school board has had a far too hands-off approach with the administration in terms of crafting the policies of the district, as well as communicating those policies and the rationale for them out to the parents and community. So I am in the dark. It’s hard for me to say exactly what their full strategy is here, and that is frustrating. And I know that the parents are frustrated by that as well.
I’m not against closing schools if there is a need, if there is a benefit to the students in terms of class size, in terms of resourcing. But any closure should have very clear and obvious benefits. They should have a clear financial analysis, and I don’t see that here either in terms of what additional resources could be provided to each school. So I’m frustrated by it, as many parents are. I would certainly request that they delay any vote on this until the public is satisfied with their transparency.
Where do you see opportunity in the transformation process, and what concerns do you have about school transformation?
There’s opportunity in some sense that, as a district, we have serious issues with being able to resource our schools. We have larger class sizes in some schools than are desired. We have a lot of schools that cannot provide the level of extracurricular, elective coursework, advanced coursework, or interventionists for students that are struggling that we would desire. Some of our schools are really struggling with proficiency rates on the MCA [Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments]. So we have clear challenges in the district that need to be properly resourced. There are potential benefits to reorganization if it allows for increased resources getting to the students. I have not seen that plan from the district. They need to communicate that, if there are benefits.
The second part is risks. There’s certainly risks in reorganization. It should happen only very infrequently, so that parents and students can trust that there will be a school that they desire to go to in the district for their entire time as a student. This should not be a slow-drip process where the district is closing schools slowly over five years. I do believe that would create even worse uncertainty in the district. There is a risk of students going to other districts if they don’t trust that there is stability in MPS. There is a lack of trust right now that’s been built between many parents and MPS due to their communication strategy, and they certainly need to rebuild that.
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?
When you say expansion of the Spanish immersion program, I guess I had not heard of that proposal. What is that exactly?
They’ve been discussing the transformation plan for years, and one of the proposals said it should look into expanding the Spanish immersion program. At that time, there were long wait lists for the Spanish immersion program, and they were looking to expand it, hoping for more opportunities there. So looking into that was in one of the official resolutions that was passed for the transformation plan.
I think if there’s ever a waitlist for a program, there should be effort put into expanding that program. If that’s true, if there is any program that has excess demands, we certainly have the excess building capacity, excess classroom capacity to be able to resource an expanded program and potentially move it into a facility that allows for that expansion. So certainly that should be done if there is a desire.
MEET THE OTHER AT-LARGE SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATES
If you had to vote today on whether to move forward with the presented transformation plans, how would you vote?
I would vote no currently. I don’t think that there is enough communication and analysis done. There’s not enough community trust, and I’m not sure that this is a long-term strategy. I think that this district has struggled with a lot of short-term thinking, a lot of short-term planning. There needs to be a holistic approach to governing the district, and so I would vote no on this.
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 clear and detailed analysis of the impacts to the students in terms of class sizes, in terms of resourcing the schools and what that looks like for improved opportunities within those schools. I would need a financial analysis of the cost index, and I would need a full long-term financial forecast that would show that this was a one-time transformation and not a slow, gradual drip of a transformation that was going to impact the district over an extended period of time.
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 finance department has had a lot of oversight over the last year due to the financial mismanagement, and I know they brought in outside auditors. I think a lot of it is a little bit of a black box to the public, unfortunately, including myself. So it’s hard to say exactly the extent of the behavior. Certainly the financial department has lost a lot of their staff over the last few years.
I think it’s important that the school board be much more of an advocate for the public, an advocate for parents to get the transparency that’s needed and deserved, for where the tax dollars have gone in the district. That’s not just related to some of the scandals that have occurred in terms of funding from the state that was not properly filed, it also includes better accounting and more transparency to the public about all financial matters. I know that transportation costs have gone up over the last five years in the district, and there’s very little understanding about why that is.
There’s a lot of transparency that is needed, and that can be provided by the school board instead of rubber stamping budgets. It’s our job to dig into them, make sure that all contracts are competitively bid, make sure that we understand where all of the money is going, so that we can get the most resources to the students.
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?
Again, one of the problems with the school board and the administration is that they have not been transparent about financial matters. So I don’t think anyone can very clearly say what the root cause of these budget deficits are because we just don’t have clear audits. My number one step on the school board is to do a thorough audit of the finances and how they have changed over the last five or 10 years.
What I can say is that we need to prioritize getting money into the classrooms, employing as many teachers as possible, and focusing our resources on that — on interventionists, small class sizes, and improved student opportunities in schools. Everything else would be my focus for the cuts, whether that’s administration, whether that’s anything else that’s not classroom-specific. We have spent millions of dollars renovating schools in the last two years that are now slated for closure. We need to be making decisions that are not wasteful like that, and prioritizing the students. However we can do that needs to be done.
What’s another issue that’s important to you that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?
I care a lot about STEM education. As an engineer, my day-to-day work is designing products. It’s really provided me a good livelihood. So I’m definitely passionate about how our STEM education and STEM-specific programs are working in the district. I’m excited to dig into some of those specific magnet programs and better understand their struggles, their strengths, and work on how we can improve STEM education in the district.
I have a big interest in how we can help improve some of the MCA proficiency scores. Through the READ Act as well, we have an opportunity to really assess whether the new phonics approach is working, to get good data on how it’s affecting our students, how their proficiency is improving over time, or whether certain schools are improving at a quicker pace than others.
I think that there is a need to give more autonomy to the schools in order to provide for the specific needs of their own student populations. I’m very interested in how well that is going and whether certain principals feel they need more autonomy or less in order to properly have student-specific educational approaches in the very different schools we have throughout the district. So I’m excited at the opportunity to speak with some of the principals and understand whether our current approach is working and what needs to change.
But we need to also hold principals accountable for improving the proficiency of their schools. We’ve had a decline in proficiency since COVID, and we haven’t recovered fully from that. I think we need to look at how we delegate more authority to the principals, but also hold them accountable for student improvement. What that looks like would be something that we’d have to work through. But again, a lot of this comes back to transparency, and I’m excited to be a more transparent school board member.
