Minneapolis superintendent rolls out plan that could close up to 16 schools

Minneapolis Public Schools might close up to 16 schools next year in an effort to reduce the district’s footprint by providing more services to students in fewer buildings.

The school board presentation Tuesday night in front of a packed boardroom outlined three detailed proposals for school closures, mergers and boundary changes. The presentation came after three years of discussion of a “transformation” process. School board members have expressed hope this process would help the district address its financial challenges, following three years in a row of deep and painful cuts.

“The goal of this work has to be bigger than balancing the budget or operating fewer buildings.  It has to be about giving students what they deserve,” school board Chair Collin Beachy said as he opened the meeting.

District staff presented three plans to the school board.

“Our current programmatic reality is that we have fragmented pathways, inconsistent opportunities, schools operating below optimal size, resources spread across too many sites, and variable staffing from school to school,” said Deputy Superintendent Ty Thompson. “This has resulted in students having different experiences depending on where they attend school within our district.”

Under the transformation plans, Thompson explained, students would have more consistent pathways across magnet specializations, including tracks with a focus on Hmong, Somali and Native American communities. 

Courtney McCormick, the district’s executive director of academic programs, explained that all elementary schools would have at least three full-time specialists — like an art, music and a gym teacher — as well as both a reading and a math interventionist. All middle schools would have athletics and activities, and all high schools would have access to all graduation requirements.

Across the three plans, there were a lot of similarities — especially in terms of which schools were proposed for closure. The plans varied largely in where attendance boundaries would be redrawn and where students would go if their school closed or boundary changed.

The proposals met with mixed responses from the school board. Several board members expressed gratitude for the work the superintendent’s team had done at their direction. Some expressed concern about the timeline: the board is expected to vote on a plan no later than Nov. 10 in order for the changes to go into effect in the 2027-2028 school year. And some condemned the plans altogether.

School board member Greta Callahan, who previously served as president of the teachers union, said she found the options “offensive.” She said that from the way the plan was presented, she had to get out a magnifying glass to decipher which schools had been recommended for closure.

“The list of schools slated for potential closure includes beloved community schools that have just received statewide accolades, schools with waitlists, schools that we just pumped tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into, schools that serve young mothers and new immigrants, schools with devoted principals, educators and families who had just welcomed students back at the start of the year,” Callahan said. “And these are schools that were the very reason why so many families even live in Minneapolis.”

She recalled the last time the district implemented major changes to its schools, the 2020 Comprehensive District Design plan after which many students left the district, and questioned what would make this different.

“There’s not an analysis of how much money the district expects to save,” she said. “There is not a projection of how many families will leave the district if this plan takes place.”

Audience members clapped and laughed loudly as Callahan spoke, prompting Beachy to remind them that the school board meeting was not a circus.

Board member Joyner Emerick thanked the staff for their work and called the transformation process “very courageous.” Emerick said families had been asking for years for the board to stop delaying a decision.

“One of the ways that we address equity in our district year over year is to try to reallocate resources from the schools that have more to the schools that have less,” Emerick said. “What we are now finding in these last few years is there is nothing left to reallocate. The schools that have historically had more don’t have any more for us to take. … I don’t think there’s any one person who wants to close schools. If there was a different way to do this, collectively we would have figured it out.”

Emerick asked why changes to the popular Spanish immersion program, which the board has been hoping to expand, were left out of the transformation plans. Senior Academic Officer Melissa Sonnek explained that there were currently very few students on the waitlist and that several schools had room to expand that program.

School board member Abdul Abdi, who represents northeast Minneapolis, expressed concern about the timeline to make a decision and about whether the schools in his area had the infrastructure in place to absorb students from Heritage High School, if it closes. “Are we ready to lose those students?” he asked.

Board member Lori Norvell thanked Emerick for their comments. “Change is so hard and I know we all have a lot of feelings about it,” she said. “We can do hard things, and sometimes we have to.”

Norvell recalled when her family moved to Minneapolis and had to choose between middle schools with very different options: a bigger school where they could take choir and band and foreign language multiple times a week, or a smaller school with fewer offerings and Spanish once a week.

“We’re trying to give all of our students that experience of having those options,” she said. “I think it is important and it does go back to the feedback that we’ve heard from families about wanting band, wanting languages, wanting these different magnet pathways, all of that.”

Board member Sharon El-Amin said she saw potential for these plans to help create a better education for north Minneapolis kids, but she wanted a longer timeline.

“The goal here for me, what I want to see, is our Black and brown children’s reading scores, math scores going up, and for them to have an opportunity to have all the resources that some of the other schools have that we do not have on the North Side,” she said. “We’ve had many, many, many, many meetings where parents, teachers, educators come up and talk about what students don’t have, talk about the absence of gym teachers, talk about the absence of the hot lunches.”

However, she said, the proposed timeline was too short. 

“We do owe it to our families to give them more than two months if we’re talking about closures with the schools,” she said.

Beachy reiterated Callahan’s question about cost savings.

“How much of our structural financial problems do these recommendations actually solve?” he asked.

Thompson acknowledged Callahan’s point.

“What we know about school consolidations and closings across our nation is that it’s not something that’s a huge cost savings,” she said. “Our understanding of the resolution from the school board is that hasn’t been the intent. The intent has actually been to use the resources that we have to give families the experience they have asked us for for a very long time, and that we agree that our students deserve.”

Parents and teachers react

Parents and educators who attended the meeting expressed doubt about the plans.

School board candidate Becca Dryden said that one of her kids’ schools was proposed for closure. One of the proposals would split the elementary community apart, which she said would be “really hard for young kids.”

“It feels really hard to even know how to talk to my kid about this tomorrow morning because I know their principal and teachers all are just finding out at the same time as me,” she said.

She noted that the Comprehensive District Design was implemented only five years ago.

“It’s so destabilizing for kids, let alone the kids who have been through so much in the last 10 years of their short lives,” she said.

Brooke Moehrle, the mother of a third and fifth grader at Kenny Elementary, questioned why her kids’ school would be slated for closure.

“I recognize that the district needs to do something to balance the budget and to figure out the funding pieces, but I have questions about how they’re going about it and if it’s actually going to save the district money,” she said. “What I see by the changes specifically with Kenny is an increase in transportation costs, a decrease in families that are going to choose to attend Minneapolis schools.”

She noted that Kenny already “checks all the boxes for the optimal Minneapolis school experience.”

“We’re not going to gain anything, and we can see where the district is going to lose money, and that impacts everyone, not just the kids in southwest Minneapolis,” she said. 

Beth Haskins, a parent with Minnesota Families for Public Schools whose child attends the Keewaydin campus of Lake Nokomis Community School, said she’d appreciated being able to send her child to the Wenonah campus, which just serves kindergarten and first grade. Under all three proposals, Wenonah would merge with Keewaydin.

“Keewaydin’s campus has no first-floor classrooms,” she said. “The playground isn’t for kids that age.”

She’d like to see enrollment and retention strategies, rather than losing a building, and suggested Wenonah could be a good site to expand early childhood education.

Marcia Howard, the president of the teacher chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, said the public response from people attending the meeting made it clear how the plan would go over.

“Their plan sucks,” she said. “It’s going to be very obvious once it hits the street that it sucks, and they’re going to have to justify why they plan on closing 13 schools with zero cost savings whatsoever.”

Sahan Journal intern Valentina Contreras contributed reporting.

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