After weeks of negotiation, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) and Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) reached a tentative settlement agreement on Monday. Both parties have been in negotiations since April. MFE held a strike authorization vote from Oct. 23-27, and filed its intent to strike three days later, making Nov. 11 the latest they could strike.
The deal gives teachers 2% pay hikes in each of the two years of the contract and boosts pay for adult educators and education support professionals. The union’s original ask was a 7% hike in the first year and 6% in 2026-27. It also addresses a key issue raised by teachers and parents — growing class sizes — by instituting new caps and making them more enforceable.
Going into negotiations, the school district said it was facing a $25 million budget shortfall for next school year. Minneapolis Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams joined union officials at a Monday morning news conference to laud the new contract, but did not spell out the impact on the district’s budget.
“We have moved past the divisiveness,” she said. “This contract is a victory for our students, our schools, our community and our staff. Within the resources that we have, we have to be responsible stewards, and that’s what this contract represents.”
Later in the day, MPS spokeswoman Donnie Belcher said in an email that the district estimates the tentative agreements will cost $35 million in general fund dollars over the two-year contract.
The amount is “within our budget assumptions,” Belcher said in the email. She added that the district will have a better estimate of its budget gap after its annual audit in January.
The district and the union met multiple times this past week without a mediator and had a session with a mediator scheduled Monday, immediately ahead of the strike. “That’s when we started cooking with gas, and the numbers started making sense to both sides,” said Marcia Howard, president of MFE’s teacher chapter at the news conference.
“All of the things we may not have won, all of the big things we still have work to do, but I will say that we are steps closer to winning all the things,” said Catina Taylor, the president of the union’s ESP chapter. “We will start breaking the past practices of being adversarial toward one another and building better relationships.”
The tentative agreement covers three contracts — teachers, educational support professionals and adult educators, addressing the key issues of the negotiation. The Minneapolis Federation of Educators has two chapters and three contracts. The two chapters are teachers and educational support professionals. The third contract is for adult educators, who teach GED classes and English language to adults.
The agreement will go through a ratification vote later this week by the MFE membership. If approved, the school board will give its final approval.
Here’s a breakdown of the contracts with specifics on some aspects yet to be revealed:
Revised salaries for teachers, pay parity for adult education teachers, and living wages for ESPs
The new contract secures a pay hike for MPS teachers who will get a 2% increase in 2025-26 and 2% in 2026-2027. Teachers get paid on a step schedule that accounts for both their education and their years of experience, and the new contract will see reduced steps so that teachers can reach the top of their salary faster.
Minneapolis teachers get paid less than their counterparts in St. Paul. Each year since 2022, Minneapolis teachers have gotten larger raises than they did in the previous 20 years or so.
Adult education teachers, who get paid less than their counterparts on the birth-22 contract, will now receive equal pay as other teachers in the district. Their contract was the first to be settled in the negotiations.
The contract also revises the pay for education support professionals (ESPs): $750-$1750 lump-sum payment in 2025-26 based on years of experience; 3% for all ESPs in 2026-27; $1,000 lump-sum for ESPs with more than eight years of experience.
Living wages for ESPs was the primary issue driving the 2022 strike. Education support professionals, a more diverse group of staff than teachers, earn lower wages and do not always receive consistent hours. This improved after 2022 but is still not enough according to Taylor, who said that some ESPs are still facing homelessness.
Smaller, more enforceable class sizes
The new contract promises smaller, enforceable class sizes, although the mechanism of enforceability is yet to be revealed. Minneapolis Public Schools agreed to class-size caps to settle a contract with the union in 2022, following a three-week strike. But in 2024, to close a $110 million budget deficit, the school board decided to increase class sizes. A Sahan Journal analysis found that in fall 2024, one in five elementary classrooms exceeded the class-size limit. Union leaders attributed the large class sizes to “loopholes” in the contract language that allow the district to exceed the class sizes cap.
The current class size caps are two-tiered, a lower cap for high poverty schools where 70% or more of the students are eligible for benefits like free and reduced price lunch, and a higher cap for lower-poverty schools.
In practice, however, many families have felt the larger caps at their lower-poverty schools to be untenable.
The class-size caps also prioritize the youngest students for the smallest classes. But class sizes get larger and larger into upper grades, with more families complaining about high school class sizes.
Special education caseloads
This is a similar issue to class size, in that it focuses on special education student-to-teacher ratios. Special education teachers also do case management for their students, monitoring their individualized education plans. The new agreement ensures manageable caseloads and more educators for students who receive special education service.
Memoranda of agreement for Indigenous education
The contract will offer incentives to recruit and retain educators in Indigenous pathways schools and add an extra step in pay for Indigenous language teachers.
The union went in with “better math” this time to negotiate for their demands, Howard told Sahan Journal. “I don’t think you would have seen us in 2022 in a little room, just with a whiteboard, with our math person and their math person going section by section, seeing how money moves, throwing out ideas on how to make class sizes smaller, they would have been entrenched in their idea of fiscal responsibility, i.e., not giving us a dime, whereas we being confident in our presupposition of the funding that we knew was there.”
“The coalition of contracts, the collaboration between all three contracts in both units has been attempted before, but this was the first time we did it with fidelity, where no one felt left behind, and that required constant communication and a level of trust that has taken years to build,” Howard added.
For MPS parents, smaller class sizes and increased pay for the teachers were top priority as they organized to support MFE throughout the negotiations.
Shannon Gibney, a parent of two in the school district and a member of Minneapolis Families for Public Schools (MFPS) said that she is “cautiously optimistic” over the agreement as she and other parents await more details. Last year, Gibney’s son, who is now in 10th grade, was in classes of 35 to40 students with teachers “clearly struggling” and having to use microphones and videos to teach. “It’s not sustainable, and it’s not equitable.”
She said that in 2022, MFPS was operating at a smaller scale than it is this year. “I feel a lot more empowered this time around. I feel a lot more connected to other parents, and also I feel like I have a lot more context and understanding of how things work in a district and what are the levers of power. And I feel a lot more hopeful,” she said.
Amanda Otero, the co-executive director of Take Action Minnesota, the umbrella organization for MFPS, also has a daughter who’s in the school district. She, too, is optimistic and will be paying close attention to the details. Otero started to get more invested when her daughter’s class size increased substantially when she went from kindergarten to first grade, affecting the individual attention she was receiving from the teachers.
Smaller class sizes are important to her for “the impact on my kids’ learning as well as the impact on us as parents and caregivers, the amount of time and energy we have to spend to simply keep, you know, some basics in place for our kids’ classroom instruction.”
Gibney, who attended public school in Michigan in the 1990s, said she is a beneficiary of the public school system. “I actually believe right now, particularly with the rise of authoritarianism, and incursions on public civil liberties and safety, having strong public schools is more important than ever. But in order to do that right, you have to commit to fully fund them,” she said.
Correction: This story has been updated to better describe the relationship between Minneapolis Families for Public Schools and Take Action Minnesota.
