Name: Molly Chase
Age: 52
Neighborhood: Ericsson
Molly Chase started her career at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta, where she headed the digital department for the Cartoon Network. Since moving to Minneapolis 15 years ago, she’s focused on using her business skills to help nonprofits and startups. Gov. Tim Walz also appointed her to serve on the board of the Perpich Center for Arts Education. She currently uses her marketing skills as the audience development manager for City Cast Twin Cities.
“I have worked with budgets of all sizes and all sectors,” she said. “I’m familiar with the state budgeting process and open meetings laws, and serving on a board that includes a high school.”
Chase also has a first-grade daughter who attends Minneapolis Public Schools.
“My running joke is I am old enough to be in the AARP, but I have a first-grader because I had a kid when I was 45,” she said. “So I have this odd mix of decades of work experience and nonprofit and managerial experience, plus a vested interest at the very beginning of my child’s MPS journey.”
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.
Chase is running to represent District 5, an area of south Minneapolis that includes the Longfellow neighborhood, Lake Nokomis and Diamond Lake. She spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 24. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for Minneapolis school board?
It’s both my personal investment, being at the beginning of my MPS journey, and also my frustration with disruptions and the way that MPS has managed those disruptions. “Disruptions” is an understatement when we’re talking about reduction of SNAP benefits, a potential educator strike, what happened with the ICE occupation over the winter. All of those things together made me feel like we needed someone with some change management, finance, and organizational experience in the role, and that’s why I came to this.
Let’s start with the transformation process. What were your initial reactions to the proposals?
I’m honestly in mourning over both the plan and the way it was presented, and the damage it’s already doing. The places where MPS could shine are on being stable and transparent, and this plan fails by a long shot for both of those measures.
I want to clarify: I’m not automatically against any changes. I feel you could make a case, but it would have to be a very strong and clear case, and not just get us up to the doorstep of chaos, but have a plan that goes all the way through.
If you absolutely had to consolidate or close a school, what does that building and that resource become for the community? To simply close a building and leave it empty for decades, as they’ve done with Tuttle and Cooper, for example, is not transformation at all.
And that they used more than 100 pages of slides to obfuscate these closures is deeply frustrating and undermining of trust. Honestly, I wish we could go back and stop this before it started because, in some ways, this is unrecoverable in terms of parents’ faith and trust, just as they were starting to get their footing again.
Where do you see opportunity in the transformation process, and what concerns do you have about school transformation?
There is opportunity. I love the pre-K emphasis, though they’re a little shy on details. I think that’s an important place to go. I appreciated that they included K through 8. And I agree with the impulse to ensure that students across the city have access to the resources that they need, and that that’s more evenly distributed.
I have deep concerns about the impact this plan will have on enrollment citywide. I feel that MPS was just beginning to earn back trust. They had a whole new batch of parents who didn’t go through the CDD [Comprehensive District Design], who were excited for MPS and kind of freshly starting their journey, and now they have essentially told those parents that they can’t rely on the same stability that they are constantly trying to provide for their kids.
Parents are all trying to pick stability over chaos, and there should be nothing more stable than a school that’s been open for more than 100 years. Charter schools you expect to come and go, but you don’t expect for public schools to announce suddenly the closure of 16 schools. But it’s undermining faith that parents have, and a lot of parents have picked where they purchased a home based on the idea that that is the community school that we will have access to, that there will be a community school within a certain radius. I think for a lot of people this was a very rude awakening.
The school board has been talking about this since 2023. But they have not brought the public along at all. I was asking parents in the spring, “Have you heard of transformation?” And they had no idea what I was talking about. I said, “Have you heard about school closures?” Absolutely no idea.
There are a lot of problems with business, but one thing they do well is they make sure their shareholders are not surprised, and that is something that, very sadly, I feel that the board and the district have been so immersed in this that they didn’t realize they weren’t bringing parents along at all.
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?
Certainly language, dual language, language immersion, even language exposure, are all major selling points to parents. I think one of the major driving forces for parents in making a choice is, what choices are they making now that will limit their kids in the future? The idea that your child could graduate knowing two languages fluently is very enticing. We see that in the success of charter schools that have focused on language or language and culture, so I don’t think that the district or the board is wrong in wanting to pursue that, but it doesn’t seem like this plan made that a reality.
MEET THE OTHER DISTRICT FIVE CANDIDATE
If you had to vote today on whether to move forward with the presented transformation plans, how would you vote?
No. In fact, if I were in a position of leadership right now, as soon as humanly possible, I would assure people that this is on hold, that we are not considering it at this time. We are getting feedback, and we will be getting feedback until the new board is seated in January. I would seek to assure people as quickly as possible that these changes, as drafted, are not happening because the panic and uncertainty and frustration this is causing every day that it goes on is costing MPS. It’s costing them goodwill, trust and a reputation for stability that any public institution should have.
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 the before, during, and after of the plans. It would be up to me and the other board members to clearly articulate what the goal is. Is the goal cost savings? Then that’s what we should be talking about. What savings are there? Where do they come from? Are we talking about increasing enrollment? Well, that’s not mutually exclusive to cost reduction. I think parsing out the individual pieces and speaking to each of those would make a lot more sense.
My general feeling is we should be laser-focused on reducing costs in transportation, looking for ways that Hennepin County and Minneapolis Public Schools services overlap or could overlap, and really emphasizing enrollment and communication.
Also, I would be advocating with the Legislature for a few things. One is, and I know this is underway, emphasizing better healthcare options for all of our educators, teachers, but also and maybe especially ESPs, who are educational support professionals who are losing almost half of their paychecks to healthcare costs in some cases.
I would ask the Legislature to create a path for any public school to absorb a charter school. Right now, charters can only merge with each other. There’s no way for the traditional public school system to absorb charter schools. And I would talk more openly about charter schools and the impact.
Most of those charter schools are duplicative of the existing school structure. Oftentimes they are targeting early elementary, and they’re going through K-8. You know these are all things that Minneapolis Public Schools could be communicating more transparently about. Right now, we just pretend that enrollment loss is sort of in the ether, but we know statistically it’s primarily charter schools. We know that charter schools are very directly marketing to parents and explaining how they’re different from public schools in a way that our public schools do not communicate. MPS doesn’t acknowledge competition, and I would do that.
I don’t want to suggest that I think what MPS is missing is ideas. I think what they’re missing is someone with experience in change management, finances, and organizational management. I feel like, in some ways, the superintendent is maybe unprepared for the reaction that parents would have, and I think the board was unprepared in a lot of ways. I think some of that just comes down to experience in change management.
I don’t know that we fundamentally have too many schools any more than we fundamentally have too many parks. We have to make sure that we’re earning money and spending money smartly.
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 wish we were much more embracing of these financial issues coming to light. It’s important to remember the superintendent inherited a very large organization, and that these finance issues go back several years. At first, I was surprised and frustrated by the amount of money that we are spending for these outside school finance experts to come in, but they have more than paid for themselves in uncovering some long-standing issues.
I think if we want real, honest change and reform, we need to embrace that news and say, “Yes, thank you, that is great. More of that, please.” Instead, we treat every admission as a scandal. We should be looking for savings anywhere that they are. We should be looking for better efficiency. If we need to hire on some expertise to do that, I’m OK with that. If we need to upgrade technology for a long-term gain, that’s great.
I think as parents and as a board, it’s important for us to be encouraging when these things come to light and to ask for more of it instead of discouraging it and treating everything like a brand new scandal. We actually really want more of that. I would love it if they would find $20 million more in a previous error. Great. Let’s find that and let’s fix it, instead of being afraid to bring it to light. And to be clear, I don’t think that the district has necessarily been afraid to bring it to light, but I think the way we react to it, even in the media, is an opportunity to create some real change.
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?
I think a big part of those is the influx of COVID funds that went away. There were some short-term COVID funds that were spent, and I think also led to some of that panic in 2022-’23 that began this transformation plan.
The places where I think we should look for better efficiencies are around transportation costs. I think we have to be honest with ourselves that education is not a cost-effective enterprise, and we should find efficiencies where we can. But ultimately, when we are investing in education, we are investing from the time kids are born and then all the way through graduation and what happens to them in the world after graduation. It is an enormous investment in our neighbors and in future decision-makers, and we should not be shy or apologetic about investing in education.
Among the other reasons for having less budget to go around are certainly transportation costs generally, but the cost of diesel right now is immense, and the cost of providing excellent special education is higher than I think what MPS can do right now.
In terms of how to resolve it, I truly believe that a focus on enrollment is the most strategic way to address these issues longer term. I think we have to work with the state Legislature, not only for MPS, but across the state we know that schools are underfunded, and we’re seeing the impacts in many ways. Instead of talking about in what ways Minneapolis is different from other schools, I think we need to be emphasizing how all schools across the state are dealing with many of the same issues.
And I think we have to protect the money that’s coming in. I think we need to reduce costs and celebrate cost reductions that don’t directly impact the classroom. For example, the issues that have been uncovered within the finance department, and resolving those as quickly and transparently as possible, and finding ways to work with Hennepin County on structuring the ways that Minneapolis Public Schools intervenes and helps with early education, and making sure that we’re maximizing our efforts and making sure they’re complementing the county efforts, and seeing if there are ways that we could make the budgets of each go further.
What’s another issue that’s important to you that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?
Ed tech, or the influence of software and AI in our schools, has been neglected. I think this discourages enrollment in our kindergarten, first and second grade especially, and it is also a detriment to our students’ ability to learn, and that for too long we’ve assumed that all technology is good and a good way to prepare our kids for the future. But we have a lot of data now suggesting just the opposite: that we are undermining cognitive skills and ability to learn in more traditional ways.
Some kids, by the time they’re in high school, have trouble with handwriting. But as important are the impacts on mental health, certainly through social media use and through what’s accessible on devices, both through school and home. I think MPS has done a good job of keeping up with the changes the state makes on a legislative level, but they have not been talking about this issue or at the forefront of this issue, really at all.
Most technology purchases and renewals are done through consent agenda. So there is no discussion. There have been no special meetings regarding tech. But if you talk to parents, as I’m sure all candidates are doing, you hear loud and clear that kids being issued an iPad in kindergarten is a big deterrent for a lot of parents, and if it doesn’t deter them from enrollment, it still makes them concerned, and they see behavioral changes in their kids. This is deeply concerning, and it has just not been addressed.
