Name: Shannon Gibney
Age: 51
Neighborhood: Powderhorn Park
Shannon Gibney, a published author who teaches in the English department at Minneapolis College, started organizing with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools and TakeAction Minnesota as teachers fought to settle a union contract last year. Ultimately, the union won enforceable smaller class sizes and more support for special-education support professionals.
Then, as Operation Metro Surge started, Gibney became the lead MFPS organizer at South High School, which her son attends. She also has a daughter who started this year at Andersen United Middle School.
“We raised almost $450,000 for rental support, supporting about 200 families for two to three months,” Gibney said.
Under Gibney’s direction, South High families also developed a food buddy system.
“Privileged families like ours were partnered with vulnerable families, and we would bring them food once or twice a week,” Gibney said. South High parents also organized patrols around not only the high school, but also the neighboring adult education building.
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.
After taking her son to a school board meeting, Gibney decided to run for the board herself. She’s running unopposed to represent District 3, which includes parts of south Minneapolis. She spoke with Sahan Journal on Sept. 28. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for Minneapolis school board?
This wasn’t something that I planned. My son, Boisey Corvah, is actually one of two student representatives on the board. So I was driving my son to and from the Davis Center for these board meetings. I was there in March when the board and district leadership were talking at a macro level about the economics of the Operation Metro Surge drawdown and the effects on the district, and what it’s done to things like compensatory aid.
I was just shocked that the only person that mentioned anything about the heroic work being done by regular community members — caregivers, teachers, administrators at school sites around the metro — Abdul Abdi was the only one who mentioned being on a patrol, and proud of the work that families throughout the district were doing at school sites. I had this moment where I was like, “This is what’s wrong in our district. The people leading it are not on the ground. They’re not deeply embedded in communities, and so they’re making these decisions that are actually not rooted in or accountable to the community.”
And then right after that, they were like, “Oh, and by the way, we have a projected $50 million deficit for next year.” This was before they magically found the $10 million out of the miscoding of special education.
In that moment, at that board meeting, I was like, “You know what? Forget this. I’m running for school board. I’m sick of this. I’m done.”
Basically, I came to the realization that I’m going to be in this fight no matter what. Public school education is in my DNA. I came of age in the 1980s as a child, 1990s as a teenager, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when people still believed in fully funding public education, and I always say I am a direct beneficiary of that system. That’s what I want for my kids. That’s what I want for all our children. So in order to do that, I’m going to have to be in the position where I can do the most good.
I also said the only way that I’d do it is if there was a slate. TakeAction had been giving us a lot of technical and organizing support, and they were already working on that. I do feel like part of the problem with school boards is that there’s really smart, connected people who will get on a school board, but there’s just one of them. There’s not enough momentum. They don’t really have a base that they have to answer to, and we have that.
Let’s start with the transformation process. What were your initial reactions to the proposals?
I was quite frankly shocked and angry: that they would say that this was a multi-year process, and they would say that they listened carefully to thousands of community members and took all that feedback into consideration, to then come up with a plan to potentially close 13 to 16 schools throughout the district that, by their own admission, doesn’t even really save us any meaningful amount of money after what all of us have been through this past year.
Our kids have been through so much trauma in the past few years, from the pandemic to the George Floyd murder and subsequent uprising, to the teacher strike to of course the CDD [Comprehensive District Design, a 2020 plan that changed school programming and reassigned many students to new schools], which they bungled spectacularly. I’ve talked to many parents since they launched this whole campaign for the transformation plan, and they’re like, “Look, I trusted the district before with the CDD.”
I feel like people are willing to do it once. And then when they have this bad experience, like we all did with the CDD, it’s like, I’m not trusting you anymore. Especially when you look at the actual plans, and they don’t make sense.
Where do you see opportunity in the transformation process, and what concerns do you have about school transformation?
A study just came out from Stanford that closing schools doesn’t save the money that districts think it will. Lately, district leadership has said, “Oh, well, this was never about saving money in the first place,” which then begs the question: Well, then what is it about?
I’ve heard them publicly say it’s about this amorphous thing called the Minneapolis Public Schools experience. I get what they’re saying. There’s certain buildings in the district that have, let’s say, a [half-time] librarian, whereas some other school on the other side of the district has a full-time librarian. Same with ELL [English language learner] supports and special ed ESPs [educational support professionals]. We need to make it more uniform. That’s how they’re loosely defining this “Minneapolis Public Schools experience.”
The problem is, when you actually talk to people at these sites, teachers, parents, administrators — I’ve heard from I think four school communities — who say, I don’t know where they think they’re going to put all these students. Maybe you can make this extra room here, but then we no longer have a teachers’ lounge, or now the specialists don’t have a place to prep, so they’re just going to prep on their carts.
I just feel like there’s this lack of understanding of the real lives of the people that are going to be impacted by this plan. It’s not just little dots that you’re moving around on some chart or something. But also there’s a misunderstanding about the actual physical realities of these buildings too.
The whole plan is flawed, and they need to scrap the whole thing. I don’t understand how they got to where they got, and I don’t understand why and how they think that this MPS experience is somehow going to benefit the district or lead to more enrollment. There’s actually no evidence or research that supports that idea that making uniform school experiences across the district leads to increased enrollment.
I think the opportunity in the transformation plan is simply that the district’s funding structure is unsustainable. This is why we constantly have a deficit, and that needs to be dealt with in a very serious and intentional way. And in order to deal with that in a serious and intentional way, you need to actually, actually engage community, and that is not being done.
I’m not saying that school finance is easy. It’s very complicated. I have a big learning curve for sure. But one thing I do understand is that we’re never going to get there, one, if we don’t get a hold of all the mismanagement that has been going on for years in the Minneapolis Public Schools Finance Department. I do think that the current district leadership is working on that.
Also, we’re not going to deal with this unsustainable budgeting structure in the district without dealing with state funding and making a big push at the Legislature and in districts throughout the state to get them on board. Per-pupil funding has not increased in the state in 20 years. It has not kept up with inflation. Districts throughout the state don’t have enough money.
Another component is enrollment. I think it’s clear, from the story that you did, that enrollment is not a priority. They have not put together a comprehensive marketing plan or told the story of why MPS is the best choice for children and families in Minneapolis. So the opportunities that I see in the transformation plan is to have a real conversation about what is going on here currently and historically with our fund balance and this unsustainable funding structure, and to make things even more transparent for families in the district.
I think also, just from my positionality as a parent and parent leader, we’re building community through this crisis of them trying to push through this terrible proposal, which I actually feel could gut the district for a long time. I think that they are really underestimating how many families are going to leave if this goes through and all these schools are closed.
MEET THE AT-LARGE SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATES
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?
I think we need not only more pre-K sites throughout the district to onboard more families, but I think we need more multilingual pre-K. I would definitely like to investigate what that would look like in terms of Spanish immersion. I have not seen the numbers on how many students are going through that pathway right now, and I have not looked at any data. I would have to look at some data on how are those students doing in that pathway.
What I have heard from parents is we want more bilingual options. Not even just Spanish, but also a Somali pathway. I don’t know how feasible that is. But I think these are things that we should take seriously. St. Paul, when they went through their latest huge redesign, actually listened to immigrant families who were like, “This is what we want. We want more Hmong language immersion and Spanish language immersion,” and the district did that and their enrollment went up. So I think that we have to look into that seriously, and I don’t get the sense that the district really has taken that seriously enough.
If you had to vote today on whether to move forward with the presented transformation plans, how would you vote?
No.
If this process were delayed until you joined the school board, what would you need from a transformation plan to vote yes?
I would want a robust community engagement — not just “oh, we came up with this thing, and so at the last minute, we’re going to try and rubber stamp it from community members.” I would want the proposal to actually be grounded in community, be created in concert with communities, particularly those communities that are constantly left out of these conversations.
I represent a certain portion of the South Side, and so there’s a ton of working-class Black and brown families, many of them multilingual. A lot of our multilingual families are just finding out about the transformation plan now, which is crazy. Those are a lot of families that are consistently left out of district planning and big district decisions. I would want to really make sure that we’re hearing from them and centering them in all of this, in terms of what are their needs, what are the things that they would want to see. Obviously I want to hear from everybody, but I think especially the people that we have not historically heard from. North Siders have also not really been, I think, deeply represented in a lot of this decision-making.
I also would want to know, what are the specific problems and priorities that we’re trying to solve with this plan? I would really want it to first and foremost tackle this issue of this unsustainable funding structure. How are we going to deal with that?
There’s no other district in the state like MPS, and we just have to admit that. It’s not going to be a silver bullet. It’s not going to be one thing that’s going to just magically fix the funding situation and build up our enrollment. I’d actually want it to be a community-driven and accountable plan that there’s actual buy-in from caregivers, families, teachers, administrators, etc., so everybody knows that they have a role to play in this and they’re invested in it. Even if we have to make some hard decisions. Because sometimes you do.
I’ve talked to a lot of parents. They’re not tiptoeing through the tulips. I feel like that’s this false binary that district leadership is presenting. I keep on hearing this whole thing of, we have to do something. Yeah. We know this is not sustainable, this budget crisis that keeps on coming up every year. We know that. We know that it’s not good that 47% of Minneapolis kids in Minneapolis don’t go to MPS. We need to actually face these things and do something about them.
You have to make sure that you’re asking the right questions at the right time, the right way, to the right people, and then be transparent about that. We want, for example, more funding for smaller class sizes and more special ed programs. And then there’s the political realities, especially statewide. How do you make that happen? Every parent that I’ve talked to in the past week about the transformation plan has understood that. You can’t have everything that you want in a school district. You have to make peace with some things, and they’re willing to do that for a good reason. The way that you build something like that is together.
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 school board’s role is governance, and I don’t think personally that the school board has been doing that. We have members who just don’t show up for board meetings, and people who are then running for other political positions too. In my view, this particular board right now is not invested in Minneapolis Public Schools and the district functioning to the best of its ability.
I’m glad that the external audit was finally done. I’ve read that document. Even with all the stuff that’s redacted, it’s deeply disturbing to read how dysfunctional that department has been. Anybody who has their foot in district business knows that there’s been problems in that department for years. I do get the sense that the superintendent and senior district leadership understand that this mismanagement of public monies is quite serious, and that they are committed to taking a critical look at the finance department and looking at what is working, what is not, how can we actually build this back up again.
A lot of the critiques in the external review were like, it’s a culture of fear, and different parts of the department are not talking to other parts of the department. There’s been such big turnover that there’s no institutional memory. In something as important as a finance department, you can’t have that. Of course, a lot of this also has to do with the cuts that people have been making throughout the years, and it’s just made it so it hasn’t functioned. But I also think it’s a lack of leadership as well, and political will to really look at a lot of these things.
I do feel like senior leadership is taking it seriously and taking the appropriate steps to ensure that this does not happen again, and that the department is actually functioning at the level that it needs to. But I do feel like the new board is going to have to come in there. I know me, Becca [Dryden], and Christin [Crabtree] will all be on the finance committee because we need to know what’s happening with our money, and we need to know what’s happening with that department. That is serious. So we will actually be governing that department in terms of looking at what are the concrete steps being taken to shore it up and make sure that it is actually functioning in the public interest again.
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?
That has to do with a lot of the stuff that I mentioned before. Obviously, we lost millions of dollars through mismanagement of public monies in the Minneapolis finance department, so we need to make sure that the money that we do have is being appropriately managed, and that’s number one.
But I think the real root cause of the problem is that we’re not getting enough money. We don’t have enough money to run the district in a way that is commensurate with our ideals of public schools in Minneapolis being a public good, and really educating our kids in the way that they deserve to be educated, and to have those core, not just academic but social and cultural experiences that we want them to have.
And also for teachers and staff to have a really good experience. Teaching is hard. I teach at the college level. It’s different, but I know it’s hard. And people should be appropriately compensated for that and be in work settings that are humane, that are life-giving. For those things to happen we have to figure out this financial piece. That is going to take school board members working with district leadership to really, in an ongoing way, constantly advocate and organize at the state level and legislatively for more state funding, particularly in terms of special ed. That’s killing us at the state level. And then also per-pupil funding. Those are things that we absolutely have to move the needle on.
Of course, the other thing is enrollment. That’s a huge priority for me. We have got to come up with a robust enrollment plan that we are going to systematically carry out to get back a lot of these students that are not in MPS now.
What’s another issue that’s important to you that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?
There’s so many issues. Tech in schools is a huge issue right now. I really would like to see a robust district-wide policy on things like smartphones in the classroom, and then also Chromebooks and their ability to access things like YouTube and whatnot. It would have to be nuanced. We have some learners who maybe need to use screens more than other types of learners. So any district-wide policy would have to be nimble enough to adapt to different situations and different school sites. Talking to educators, and hearing things from parents like myself, it’s getting in the way of instructional effectiveness, and even social skills in the class. So I would really like to see that as well.
