Jim Vue, the only Hmong school board member for St. Paul Public Schools, is stepping down after tonight’s meeting, after more than five years on the board.
Vue’s resignation comes shortly after an emotional December school board meeting in which he was the only board member to vote for a plan brought by parents — including his wife, parent volunteer leader Sai Thao — to ease overcrowding at Txuj Ci HMong Language and Culture School.
But in an exit interview with Sahan Journal, he said that while that board meeting was a contributing factor to his decision to step down, he’d never intended to serve more than a four-year term. After Ramsey County voters chose to move elections to even years, the school board voted to do the same — extending their own terms by a year. That means that board members like Vue who were elected in 2021 face reelection this fall, rather than last year.
Vue joined the St. Paul school board in summer 2020, filling a vacancy left by 31-year-old board chair Marny Xiong who died of COVID-19. In 2021, as the board prepared to close and consolidate some schools, Vue brokered a compromise to keep open three schools serving many immigrant students — Highwood Hills Elementary School, which serves many Somali students; LEAP High School, which serves new immigrant students; and Wellstone Elementary School, which has a popular Spanish immersion program and recently started a Karen immersion program as well.
Sahan Journal sat down with Vue at Kong’s Kitchen on the East Side of St. Paul over pho and Thai tea on Thursday, hours after border czar Tom Homan announced a plan for ICE and Border Patrol agents to leave Minnesota.
Vue expressed pride in his time on the school board, and said St. Paul Public Schools needs a new style of leadership for the current moment.
“I really feel like I was the right board member for COVID-19,” he said. “I see myself as a stabilizing force. Right now, we need a force of courage.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
First of all, why are you leaving the St. Paul school board?
The most straightforward answer is Ramsey County had an election last election cycle to make all their election cycles even years. What happened with the school board is that extended my term. In December of 2024, the board had to vote whether or not to extend our terms. I was the lone no vote.
So the short answer is, I never envisioned serving beyond my four-year term. I always said to myself, whatever I’m going to do, I’m going to do within this four years, and that’s it, and I’m moving on. That’s just me sticking to the commitments that I made with the people in my inner circle during the time when I decided to run.
In addition to that, I’ve accomplished a lot of my goals that I set out to do. One of the beauties about serving is that you know when it ends, so you’re realistic about what you can accomplish. And I think I was able to do that.
You were first appointed to the seat in the summer of 2020, after Marny Xiong died. At that time, what did you hope to accomplish on the school board?
One, I wanted to stabilize the board, because Marny Xiong passed away. So in addition to all the institutional destabilization going on during COVID-19, Marny’s death added on to that as well. So I’m very proud that I was able to step into that role. No one can replace Marny Xiong, I said as much when I got appointed. I helped them walk through that grief, helped them stabilize governance, leadership on the board.
What I can point to is the Marny Xiong memorial at the Washington Tech High School that was sort of the culmination of that work. I really see that memorial as not just a memorial for Marny Xiong, honoring her work and her life and legacy, but also a symbol of St. Paul Public Schools’ collective struggle during that time, and how we were able to walk through that grief and make ourselves whole and come back out.
You’ve been on the school board now five and a half years. What do you see as some of your greatest accomplishments on the school board?
I wanted to have a leadership role. You have to be in those roles to influence how the governance goes. I was able to accomplish that. And I would say that my stamp that I put on board governance was collaborative leadership. Believe it or not, that didn’t really exist at that point.
A lot of board members came in, they cared very much about their issues, but I didn’t see a whole lot of you know, how do we work together to get something done? How do we collaboratively come together, move our work forward and put four votes to it? So I was able to establish that kind of culture in board governance.
What I can point to to demonstrate that is the colleagues that ran with me in my campaign election cycle, [they’ve all served as] board chairs. A part of that is the precedent that I set of taking turns being leaders. I help bring people up to be leaders. They help bring people up to be leaders. That’s kind of the cultural leadership that I’m talking about. It’s just not one person doing all the work.
Another thing that I can point to is our superintendent at the time, Joe Gothard, was actually named Superintendent of the Year 2024. Things like that don’t happen if you don’t have a stable board to support your superintendent.
I remember your role with Envision SPPS in 2021. I remember the district proposed closing certain schools, and then the board voted to keep some of those schools open. But some schools did close, and you voted to close your own child’s school. And I remember you wrestling with that.
Yes. So the administration brought forward a proposal to close a certain amount of schools. And the knock on the board at the time from the public was we just rubber-stamped whatever the superintendent brings to us. So that’s one of the challenges I sought to change on the board. Yes, they do bring us recommendations, but the board has to look at those recommendations and decide if that’s truly what’s best.
At that time, that was one of the decisions that I tried to make. Some of these schools, yes, the math and the calculations say to close the school, but at the same time, these schools serve a specific purpose and need for our communities. So we made an amendment to the proposal to keep some of the schools open, but then close the others.
What work that you might have liked to have accomplished in your time on the school board do you feel is left unfinished?
I’m working on a project right now called the HMONG Project, which is a needs assessment for the Hmong community. There’s a nuance to the needs of every community. And I don’t think that you get to know that need unless you get to know the community. The needs assessment is almost like a framework to get to know this community, get to know who the members of the community are, who the leaders of their community are, what they think is important, and work collaboratively with them to help guide decision-making at the district administration level and governance level.
I would like to see that done with not just the Hmong community, but other communities as well. Our Somali, Oromo communities, our Karen communities. Our Black communities and our Hispanic communities as well. Since I’ve been in St. Paul Public Schools, there’s always been this blank slate of equity. And it may work for some of our community, but not for all.
What do you mean a blank slate of equity?
What I mean by that is St. Paul Public Schools, typically, they will do surveys. They will engage with communities. They will engage with the range of our district. But at the end of that, they amalgamize all that data into these specific buckets of needs. Sometimes those needs fit a community, sometimes it doesn’t.
For example, I think one of the biases that I’ve seen with the Hmong community, is they keep treating the Hmong community like they just got here. And Hmong community has been here for 50 years. We’re in our third generation of sending our students here at St. Paul Public Schools. But the majority of people who are not Hmong in leadership roles, they treat us like it’s 1984, like we just got here. That’s a disservice to the institution expertise that our community has. It’s a disservice to the time and effort that we put into our district. To know what our community needs, for you to not tap into that expertise and use that to guide your decision-making, is a waste.
If we don’t work to understand what those needs are to help us make decisions, it’s going to hurt us in the long run, so we need to be a little more nuanced in the criteria we use to make our decisions.
In 2021, you told me it was a priority for you to stabilize enrollment, especially among Asian American students who are leaving the district. How do you feel the district has performed on that measure over the last five years?
I have to give our district some credit. From 2015 to 2020, there was a 3,000 dip in enrollment [of all students]. And between 2020 from when I got on the board to right now, there’s been a stabilization of enrollment. So I give credit to our administration, listening to me and my colleagues, particularly how the language and immersion programs are a necessity to St. Paul Public Schools and the people we serve. And I think that has helped stabilize our enrollment some. So we’re hovering at a solid 33,000 for the last three years, which is better than dropping 1,000 each year.
This winter, you were the lone school board member to vote in favor of a plan to ease overcrowding at Txuj Ci HMong Language and Culture Lower School, which your wife had championed as a parent volunteer. I remember seeing you leave that school board meeting after the vote with your family. What were you thinking and feeling?
I voted no for the second motion that came after the first motion. That was to add a full-time staff for extracurricular activities at middle school and some additional support for busing and cafeteria at the lower campus. And I thought to myself, that doesn’t get to the heart of the bricks-and-mortar needs of the school. Yes, that helps the operations of the schools, but it doesn’t help the fact that the enrollment of the school is pushing against the walls of the building.
RELATED STORIES
I tried to state my case as plainly as I could during the meeting, but I was frustrated that the topic kept being diverted, from the issue of the building itself, to cafeteria staffing and busing staffing. It’s like we’re trying to treat the symptoms of the illness, not the illness itself. So that’s where my frustration came from.
Obviously, I voted no for the motion. And I didn’t want to state why I wanted to vote no, but it’s basically what I’m telling you right now. We’re just treating symptoms. If someone has cancer, you don’t treat their cough. You treat the fact that their body’s eating away at itself.
Did that contribute to your decision to step down?
That was part of it. That’s probably like 20% of it. But the bulk of it is that I accomplished most of what I wanted to do already anyway, and I made commitments to my family, primarily to my wife, that I wouldn’t serve beyond what I committed to serve.
What do you think Hmong families in St. Paul Public Schools need from the school district in the short term and the long term?
Short-term is to understand the current demographics in terms of who we’re serving. It goes back to understanding that we’re not serving recent refugees, we’re serving a group of people who have been in the institution for a long time. How can we use that to our benefit as a district, to serve our school district?
Another short-term is, for as long as Hmong people have been in St. Paul Public Schools, we don’t disaggregate the data like that. We have the Asian demographic, but that doesn’t get to understanding what’s the difference between Karen and Hmong and Chinese and Vietnamese? We haven’t gotten to that point yet. So these are the short-term things that I think St. Paul Public Schools can do right now to help themselves in the next two or three years.
Long-term is the facilities needs. One of the outcomes of voting the way we did with the facilities needs is we’re going to cap enrollment for a program that’s in demand. That’s just going to end up hurting our enrollment in the long term. Where I bragged before that we stabilized at 33,000, that’s only good relative to the fact that we were dropping before. We can actually grow that. It just takes leadership with vision and intent to do that. And you have to make decisions differently than we would have done in December to do that. Anytime you cap a program that’s in demand, I see that as a problem.
What do you hope the board takes into consideration as they appoint your replacement?
I already told them, I know you guys want to set up all those criteria, but the less complicated you make it for the applicants, the larger the pool of applicants you’re going to get. They wanted to schedule all these interviews. Realistically, who’s going to make the two or three stages of interviews? It’s going to be probably the most privileged people who can take time off of work to be able to do that. So you’re going to end up with a bunch of white people who apply. You just make it a one-time interview, you’re more likely to get a deeper breadth of people who apply. So, that’s all I told them: Don’t make it so hard for the applicants.
What do you think of Tom Homan’s announcement this morning that he’s winding down Operation Metro Surge?
I think it’s good PR, but the money’s already in the bank, as far as I know. The only thing stopping it from escalating is our weather. Once it gets warmer, I don’t think it’s going to slow down. It might be done differently. It might be done more under the radar, but it’s still going to be done.
How has all this been affecting St. Paul Public Schools?
Certainly our student absences, but then it trickles to our staff absences as well. One of the last conversations I had with our HR director is that we are at a dangerous point right now: only a certain level of staff can be absent before we stop operations, and we’re kind of getting to those points. We can only fill so many absences.
So that’s how it’s affecting us in terms of day-to-day operations. Long-term, some of these families aren’t coming back. You know, I’ve heard [from] some families that they’ve moved to complete different states just to avoid this. And who knows if they’re going to come back? That’s the long-term effect. Not just St. Paul Public Schools, the city of St. Paul is losing residents.
Anything else you want the public to know or you want your fellow school board members to know as you’re preparing to leave the school board?
I was what St. Paul Public Schools needed for the time. I really feel like I was the right board member for COVID-19. I think right now, with the ICE surge, you probably need a different kind of leadership to come in. I see myself as a stabilizing force. Right now, we need a force of courage. We need someone who really needs to hold their ground with this federal administration.
We need champions of public education. This federal government is clearly targeting public education institutions. They’re just divesting in us, they’re making us look like we’re bad guys, we’re money wasters. So we need somebody who’s going to come in and say, “These are the great things we do. These are the communities we serve. If this institution wasn’t here, the city wouldn’t be the way it is.” We need those kinds of leaders.
