Name: Tamara Mattison
Age: 66
Neighborhood: Frogtown/Midway
Tamara Mattison is the owner of Generation 2 Generation, a company that educates and develops the next generation of culturally competent leaders. She has a daughter who graduated from St. Paul Public Schools in 2008 and is also a district grandparent. Mattison has a doctorate in organizational management and leadership.
Her priorities include delivering results on literacy and teacher performance; creating a student advisory board that will address the imbalance of a predominantly white teaching staff serving a student body that is nearly 80% students of color; building relationships with parents; and ensuring mental and psychological well-being for students and staff.
“My goal as a school board member is to involve parents, to walk alongside them, and to empower them on how to navigate and advocate for their kids in the school district,” Mattison said.
The candidates are competing for three at-large positions on the school board, which represent voters in every part of the city.
Mattison spoke with Sahan Journal on Oct. 8. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you want to be on the St. Paul school board?
So one of the reasons why I’m running is because I think we need leadership that is going to deliver results that are not just words on a piece of paper. I think that the current school board is not active in the community. I’ve been in my home for over 20 years, and I’ve never had a school board member campaigning in my area, and I live in one of the worst-performing ZIP codes. I plan to make sure that all the kids are being successful, and not just our Black and brown kids that are failing miserably. One of my ideas is to be, as a board member, present at teacher conferences, so that I can find out what the needs are of parents as well as what their concerns are.
St. Paul, like many districts, has seen a decline in English language learners since Trump’s second term began, and lost nearly 500 students following Operation Metro Surge. What impact does that have and how should the district respond?
I think if people paid attention to his first term, we should have been anticipating something reckless to happen, so I think where we failed was we were not proactive. We should have had protocols in place to work with agencies that work with immigration, so our families will be educated. Although the school district’s responsibility is safety first, as a Black and brown person, we’ve always been targeted and hunted down with no regard to the laws.
I think because [most] of the teachers are white, then they were in their comfortable privilege, versus the 80% families of color that were not, so that’s an imbalance right there, which is putting our kids in danger. A lot of teachers don’t live in community, and I live in community. People were illegally being detained, illegally being arrested, and so I would say those privileged people don’t get involved until it impacts them. That’s always been a concern of people of color, and nobody has cared until Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We didn’t learn enough from George Floyd to say, people in this country deserve to be treated in a humane way. And the comparison that I have to that is that of Obama. He removed more people, but he did it in a respectful and in a humanizing way, and so we don’t talk about that because it wasn’t violent, it wasn’t overbearing, and he didn’t break the law to do it. That’s the difference for me. I’m in a meeting right now with the African American Leadership Council, and those families are not coming back into the school, so there’s going to be a shortage.
On the other side of that, people are not having as many children, so the school district is not going to be full like it was. For us to think about that, we have to deal with the facts.
Last year St. Paul cut ELL funding after a decline in ELL students. How can St. Paul best support those remaining students?
There’s the top three schools and there’s the bottom three. I happen to live where the bottom three is, and so I know that those resources that are in the top three do not exist in the bottom three. If there’s this imbalance of resources, then it makes sense why other more affluent ZIP codes are being successful in their outcomes versus the lower income areas that don’t. Even last night in our candidate panel discussion, every single room that I’ve been in is full of white people, and they don’t make good decisions about people of color because they don’t understand our experience, our background, our socialization. So until that board is actively in community, we’re going to keep doing the same thing we’ve always gotten, and our kids are not learning. I work with too many high schoolers that can’t even fill out a job application. That’s a literacy issue.
The district has grappled with some major budget challenges in recent years, leading to cuts in 90 school-based positions in the most recent budget. Looking ahead, what challenges do you see in keeping the district on track financially? How do you think the district can address those challenges?
There doesn’t seem to be a succession plan for teachers who are no longer effective, so we hold on to teachers just because they’ve been teaching. We need to take a true assessment of the teacher meeting their outcomes and dealing with them accordingly, because unions usually protect white teachers; they don’t always protect Black and brown. Black and brown are usually the paraprofessionals, and they don’t get the same fight and response from a union, but white teachers who are no longer effective still get to stay in a classroom. They don’t know how to teach Black and brown kids.
The other thing is making sure that our district headquarters is not top-heavy with administration, so it needs to align itself with the amount of students we have, and the amount of teachers we have, and the amount of programming that we do in the St. Paul Public Schools.
If we would be honest: Education systems were not designed for people of color to be successful. So it needs to be overhauled, because clearly the people that consistently lose are Black and brown families. I come from a financial background, so I understand finances, I understand strategic decisions, but I also understand accountability, and I think that’s what’s missing. Because if we are accountable in how we spend money and how the resources are distributed, we wouldn’t stay in this cycle of a hole that we’re in, because there is no shortage of money. That is the truth. There is no shortage of money. It is how it has been resourced and distributed that we have to deal with.
Last year, parents raised concerns about overcrowding at Txuj Ci Hmong Language and Culture Lower School. The school board rejected their proposal to address the overcrowding, and the parents’ concerns remain. Now there is no Hmong member of the school board. How will you make sure this community feels heard and their needs are met?
Editor’s note: Some readers may find the following answer offensive. We are including it so voters are informed about the candidate’s viewpoint. Sahan strives to avoid language that stereotypes groups based on race or ethnicity.
When it comes to the Hmong community, they’re extremely resourceful. They’re extremely wealthy. [Reporting by Sahan Journal and other sources has found that the Hmong community has a higher-than-average poverty rate: 14% nationally and 15% in Minnesota.] If I look up and down my neighborhood, the Hmong community is not lacking; the overcrowdedness is not true.
What’s another school board priority of yours we haven’t talked about?
There are 80% students of color, and there are barely 20% staff of color. [Editor’s note: The latest state data shows at least 27% of St. Paul teachers are people of color.] The students know what they need, so I would like to see a student advisory to the board, and then I want to see parent groups empowered as partners and not as hindrances or barriers. I’m a St. Paul parent of a public school child and grandchild. I know for a fact that when we show up passionate and need to ask questions, we are deemed too aggressive, too assertive, and what they end up doing is banning Black and brown parents who are just trying to get answers.
My goal as a school board member is to involve parents, to walk alongside them, and to empower them on how to navigate and advocate for their kids in the school district. Where teachers fail is that they don’t reach out to a parent until there’s a problem, and so that parent doesn’t have a relationship with the teacher.
We can’t fear these parents. These parents are just like us. They got kids that they want to
be successful, but if they have a question, they need those questions answered. So, using parents as partners is critical to the success of our schools and the outcomes that we’re seeking.
When St. Paul removed SROs (school resource officers), kids knew that there was not this officer in the building that could guide them and that could help them. So for me, that made all schools unsafe.
My doctorate is in organizational management with a specialization in leadership, and I see leadership not as a position but a responsibility. We are not just here for students. We are here for students and families, and that’s the experience that I’m going to bring to the board. I’ve been working in the community for over 22 years. I’ve been in the schools. I know the kids, I know the families, and so that’s the experience that I bring. I plan to be a very active and in-community school board member, and I don’t see that in this current school board team.
