Name: Uriah Ward
Age: 35
Neighborhood: Dayton’s Bluff
Labor organizer Uriah Ward was elected to the St. Paul school board in 2021. He is currently the chair of the board and has two kids who are future St. Paul Public Schools students.
Ward has a background in education and is a former middle school social studies teacher. He is a doctoral student studying public administration and working on a dissertation on school board governance.
Ward’s priorities include gathering community feedback and turning that into goals using the governance model he built; making the budget process more transparent through the new budget policy he created; and improving literacy rates for students.
He is endorsed by St. Paul DFL, SPFE Local 28 and AFSCME Council 5.
“Our district is trying to refocus everything that we do to make sure that we are supporting literacy among our students, because literacy is the pathway to everything else,” Ward said.
The candidates are competing for three at-large positions on the school board, which represent voters in every part of the city.
Ward spoke with Sahan Journal on Oct. 1. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why are you running for reelection on the St. Paul school board?
I currently serve as the chair of the board. Serving as a board member for St. Paul has been such a huge honor and has been an amazing experience, partly because I really believe in the work. I have two young kids that are future SPPS students, and I want to make sure that our school district is everything for them and for all of our kids. We have such a special team in St. Paul; we have an amazing board that works really well together. Over the past few years, we’ve been able to institute some changes that I think are really exciting. I ran being fairly critical of the way the board governed. I thought that we were too closed off from the community. I thought that we weren’t being transparent enough. I thought that we did not provide pathways for community members to shape their public schools. I thought the board was too hands-off and too deferential to our superintendent, and we’ve been able to change all of that.
I built the governance model that our board uses right now, and that governance model had us going out to the community and gathering feedback. We turned that feedback into goals, and our board set goals for the district for the first time ever. We’re now monitoring those goals at all of our meetings, so that means we spend time at all of our meetings talking about how our kids are doing, which is really exciting. I also wrote our new budget policy, which dramatically changes the way that we do budgeting and makes our process more transparent. It gives very clear pathways for community feedback to matter. It requires the administration to prove that we are utilizing community feedback. The board is involved at the very beginning and we’ve seen really positive results from that, too.
We also hired a new superintendent who’s been great, and I want to stay on the board to follow through on some of these things to make sure we’re meeting the goals that we set, to make sure that we’re staying true to the procedures that we built, to make sure that we continue to provide effective guidance and collaborative leadership. There’s a lot more work to do.
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?
It’s had a really terrible impact in a number of ways, right? And the most serious one is that we had our neighbors stolen from us. We had people in our St. Paul community, in our SPPS community, that are no longer there, and that’s horrifying. In a lot of cases, we don’t know where they are. We don’t know what happened to them, and the folks that are still here, I think, are still reeling from the fact that their friends and family are gone. I think that’s the most important thing. The actions of the Trump administration were evil. They were horrifying, and even though the operation ostensibly ended, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is still here, and the impacts of those actions are far-reaching and lasting. From the school board governance perspective, it causes a lot of other problems, too. We have fewer students, which means that there are deepening budgetary issues, right? Because the way that we allocate money as a state is: you get money based on the number of students you serve, and that is something that we’re going to have to continue to grapple with as we go into next budget season. We’re going to see deeper cuts than what we would normally expect.
Two or three pieces on how we respond: We as a district did respond pretty strongly against Operation Metro Surge. We put out a statement calling for ICE to leave, and for the end of the operation; we passed a resolution prohibiting the district from coordinating with ICE and immigration authorities. We put notices on all of our buildings prohibiting entry to any immigration enforcement officials, and those are things that we are still doing, even though Operation Metro Surge ended. We are still on guard, we know that the Trump administration still holds the same beliefs and stance.
We’re trying to, even as we’re making cuts, keep social/emotional well-being for students at the forefront of our work, and we’re doing that in a few ways. Whenever we make budget allocations, we try to make sure that we can allocate resources to mental health support staff. We have a goal focused on the greater implementation of restorative practices, so that we are punishing students less and restoring them more. As we adjust to our new fiscal reality, we are going to have to make really hard cuts again next year, and we’re going to need a really thorough and transparent process, which I think that we are going to have. We’re being very upfront with the community about what the realities are, about what money is available, and how things have changed, and try to make the decisions that are going to do the most to support our kids.
Last year St. Paul cut ELL funding after a decline in ELL students. How can St. Paul best support those remaining students?
We did make that cut, and one of the most controversial pieces of that change was changing the way that ELL staffing is allocated. So we used to allocate ELL staff either at a 1.0 FTE or a 0.5 FTE, and now we’ve broken it down into 0.2 increments. This means that there are chances that teachers spend less time at particular buildings because they might be allocated at a 0.2 in a building. We are evaluating the effectiveness of that and the impacts of that. I’ve spoken to some educators that are concerned that it makes it harder for them to develop effective relationships.
There is a continuing interest from the superintendent, but we’re trying to provide more kind and caring adults for students, so that they can have those additional supports.
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?
One of the biggest headwinds that we face is declining enrollment. When I first joined the board, I was very critical of our district because we saw continually declining enrollment, and we weren’t really doing anything to try to change that. That’s no longer the case. I worked with my fellow board members and district administration to form our enrollment and retention committee. Workers were also part of that effort, and we worked together to try to build a plan to welcome people back into the district. Our new superintendent has taken that charge and has expanded upon it, and we now are engaging in concerted efforts to try to bring families back into St. Paul Public Schools. That effort has resulted so far in a modest increase in the percentage of school-age students that we are serving in SPPS. A couple years ago, SPPS was serving 60% of St. Paul students, and now we’re at 61%. That is a very small increase, but it is still an increase.
At the same time, overall enrollment has gone down because the number of overall students that are school age in St. Paul is going down, and there are two main reasons behind that. There is a declining birth rate — people are having fewer kids — and the Trump administration is incredibly anti-immigration and has made it harder and harder for us to welcome new families from other countries. We used to have a great refugee resettlement program where we were welcoming families and they needed a home, and that doesn’t exist to that degree anymore. So, the declining birth rate, welcoming fewer families from other countries means that we have fewer students to serve.
The state demographer last year projected that over the next couple decades we might see a decline in enrollment to the degree where instead of serving a population in the low 30,000s, instead we’re serving a population [between 25,000 and 28,000] and that is a drastic decrease. I think that her estimate was slightly more pessimistic than we’re going to be because she was projecting a lower market share, and I think that we’re going to continue to grow higher into the 60s and potentially higher, depending on how successful our efforts are.
We can’t change the number of kids who are available, at least not at the school board level, and so we are going to have to adjust to serving a smaller student population. So I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges.
The other piece is that the vast majority of our district’s funding comes from the state government. We do have the ability to go out for referendums to raise local property taxes. We did that recently, reluctantly, but the St. Paul community is overtaxed as it is, and we feel that because we’re part of the St. Paul community and we’re also feeling the tax impact. We really need the state government to step up. One thing that I’m doing as an individual is trying to go out and help pro-public education legislators or potential legislators win their races. Because if we have a pro-public education state Legislature, it’s more likely we’re going to be able to have the funds we need to serve our students effectively.
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?
A couple of things that I think might be helpful for context: Our board voted against that resolution because when we looked at the information in front of us, the resolution would not have fixed the problems that were being raised. There were questions around overcrowding; one of the biggest issues was around the very large lunch period, going from 10 or so in the morning to 2 or so in the afternoon. We’ve managed to improve that issue. We’ve shortened the lunch period, so it’s not quite as extreme as it was. We have worked to try to improve the wait times for bus routes, and have been able to make some modest gains there. None of this addresses the primary underlying issue, which was that the Hmong community wants pre-K through 8 school building. Whenever we voted against the resolution, we also did vote in favor of directing the superintendent to make certain that our district was able to provide that pre-K through 8 school building by the start of the 2032 school year at the latest. That is a commitment that we’re making sure our district is going to achieve.
What’s another school board priority of yours we haven’t talked about?
The biggest thing is probably literacy. Our superintendent’s biggest priority is literacy. Our district is trying to refocus everything that we do to make sure that we are supporting literacy among our students, because literacy is the pathway to everything else. We want to make sure that all of our kids can read effectively. That allows them to learn everything else they need to learn. That allows them to become effective members of society that can continue to learn and grow throughout their lives. We’re still in the early stages of our new governance model. We’ve seen very slight gains in MCA scores across the board. Things are trending in the right direction, but the trends are small for now, and we’re really focused on trying to make sure that we see more robust gains going forward.
