School board finally makes lasting decision

Meeting at the former Northeast Minneapolis light bulb factory that serves as their headquarters, the Minneapolis School Board recently marked the beginning of the end of a very long process: making a lasting decision. This past Tuesday, Oct. 12, the board heard final presentations from two independent consulting groups charged with gathering community input on how the cash-strapped school district should proceed in the face of extensive budget cuts and plummeting student enrollment.

The highly anticipated meeting essentially concluded the public aspect of what had been a uniquely public process.

“This has been a hellacious three years,” sighed school board member Dennis Shapiro, the day after the board’s meeting. “The school board has been publicly pilloried for any number of things … this period right now is probably the most crucial for the Minneapolis Public Schools for the next five to 10 years as we figure out what schools to close and how to reconfigure the district.”

Having lost more than 5,500 students over the previous five years, projections for the current school year had predicted an additional loss of 3,000 more—a total drop of around 22 percent in district enrollment. That dismal outlook was combined with the $100 million in cuts that the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) had already suffered over the previous four years.

Faced with the prospect of potentially having more than 800 classrooms sitting empty, in February of this year, former interim superintendent David Jennings announced a plan that would have closed about half of those classrooms, as well as several area schools. The resulting public outcry included complaints of an important decision being made with little input from the community. Having since publicly acknowledged the bullheaded move, both the board and the administration proceeded to hire two independent consulting groups to test the public waters.

One group, the Community Engagement Consultant Collaborative (CEC), over the span of three months held 75 public meetings to discern specific values that Minneapolis communities prioritize for their public schools.

Immediately after Tuesday’s presentation of CEC’s extensive findings—which included the clear need for a more diverse district staff and a more equitable allocation of district resources—MPS superintendent, Thandiwe Peebles, repeatedly promised that these results would be one of the top priorities in the board’s subsequent decision-making process. The board will vote on their decision Nov. 30.

The other consulting group, the Facilities Utilization Planning Team, headed by the locally based KKE Architects, held a series of community-specific public meetings to determine how the district’s buildings could potentially be “realigned.” Those buildings included not only schools, but also the district’s administrative and storage properties.

During Tuesday’s meeting, KKE’s Kevin Halbach presented the board with three possible scenarios, each of which would close between 525 and 550 classrooms and would significantly impact between 19 and 21 schools and buildings. Halbach was careful to emphasize, however, that none of the potential plans actually recommended selling or tearing down any of the district’s currently owned buildings.

“Relative to the alignment of physical space that we need for programs, clearly we need less,” Halbach said. “With the enrollment decline, we have extra space. Not unneeded—we will find needs—but it’s extra.”

Nonetheless, some of the buildings that are mentioned in each of KKE’s scenarios include Pratt, Powderhorn, Phillips, Northrop and many others. While it may be scant comfort to sections of the community that have grown particularly attached to those school buildings that are facing realignment, Halbach stressed that regardless of what may happen to the district’s physical structures, few actual programs would be placed on the chopping block.

“Buildings are different than programs,” he said. “That’s something that we lose sight of in this process—that a good program, or a specific service maybe could be done in another building.”

Under all three of KKE’s scenarios, roughly half of the impacted buildings would be repurposed within one year, while the rest would follow within two years. No details were provided by the consultants as to how those buildings could be reused, although possibilities mentioned included integrating the needs of the wider community.

Much of the long-range scope of the group’s recommendations was driven by projections spearheaded by Hazel Reinhardt, the former Minnesota state demographer. According to those findings, a confluence of factors will continue to sap the district’s enrollment during upcoming years. While numbers for several grades are eventually expected to level out, the biggest crunch is projected to arrive by 2008 in the middle school grades.

“You need to remember that middle school number,” Halbach repeated during the evening. “What you need to do is align first to your current needs and then prepare and align in stages for your future needs.”

While KKE’s subsequent recommendations include retaining all current high schools and programs, the need for post-2008 changes was also hinted at.

According to the CEC’s results, of a final list of 15 broad value priorities, the first three (in order) included student achievement, small classes and community involvement. While these three were integrated at various levels into the KKE recommendations—particularly class size, which for projection purposes was placed at between 19 and 26—the fourth, “stability,” was given particular credence.
Stability proved to be a consistent criticism of the district by parents and was cited as a reason why many have decided to withdraw their children from the district’s schools. Parents complained that as the district has flailed in recent years to shore-up resources and stop the outflow of students, poor year-to-year constancy in terms of teachers and programs—not to mention fluctuating answers about whether certain schools would be closed down—has severely complicated long-term planning for their children.

Halbach suggested that one of the group’s three scenarios seemed to be an all-around best approach for the district, largely because it was particularly well-suited to deal with this criticism.

“How do we build in the flexibility not to disrupt programs year after year after year?” he asked. “What we need is the ability to sustain programs with predictability and have them full and have them have all of the services throughout this period of time and beyond.”

Complete results from the CEC and KKE studies are available at www.mpls.k12.mn.us.