By fits and starts, the Minneapolis School Board has started to address the question of crowding in Southwest Minneapolis Schools. While a major facilities planning study isn’t due out until some time later this year, many members of the board used a presentation on updated enrollment information to press district staff for information on overcrowding. “I would really urge this board and this superintendent to say, ‘Hey do we need to tweak [the district’s zone-based enrollment scheme] and boundaries or do we need to build,’” board member Carla Bates said. Citing Ramsey Fine Arts Academy’s …
Tuesday night, the Minneapolis Board of Education approved its calendar for the 2011-2012 school year, but not without opposition from some new board members over starting school on one of the year's biggest Muslim holidays. The vote to approve the calendar anyway was 5-3. The calendar ties into a larger debate about “cultural competence” and acceptance that’s been simmering in the Minneapolis schools community for a long time, in various forms. At issue on Tuesday was the fact that this year’s Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of the fast month of Ramadan will fall on either …
After years of claiming they’ve already cut to the bone, how are Minneapolis Public Schools preparing for more possible cuts and an unavoidable $10-30 million deficit? Governor Mark Dayton's newly-released budget proposal promises an increase in education funding for the first time in many years. But the plan relies significantly on tax hikes that would have to make it past a tax-averse state legislature, meaning the increase is far from certain. If Governor Dayton’s promised $37 million increase to the state education budget doesn’t make it through the state legislature alive, the district …
Minneapolis Public Schools (MSP) accountants underestimated the cost of the teachers' contract by $3.7 million. That puts the contract's cost at roughly $14 million, up from the original $11 million estimate. It came out that folks in the human resources and labor relations departments forgot to count teachers’ time when they might be teaching summer school. Still, given that $3.7 million is relatively small potatoes in a budget that totals many hundreds of millions of dollars, school board members approved the contract unanimously, with a minimum of finger-wagging at the responsible bean-…
For those of you who couldn’t make it to Tuesday’s Area 3 Parent Advisory Council meeting, which covers most of Southwest Minneapolis, at Burroughs Community School, here’s what you missed: A limited explanation of how the transitions from various phases in the curriculum worked (from the pre-kindergartern to 3rd grade phase of learning to read, to the post-third grade world of “reading to learn,” as Associate Superintendent Theresa Battle put it last night). Battle also touched on the sort of progress that parents ought to expect when it comes to reading. An explanation of the “Core 4” …
In recent weeks, the Minneapolis Board of Education voted to instruct the district's lobbyist to push a plan to merge Twin Cities schools at the newly Republican state legislature. The plan has the aim of reducing segregation in schools and better using resources, but some parents in Southwest said they prefer their children attend schools closer to home, possibly throwing cold water on the proposal. The plan could produce "significant savings," according to outgoing at-large board member T. Williams, and might ease the financial crises faced by many metro-area districts. "Pretty soon …
Is it newbie naivete or a case of union muscle-flexing? Current Minneapolis Board of Education members recently received letters written by the teachers union, but signed by incoming board members: Jenny Arneson, Rebecca Gagnon, Richard Mammen and Alberto Monserrate. The letter chastized the current board for its handling of union contract negotiations. Southwest Minneapolis Patch has obtained a copy of one of the letters, signed by Mammen, which was addressed to current board chair Tom Madden. "Members of the current school board have created ill will by refusing to stand by the …
