Until very recently,
family outreach at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) was handled
mainly by the woefully understaffed Office of Student, Family, and Community
Engagement. Former Executive Director
for External Partnerships Courtney Cushing Kiernat departed MPS in spring 2016,
whereupon leadership of this office fell
to Family Partnerships Director Lynnea Atlas-Ingebretson. For many months, this office consisted of
just eleven members, given as follows:
Lynnea Atlas-Ingebretson, Director of Family Partnerships
Patti Peterson, Account Specialist
Ahmed Keynan, Family and Community Inclusion Specialist
Briana MacPhee, Cultural Liaison-Latino Community and Families
Damon Gunn, Community Partnerships Executive Office Coordinator
Desean Smedley, Parent Academic Facilitator
Deqa Sayid, MPS Family and School Advocate
Elisa Iha, Community Partnerships Manager
Jason Bucklin, Out4Good Coordinator
Kaylie Burns Gahagan, Volunteer MPS Coordinator
Mitchell Roldan, Parent Academic Facilitator
Lynnea Atlas-Ingebretson, Director of Family Partnerships
Patti Peterson, Account Specialist
Ahmed Keynan, Family and Community Inclusion Specialist
Briana MacPhee, Cultural Liaison-Latino Community and Families
Damon Gunn, Community Partnerships Executive Office Coordinator
Desean Smedley, Parent Academic Facilitator
Deqa Sayid, MPS Family and School Advocate
Elisa Iha, Community Partnerships Manager
Jason Bucklin, Out4Good Coordinator
Kaylie Burns Gahagan, Volunteer MPS Coordinator
Mitchell Roldan, Parent Academic Facilitator
By contrast with the Department of Teaching and Learning,
which has typically had between forty-two (42) and fifty-one (51) staff members
earning a total of from $2,820,703 to over $3,000,000, the Office of Student, Family, and Community
Engagement had only the eleven (11) staff members earning a total of $737,266.
And whereas the Department of Teaching and Learning had three (3) staff members
who earned over $100,000 and twelve (12) who earned over $80,000, in the Office
of Student, Family, and Community Engagement no staff member earned over
$100,000; Ms. Atlas-Ingebretson earned
$91,463, one staff member earned $76,944, and all other staff members in the
Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement earned between $52,812 and
$64,731.
In an earlier version of this article, I advocated for great
reduction in the size of, and financial outlays to, the Department of Teaching
and Learning; with major expansion of the Office of Student, Family, and
Community Engagement.
Ed Graff appears either to have responded to my recommendations
in that and other articles (also communicated via my frequent appearances at
meetings of the MPS Board of Education; on my television show [The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary
Marvin Davison, Wednesdays, 6:00 PM, MTN Channel 17]; and other venues) or to have surveyed the
situation at the central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools at the Davis
Center and come to his own highly similar conclusions. Not only has Ed Graff disbanded the
Department of Teaching and Learning and terminated the employment of Macarre
Traynham (another measure for which I have advocated vigorously), he has also swept
away the Department of Communications and the Office of Student, Family, and
Community Engagement. These actions are
consistent with the bureaucratic paring for which I have advocated as the fifth
part of my five-point plan for overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and
which you (my readers) will read again in the next article posted on this blog.
With the disassembly of the Office of Student, Family,
and Community Engagement, along with his disbanding of the Department of
Communications and Department of Teaching and Learning, Ed Graff is now in a
position to construct a department that actually serves students from challenging
familial circumstances in ways most needed to give such students a chance to be
ready to receive the benefits of a new, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
curriculum.
Staff members in what should be called the Department of
Family Services must be comfortable on the streets and in the neighborhoods and
homes of students and their families. In
order to reach students from economically impoverished or dysfunctional
families, we must shift staffing priorities at the Minneapolis Public Schools
toward those people of multiple ethnicities who are comfortable in environments
characterized by the challenges of people living at the urban core and who can
connect with students and their families right where they live.
Comprehending the Problem in Historical Context
The life of people who live in poverty is fundamentally
different from people who live in circumstances of the middle and upper
economic classes.
History created the circumstances of poverty in the
United States as a result of differential treatment of people according to
race, nation of origin, and natal family economies:
During the 16th to 18th centuries, approximately
12,500,000 people of African descent were hauled across the Middle Passage to
insular Caribbean or mainland American locales and forced into slave labor;
about 500,000 of these slaves were sold in what became the United States.
Liberation from involuntary servitude came when the 13th Amendment to the
United States Constitution was ratified in 1866. But Reconstruction (1865-1877)
failed and African Americans, who formally gained full citizenship and voting
rights via the 14th and 15th Amendments, fell victim to Supreme Court justices
who disregarded the Constitution; and to a racist white society in the American
South that imposed conditions of sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, and
vigilante brutality. Between the years 1877 and 1965, 4,600,000 people were
lynched in the United States; a third of these were white victims in the Wild
West; the remainder, over 3,000,000 people, were African Americans lynched
mainly in the South. Both of these
lynching figures exceed the number of people who lost their lives in the
bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 9, 2001 (9/ 11).
Until the early 20th century, public school education
ended for most students with the completion of grammar school in 6th grade; a
very few students went to high schools, the rigor of which matched the name. As
more people sought schooling beyond grammar school, an intermediate institution
known as junior high, also rigorous in academic content, came into being for
grades 7 through 9. For students in grades 10 and 11 (the last grade in most
high schools well into the 20th century), great status accrued to those who
graduated from these institutions during a time when college or university matriculation
was not common.
At the same time that African Americans escaped from the
violence and discrimination of the South from 1915 forward on a Northern
Migration, great waves of immigrants came ashore, especially from eastern and
southern Europe. As these immigrants and others increasingly sought education
at the levels of junior and senior high school, new demands were placed on
systems of public education in the United States. Eastern and southern
Europeans frequently were more impoverished than were their counterparts from
Scandinavia, Germany, and other nations of northern and western Europe. They
presented greater challenges to public education systems and were stereotyped
as less academically
capable. In the schools of the United States there
developed a bifurcated approach to education whereby impoverished and
stereotyped populations were tracked into vocational education that ended
before high school graduation, while wealthier and systemically preferred
students proceeded through college preparatory study toward high school
graduation.
African American students were generally tracked along
the lines of those immigrant populations that bore heavy discrimination, and
they bore the additional burden of attending mostly segregated schools. Here
and there in the American South, African American teachers actually
disseminated considerable knowledge and skill sets to students under difficult
circumstances, but on the whole African American students into the 1950s
received low quality and truncated education. Desegregation as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Supreme Court decision advanced the ideal of equality but had little favorable
academic impact. African Americans were still stuck in lousy southern schools
or tracked in the manner of 20th century immigrant populations.
Congressional passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and equal
employment and fair housing legislation during the late 1960s opened a pathway
for African Americans who had the wherewithal to pursue middle class
educational and professional aspirations. But African American middle class
flight coalesced with white flight from the urban core, leaving behind the
poorest of the poor.
Riots along Plymouth Avenue in the summers of 1966
and1967 accelerated the movement of Jewish and other people of European origins
out of North Minneapolis, coinciding with in-migration of additional African
American populations from challenged urban areas in Southside Chicago, Detroit,
St. Louis, Kansas City, and Gary, Indiana. In the Minneapolis Public Schools,
within which there were less than 20 African American teachers and other
personnel throughout the 1970s, teachers confronted unprecedented classroom
challenges that they were ill-equipped to face.
Crack cocaine came to North Minneapolis and other inner
city areas by the early 1980s and gang activity increased apace. Drugs and
gangs placed severe additional burdens on inner city communities and the
schools that served them. Many historical forces have operated centrifugally to
propel males away from their nuclear familial units; by the 1980s, this very
much included the well-intended but operationally deleterious Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
From the time of those turbulent 1980s, so full of
challenges for people living at the urban core, nine superintendents (Richard
Green, Robert Ferrera, Peter Hutchinson, Carol Johnson, Thandiwe Peebles, Bill
Green, Bernadeia Johnson, [Interim Superintendent] Michael Gore, and now Ed
Graff) have headed the Minneapolis Public Schools. Not one of those prior to
Bernadeia Johnson effectively addressed the needs of the most challenged urban
populations. Bernadeia Johnson launched promising programs with Shift, High Priority Schools, and Focused Instruction but
departed before rooting these deeply into the program of the Minneapolis Public
Schools. Gore made little headway with any of these programs.
And thus does Superintendent Ed Graff and staff now face
the challenge of imparting an excellence of education historically denied to
most students in the United States and never offered to the overwhelming
majority of the African American population--- nor to those Native American, Hispanic,
Hmong, and African immigrant populations that have now also arrived at the
challenged urban core.
We need staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools
who comprehend the historical dimensions of the problems of inner city youth
and their families--- and who are at least as comfortable in the communities
and homes of these students as they are roaming the sterile hallways of the
Davis Center at 1250 West Broadway.
Staffing the Minneapolis Public Schools with People Comfortable at the Urban Core
Staffing the Minneapolis Public Schools with People Comfortable at the Urban Core
People abused by history, overwhelmed by poverty, and
situated in communities wherein violence and illicit drug sales are realities
of existence are constantly on edge:
Most impoverished African American extended families have
to contend with the reality that some member or members, especially males, have
been, are, or will be caught up in the maelstrom of the criminal justice
system. Many must depend on federal government food stamps, WIC (Women,
Infants, and Children supplementary nutrition program), Medicaid, low-income
Section 8 housing assistance, and welfare (with AFDC as of 1996 replaced by
TANF [Temporary Aid to Needy Families]). The latter program requires adult
heads of household to secure employment and sets a five-year limit with the
worthy goal of curtailing welfare dependency but creating practical problems
pertinent to child care.
Many families living at the urban core feature numerous
adults who are not high school graduates and contain very few members who have
successfully matriculated at a college or university. Low levels of education
and high levels of poverty typically result in households with few books or
electronic sources of the written word. Impoverished and ill-educated adults
are not well-placed to manifest the habits of reading, well-informed
discussion, or sophisticated vocabulary usage. Many have had aversive
experiences in school and regard teachers and school administrators as
intimidating figures. They may of necessity involve themselves when their
children are involved in conflictual situations, but they are not well-prepared
to advocate for their children’s academic interests.
We need community and family outreach personnel at the
Minneapolis Public Schools who by experience and training understand these
historical and contemporary forces that exert pressure and circumscribe the
lives of families dwelling in challenged inner city communities. We must have a
large contingent of employees at MPS who are comfortable walking the streets
and visiting the homes of children living in families facing the challenges of
poverty, dysfunction, or both.
We need outreach workers who comprehend the insecurity
that attends gunshots in the middle of the night, yards cordoned off for police
investigation, high-speed chases involving multiple law enforcement vehicles,
and the possibility that a cracked taillight or lapsed license plate sticker
might result in a driver being thrown up against the hood of a car amidst
unsavory name-calling.
These community outreach staff members also need to
confer with social workers as necessary to provide resource referral when
families are thrust into any of the many possible dilemmas of life at the urban
core: spousal abuse, child abuse, electrical power or running water
curtailment, landlord issues, roof leaks, pest infestation, low food supplies,
inadequate winter clothing, chronic unemployment--- for starters. Well-trained
community outreach workers need to assist families with any problems getting
children to school, whether these are rooted in transportation issues, skewed
familial schedules, sleep habits, or medical issues.
The overpowering message that we need to send to all of
our families is that their children attend schools in which all people of all
ethnicities and economic circumstances are valued equally; that the education
of every child is considered vital; and that staff members of the Minneapolis
Public Schools are dedicated to the school attendance, familial connection,
academic success, and the present and future of every single child.
We need to create a group psychology of love, hope, and
trust in which all students and families anticipate joyful experiences every
day, knowing that there are staff members in place who will remove any
impediment to the expected joy.
We must in the Minneapolis Public Schools establish a
model of the locally centralized school system for the delivery of an education
of excellence to every child, thus leading the nation toward the democracy that
we imagine ourselves to be.
For that to happen, we must prioritize outreach to
families for the resolution of any difficulty preventing the delivery of an
excellent education.
In establishing priorities, we must construct budgets and
create staff positions accordingly. To
his great credit, Ed Graff has made a promising beginning in reducing the
overladen bureaucracy of the Minneapolis Public Schools central offices at 1250
West Broadway.
Now Graff must act as decisively and wisely in assembling
staff capable of implementing the five-point
plan overhauling the Minneapolis Public Schools as he has acted with his
reorganization and bureaucratic paring this far.
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