Volume V, Number 2, August 2018 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<,Fourth in a Multi-Article Series

Article #4

 

Outreach to Families Struggling with Issues of Poverty and Functionality  

 

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

 

At present (August 2018), the Department of Student, Family, and Community Outreach is comprised of the following staff members:

 

Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement Staff Directory

 

(Office of Communications, Engagement, and External Relations)

 

Charisma Smith,Family and School Advocate, Engagement, Education & Outreach Specialist
Ahmed Keynan, Engagement, Education & Outreach Specialist

Antonio Carmona-Elias, Parent Academy Facilitator

Celina Martina, Executive Director, Engagement and External Relations

Jenny Yang, Engagement, Education & Outreach Specialist
Mitchell Roldan, Engagement, Education & Outreach Specialist
Yee Yang, Engagement, Education & Outreach Specialist

 

Ed Graff has thus cut staff at the Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement to just seven members.  This action is 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.

 

With the paring 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

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.