The Major Disappointments: Adriana Cerrillo, Sharon El-Amin, and Joyner Emerick
Adriana Cerrillo
Adriana Cerrillo
District 4 Member
612-986-1613
Adriana.Cerrillo@mpls.k12.mn.us
Term: 2025-2029
Adriana Cerrillo sees herself as a community activist and organizer advocating for policies to protect and include marginalized communities, with particular emphasis on United States government policies seeking to deport undocumented immigrants. While living in Florida, Cerrillo advocated successfully for an undocumented immigrant mother in urgent need of medical attention, raising enough money for the woman’s care and founding the Juliana Mateo Foundation for Disabled Farmworkers.
As a Florida resident, Cerrillos served as a teacher at UnidosNow.org and established the Future Leaders Academy for Youth; she Adriana stood with Manatee County teachers as they sought better pay and she worked with Florida non-profits statewide successfully to prevent passage of anti-immigrant bill SB-1070. Three years later, Adriana received the NAACP’s 2013 Unsung Heroine Award for her community activism.
In Minnesota (Cerrillo moved to Minneapolis 2013), she successfully sought the termination of a police officer cop guilty of racial profiling in Chaska and in various ways has worked to increase citizen consciousness of civic participation and activism, to protect immigrant and refugee rights, and as a family advocate has organized parents at Emerson and other MPS schools.
Gary Marvin Davison Critique of Adriana Cerrillo as a Member of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education
Cerrillo came to the Board as a reformer and advocate for Latine/Hispanic students; only the latter now applies. She was instrumental in the district establishing an Office of Latine Achievement, an unfortunate bureaucratic response to a definite academic need. But she has embraced all of the establishment organizations that undergird school boards and connect these ineffective entities to one another. Cerrillo came to the Board as the head of an unremunerative organization she dubbed Radical Solutions; one of the reasons that Cerrillo has so readily been coopted by the school board establishment is that the $20,000 paid to members is surely a major supplement to her meager income.
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Sharon El-Amin
Sharon El-Amin
District 2 Member
612-986-3281
Sharon.El-Amin@mpls.k12.mn.us
Term: 2025-2029
Sharon El-Amin represents District 2, covering Northside Minneapolis. She has been a resident of Minneapolis for twenty years. She and her husband of 30 years, Makram El-Amin (the imam at Masid An-Nur mosque), ran a fresh fish shop in North Minneapolis for many years. El-Amin has been active in the Minneapolis Public Schools as a parent and in 2019 founded P.A.R.O.S (Parents Alliance Reclaiming Our Schools).
El-Amin has 3 children, two of which graduated from MPS, and she has a granson who is still a student in the district.
Gary Marvin Davison Critique of Adriana Cerrillo as a Member of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education
El-Amin, despite having a weak grasp of Robert’s Rule of Order, served ably as chair from January 2022 though January 2023. She facilitated an extended contract for Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox that allowed the latter to move forward the innovative academic initiatives of online ACT tutoring, online high-dosage tutoring, Basic Skill Intervention Triads and, more subtly, a move toward greater knowledge intensity in curriculum.
But, disastrously, El-Amin seems to have maneuvered to bring Lisa Sayles-Adams to the district as superintendent and, although expressing the need to improve academics and to evaluate building usage, has been no more effective with regard to those needs than have other Board members.
Joyner Emerick
At-Large Member
612-472-6074
Joyner.Emerick@mpls.k12.mn.us
Term: 2023-2027
Joyner Emerick (any pronouns) is a Minneapolis Public Schools graduate, a lifelong Minneapolis resident, and a parent of an MPS student with complex disabilities. Joyner’s educational advocacy is rooted in their experience navigating Special Education—a system meant to ensure that every child has equal access to education but which fails to address systemic barriers and gaps in opportunity for many students. Joyner uses these personal experiences as a framework to stand up for all underserved kids in our district. As a disabled person, Joyner brings needed lived experience subject matter expertise in the areas of disability justice and equity in MPS.
Joyner believes fiercely that all students are engaged, motivated and skilled learners, and that it is the job of educational leadership to remove barriers. Joyner is passionate about frameworks and practices that honor all student strengths, needs, and identities as valuable and enriching characteristics of our learning communities. Joyner is committed to elevating student voice and developing our future leaders by giving our children opportunities to successfully lead today.
“The first step to building power in a community is building trust. Nobody should trust you when the first words out of your mouth layer on more shame and criticism. Nobody should trust you if you operate like you're only here for the ‘good ones.’ Nobody should trust you if you operate like you fundamentally don't need them in the work of transformation.” —Aaron Scott
Gary Marvin Davison Critique of Adriana Cerrillo as a Member of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education
Emerick is an advocate for special education students who has an overly sanguine view as to how thoroughly high-needs students can be mainstreamed.
Emerick does, along with Sharon El-Amin, realize that buildings need to be evaluated for closing and repurposing, and they (Emerick accepts all pronouns) correctly question curriculum and pedagogy in the district (to the great irritation of Lori Norvell) --- but Emerick has an errant view of curriculum and pedagogy that they apparently do not realize has roots to anti-knowledge ideology that emerged at Teachers College/Columbia University from the 1920s that eventually gained prominence in the 1970s and has academically haunted our students ever since.
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