Article #4 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume XIII, Number 5, November 2026

Article #4

Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams Should Issue Apologies and Resign

                                                                                                    

In a series of events dating from May 2025, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams issued false statements regarding three MPS finance officials (Senior Academic Officer Ibrahima Diop, Executive Finance Director Tariro Chapinduka, and Director of Finance/Controller Aaron Gilbert) that foreshadowed the current dilemmas of the district.

 

Diop’s policies, since arriving at MPS in autumn 2015, had raised the district’s investment grade from A-4 to A-1;  returned the unassigned fund balance to at least 8% of reserves;  inaugurated a lower-premium self-insurance fund;  and made adroit investments of liquid funds, thus receiving the 2022 Council of Great City Schools Bill Wise Award for excellence in public school finance.  After such a stellar performance under four different superintendents, Diop recoiled at two wildly inappropriate reprimands and resigned in December 2025.  In response, Sayles-Adams issued conflicting claims that she was terminating Diop’s employment;  accepting his resignation;  and suspending him indefinitely. 

 

Sayles-Adams then proceeded to hire three outside agencies (paying a total $1,288,286.25) for investigations based on unfounded accusations regarding the MPS finance division, focusing on the following:  Director of Finance/Controller Gilbert’s transferring 5% ($3,000,000) of monthly deposits from a health care account, VEBA (Voluntary Employees Benefits Association), for investment purposes;  the morale of the finance division under Diop’s leadership;  purported errors in coding special education categories that were deemed to have cost the district $11 million in funding from the state;  and incurrence of IRS penalties from late filing.

 

The imputations by Sayles-Adams regarding these matters are contravened by the following facts:

 

1)  The transfer of health account funds by Aaron Gilbert was approved by Ibrahima Diop, standard practice, permissible according to district documents pertinent to liquid funds, and transferred in this case to an account known as the Minnesota School District Liquid Asset Fund used by many Minnesota school districts for increasing revenue via investment.

 

2)  Special education coding errors costing the district $11 million were in fact those of the human resources division, led by Senior Human Resources Officer Alicia Miller, whereby employees had been assigned multiple ID numbers and staff without license were teaching in special education.  And unreported by Sayles-Adams was a total of $15 million in overpayment errors by the operations division under Senior Operations Officer Tom Parent for transportation and food services.

 

3)  IRS penalties were incurred when an understaffed finance division (specifically in payroll, which had sustained mass resignations after a spring 2022 teachers strike) prioritized other responsibilities (especially making sure that staff was paid), resulting in late filing.  Large public and private entities frequently incur such penalties, negotiate the amount to be repaid, and in the end sustain negligible

losses;  Chapinduka had overseen such a process before his dismissal in spring 2025.

 

 

Responsibility for the current financial dilemma of the Minneapolis Public Schools, which faces a $40 million deficit, falls squarely on the Sayles-Adams administration and the MPS Board of Education, both of which recently retreated from the administration’s own plan to close or repurpose sixteen school buildings that over time would have saved many millions of dollars in maintenance and cleaning costs and turned property liabilities into assets by selling the buildings or renting them to outside agencies.

 

The MPS Board of Education has long known of the grave financial condition of the district:  In November 2022 then Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and Senior Finance Officer Diop warned that MPS was facing a "fiscal crisis."  They emphasized that MPS was spending $3,900 more on a per-student basis in general operating costs than the state's 15 other largest districts due to the district’s excessive number and small size of schools;  drastic budgetary changes were imperative.

 

Sayles-Adams and the Board have now squandered the only hope for reducing MPS financial pressures.  Demographic realities are grim for increasing enrollment, and students currently exercising charter, private, or open enrollment options are unlikely to flock back to a district in which less than 42% of students are proficient in reading and mathematics;  curriculum is knowledge-deficient;  and the quality of teaching is extremely poor (too many video and free days, inadequately planned and educationally questionable field trips, overreliance on group work, projects assigned in the absence of contextualizing information, long-term teacher absences without suitable substitutes).

 

Sayles-Adams should resign, current members of the MPS Board of Education should do the same, and apologies should be issued to Ibrahima Diop, Aaron Gilbert, and Tariro Chapinduka for an unconscionable attempt to shift the blame for the plight of this failed school district.