Sarah Lahm
Members of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers at the September 30 rally.
September 30 felt like July in Minneapolis, with temperatures soaring to nearly ninety degrees and humidity levels that seemed almost tropical. But the heat did not deter dozens of Minneapolis Public Schools teachers, support staff, and school nurses from rallying outside Justice Page Middle School in the southwestern corner of the city.
The unions’ demands include more staffing to assist with contact tracing and the provision of N95 face masks—considered by some to be the only mask capable of protecting frontline workers from COVID-19.
Dressed in royal blue union T-shirts emblazoned with a message of unity, proclaiming the union is “All In for Students, Families, and Staff,” members of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers listened to speakers and walked a picket line to inform the public about the union’s current demands, which are numerous and heartbreaking.
Anna Ashcroft, a school nurse, took to the steps of the building and, bullhorn in hand, recounted how exhausted she and many of her colleagues are these days. This is in part because there are five unfilled school nurse positions in the Minneapolis Public Schools, meaning more work for those who are still employed. “Nurses go home crying at the end of the day,” Ashcroft said. “We need help.”
The unions’ demands include more staffing to assist with contact tracing and the provision of N95 face masks—considered by some to be the only mask capable of protecting frontline workers from COVID-19.
Along with a shortage of nurses, there are 150 unfilled educational support positions in the Minneapolis Public Schools, according to Greta Callahan, president of the teacher chapter of the Minneapolis teachers union. (There is also another division within the union that represents support staff.)
This is part of a district-wide staffing crisis that has led to class sizes of up to forty students in some schools, along with a bus driver shortage that has caused Minneapolis Public Schools staff to cancel routes—sometimes in the middle of the school day.
Large class sizes and understaffed schools would be a problem in any school year, but it is especially troubling given the continued spread of the Delta variant. The number of positive COVID-19 cases across Minnesota just reached the highest levels in all of 2021. Recently, an entire high school in Minneapolis was forced to temporarily shut down due to a spike in cases among students.
Students and staff simply cannot maintain the recommended three feet of social distancing in overcrowded classrooms.
Help may be on the way. In March, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, making nearly $2 trillion in COVID-19 relief funds available to businesses, individual taxpayers, and state and local governments. The money is also intended to help school districts get K-12 students safely back to in-person learning this fall.
Sarah Lahm
Members of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers at the September 30 rally.
The portion of these funds allotted to the Minneapolis Public Schools amounts to $159 million. The money has yet to be spent, but district officials have indicated where they’d like it to go, and things like smaller class sizes or more school nurses do not appear to have made the cut.
According to the district’s own data, seventy “stakeholders” offered feedback about how the American Rescue Plan funds should be spent. This number represents a miniscule percentage of the thousands of families who send their children to Minneapolis schools, and likely indicates a less than robust community engagement approach from the district.
Instead, most of the guidance for the COVID-19 relief money appears to be coming from a select group of committee members convened by Ed Graff, the superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Callahan touched on this in a recent opinion piece published by the Star Tribune. In it, she lambastes Graff for putting together a committee that includes “representatives from outside private groups, who have often been hostile toward our schools and educators.”
Rather than appear to address immediate COVID-19 mitigation needs, the committee put together by Graff lists the hiring of outside human relations consultants as a priority, along with the establishment of an in-house teacher licensure program.
Using American Rescue Plan funds to create an internal teacher licensure program struck Callahan as odd, as just more than half of all licensed teachers in Minnesota are currently not in the classroom.
The proposal also designates millions of dollars for building upgrades that are specifically designed to address COVID-19 concerns, such as air quality. This is good, but perhaps not enough considering how easily the Delta variant appears to be spreading among students—in spite of the building improvements.
Parents are already beginning to feel the pinch from classroom shutdowns in Minneapolis, particularly at elementary schools where students are too young to be vaccinated.
Unvaccinated students who are deemed close contacts of someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 currently must quarantine for fourteen days, per Minneapolis Public Schools policy. This is proving burdensome for many families, given the fact that there is no site-based distance learning option (meaning children must be out of school for two weeks during quarantine).
For all of these reasons, Minneapolis teachers and support staff are planning more informational pickets in the days and weeks to come. At the September 30 rally, they appeared together as a wall of bright blue T-shirts, carrying picket signs that demand more resources go to classrooms and support staff. One union member called out: “If we stay together, they can’t break us.”