Ben Garvin
Dolores Rufenacht (left) and Anna Mosser are fighting to keep St. Andrew’s Church from being razed to accommodate the expansion of a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Community activism is nothing new for Dolores Rufenacht. The St. Paul resident has lived in the same neighborhood, in the shadow of the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, since 1977. Since then, she has fought her share of battles—for a playground in danger of being overrun by drug dealers; for green space the city was neglecting in nearby Como Park; and now, for a Catholic church building that is on the brink of being torn down.
The church in question is St. Andrew’s. Built in 1927 in the Romanesque Revival style, the brown brick church boasts an impressive, multicolored terra-cotta tile roof and a handsome bell tower. From the street, it looks alive and well kept, although Mass hasn’t been celebrated there since 2011.
Back then, the shrinking parish was merged with another one nearby while the building sat in limbo for two years. In 2013, the Twin Cities German Immersion School, a growing charter school in search of a permanent home, began leasing the church building and its accompanying school site by taking on $8 million in construction and real-estate debt.
“Charter schools—with some notable exceptions—focus on individual students, seeing their neighborhoods as something to overcome rather than strengthen.”
Now, just six years later, the school wants to tear St. Andrew’s Church down and build a new school building on the same site for more than $6 million. School representatives say it would be too costly to move and that a new building would better accommodate its growing student body. Rufenacht, a former parishioner at St. Andrew’s, is part of a group of neighbors working to block the demolition of the church building, at least for now.
“We were happy when Twin Cities German Immersion School bought the building because they acted like they loved our church,” Rufenacht recalls in an interview. But then, she says, trouble set in. “The school grew and grew and grew. They had a fast growth plan. I don’t mind the growth, but they have to grow someplace else.”
What is happening in St. Paul illustrates some of the larger tensions around the proliferation of charter schools, which have long been key on the agenda of antigovernment conservatives, including Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s controversial Secretary of Education, and liberals like Senator Cory Booker, who allowed for a massive charter takeover of public schools as mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
The nation’s first charter school opened in St. Paul in 1992. Since then, the charter school sector, as it is often called, has spread to forty-three more states, as well as the District of Columbia. Charter schools are funded with federal and state public education dollars but operate separately from traditional school districts.
Supporters say this gives charter schools the freedom to innovate and serve students whose needs are not met by larger school systems. Detractors say this allows public money to flow to private hands with little oversight. Wealthy philanthropic organizations, such as the Walton Family Foundation of Walmart fame, have invested billions to support the spread of charter schools, most of which are nonunion.
Today, more than three million students in grades K-12 are enrolled in close to 7,000 charters. While this accounts for slightly more than 5 percent of all public school students in the United States, it represents a dramatic increase over the past decade. Now, communities like Rufenacht’s are scrambling to figure out what to do when an expanding charter school comes knocking.
“I am not anti child or anti school,” says Erin Dooley, a neighbor of Rufenacht’s who is also working to block the Twin Cities German Immersion School from tearing down St. Andrew’s Church. “But there has been an undercurrent of frustration here. We have been characterized as NIMBYs but nothing could be further from the truth.”
The rapid expansion of charter schools is largely an urban problem. More than 80 percent of all charters in the United States are located in metropolitan areas, where real estate prices are higher and school sites harder to come by, and where longstanding issues regarding housing and school segregation remain potent.
Charter schools, by design, are not neighborhood schools. They are program-driven alternatives that are first drawn out on paper and then approved by a state agency. Once they start attracting students, they can hunt for a building to work in, although a small percentage of charter schools exist only online.
The potential disconnect between school and neighborhood caught the eye of longtime community school advocate Martin Blank, in 2016. In an article for the online journal Shelterforce, Blank raised a pointed question: “What responsibility do public charter schools have to the neighborhoods where they are located?”
In cities like Washington, D.C., he noted, where almost half of all school-age kids attend charters, students are “scattered” about the city, living in one neighborhood but traveling to a different one for school.
“Americans typically see public schools as part of their neighborhood’s fabric,” Blank wrote, as well as “among the places where our society nurtures social capital.” But, as neighbors such as Rufenacht and Dooley are experiencing in St. Paul, “charter schools—with some notable exceptions—focus on individual students, seeing their neighborhoods as something to overcome rather than strengthen.”
When it comes to the Twin Cities German Immersion School, Anna Mosser would likely agree with this sentiment. She moved to her Como Park neighborhood home in 2012, and the Twin Cities German Immersion School moved close by, to the St. Andrew’s site, one year later. At first, she was pleased. “I thought it was neat that the school was using the sanctuary of the old church as their gym,” she recalls, noting that many residents think of the St. Andrew’s building as a neighborhood anchor.
Sarah Lahm
The neighbors of St. Andrew’s constructed a “wall of protest” near the church.
Before long, however, Mosser realized that having a fast-growing charter school just down the block was going to cause problems. The Twin Cities German Immersion School “will never be a neighborhood school,” she says, “because they have a lottery enrollment application system to follow. There is no neighborhood preference given.”
With the school growing every year, from about 320 students in 2012-2013 to more than 500 in 2016-2017, tensions have arisen between neighbors and the school community. School officials have said that their goal is to cap out at around 650 students in grades K-8.
“Even in the first year of them moving in,” Mosser says, “there were problems with traffic and a lack of on-site parking. It is scary, honestly. Most kids come by car, and there are kids and parents walking all over the place, whipping around school buses and cars.”
Twin Cities German Immersion School parent and board chair, Kelly Laudon, argues however that, thanks to the school, “life has come back” to Mosser’s Como Park neighborhood. “It has been a positive for property values,” she insists, noting that the church and its school building had not been fully in use for years before the Twin Cities German Immersion School moved in.
For Nick Faber, president of the St. Paul Federation of Educators, the problems with charter schools like the Twin Cities German Immersion School go beyond traffic congestion or even the destruction of neighborhood landmarks. For one thing, there is the basic concept of school choice.
“There is a mindset, represented in part by charter schools, that competition will breed excellence,” Faber notes. “In this model, schools are forced to compete against each other for students and resources.” This is a problem for families, he insists, who are under an “unfair amount of pressure” to make the right choice for their kids.
“We have lost our collective vision,” he believes. As competition from the city’s more than two dozen charter schools grows, the St. Paul public school system is “bleeding students and funds,” he says. “We have half-full buildings that are in danger of closing or being sold.”
Faber’s point was backed up by a December 2018 article in the Twin Cities Pioneer Press. “Enrollment falls again in St. Paul Public Schools,” warned the headline, “and district officials are concerned.” About 60 percent of the city’s school age kids attend St. Paul public schools, the article states, while close to 20 percent go to charters. The rest are split between private schools and other options, including the opportunity to open-enroll into neighboring districts.
When students leave the district, they take their per-pupil funding dollars with them. This requires districts to then do more with less as costs for things such as building maintenance do not necessarily decrease when student enrollment numbers dip.
This situation is not unique to St. Paul. In 2018, education reporter Matt Barnum wrote about the impact of charter schools and choice on school districts for Chalkbeat, an education news site. His piece covered a recent study from Duke University, where researchers studied how much the expansion of charter schools cut into existing districts and their finances.
The researchers, Helen Ladd of Duke University and John Singleton of the University of Rochester, wrote that charter schools “may expand choice for some students while imposing costs on taxpayers and students [who] remain in district schools.” The exact impact is tough to document but came out to hundreds of dollars per student for the six districts they studied.
But money isn’t the reason the St. Paul NAACP opposed the proposed expansion of the Twin Cities German Immersion School. Instead, it is segregation. The group, in a statement issued on December 19, 2018, cited the national NAACP’s 2016 call for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools and argued that allowing the Twin Cities German Immersion School to grow further would “exacerbate the racial and economic segregation in the St. Paul schools.”
The Twin Cities German Immersion School is almost 90 percent white, the NAACP statement noted, while just 7 percent of its students live in poverty, as defined by federal guidelines. That represents a sharp difference from the student population at Como Park Elementary, a neighborhood school in the St. Paul system that sits just one mile away from the Twin Cities German Immersion School.
At Como Park Elementary, only 10 percent of its nearly 500 students are white and the majority live in poverty.
In 2017, the Associated Press documented the problem of segregation and charter schools.
“National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation,” the news service found, before noting that this often leads to poor academic outcomes for these students. What the report didn’t touch on was the concept of white flight and the way public dollars are being used to fund majority white charter schools in otherwise diverse areas.
The Hechinger Report, an education news source, did cover white flight charter schools in 2018. With the help of an investigative journalism grant, reporter Emmanuel Felton found that “there are at least 747 public charter schools around the country that enroll a higher percentage of white students than any of the traditional public schools in the school districts where they are located.”
Felton further documents how little segregation has factored into the push to expand charter schools in the United States. “The federal government,” he says, “has played a role in the growth of these charters by granting charter startup grants to schools without considering whether they will lead to increased segregation.”
In Minnesota, this problem is made worse by the fact that it is the only state in the country where charter schools do not have to follow the same desegregation rules as traditional public schools. Public schools within school districts have to attempt to avoid a concentration of racially and economically isolated students while privately run, publicly funded charter schools do not.
The justification for this exemption in Minnesota is that charter schools represent choice, and segregation by choice is different from segregation by law. School choice advocates have argued that independently run charter schools that cater to niche populations, whether it is Hmong, African American, or white, perhaps, should exist because they represent innovation and choice for families.
A lawsuit to address this is currently moving through the Minnesota court system, with the plaintiffs arguing that their rights are not being met in a system that is still largely segregated. Laudon, school board chair for Twin Cities German Immersion School, said in an interview that the school “would be in favor of changing state integration laws around charter schools.”
Meanwhile, the fate of St. Andrew’s Church is yet to be decided. Rufenacht, Dooley, Mosser, and several of their neighbors have organized to try to save the church from being razed. When they realized, thanks to a neighborhood newsletter, that the school was planning to reduce the church to rubble and build a new, three-story building in its place, they banded together in a group called Save Historic St. Andrew’s.
Mosser remembers back to 2017, when St. Paul Public Schools engaged the community in a lengthy planning process over a building project at nearby Como Park Senior High.
Today, she says, it’s a different story. “The Twin Cities German Immersion School created a website about their plans after they had been finalized.”