This is the School Board and Park Board district in Southwest Minneapolis, and if you would like to see the boundaries, a map is here. (You can also just check your ballot to see if this race is on it.) There is also an At-Large school board race that appears on everyone’s ballots; I will write about that race as well, but I would like to watch the LWV Forum that will be held on October 10th.)

On the ballot for this race:

Greta Callahan (DFL-endorsed)
Lara Bergman

The incumbent, Ira Jourdain, decided not to run again.

Greta Callahan is best known for being the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers during the 2022 strike. She was elected union president in 2020; before that, she was a kindergarten teacher in North Minneapolis. Lara Bergman is a district educator and a Montessori preschool teacher.

I will say, it did take over an hour and the sound quality was sometimes a little rough, but I found watching the forum held by the Lyndale Neighborhood Association really helpful to clarify my thoughts about this race. (There’s also a pretty good writeup here.)

Things I liked about Greta:

1. She has a long memory. One of my endless frustrations with the Minneapolis School Board is the way they constantly reverse decisions that were made five to ten years ago. (For example, I remember when they closed a bunch of middle schools because they thought parents wanted K-8s, and then the CDD closed a bunch of K-8s because they thought parents wanted middle schools.) I’ve sometimes supported incumbent board members just because the lack of institutional memory on the board is such a problem; she has enough of a memory of the district (from inside) to provide some of that.
   
2. When she talked about district finances, her frustrations were so very much my frustrations. This moment in the forum was one I particularly flagged. The moderator asks, “Are there enough dollars in some of these external contracts to make up the [funding] gap?” and Greta says, “What a great question. Do you know that our union has done a request for information years in a row and we have not received that information on all those outside contracts?” The Minneapolis school district budget has always felt incredibly opaque to me. (To give credit where it’s due, Lara said she wanted to livestream the finance meetings, which would also be a good idea — but fundamentally, the question Greta brings up of what all these things are on the consent agenda, whether they’re of benefit to the kids and worth as much as they cost? that’s way out of my league. I would like a board member asking those questions, though.)
   
3. One of the questions that’s been centered in this race is whether the candidates would close schools. Lara definitely would, and she says a line I’ve heard before: “We can’t be more concerned with saving buildings than what is happening inside those buildings.” The problem is, a school is not just a building; it’s a community. When you dismantle a community, you lose people. Greta said that before closing a school she wanted to know the answer to three questions: How much money would we actually save? How many students would we retain, and how did we get that number? How many students need to enroll to make this school viable? Minneapolis may absolutely need to close schools but when they look at the finances involved, they absolutely also need to consider how many students will leave the district when they do.
   
4. In talking about why families leave the district (42% of Minneapolis children go to school somewhere other than MPS — apparently about half go to charters, and the rest are a mix of open-enrolling in the suburbs, and private) Greta emphasized just how much stability and predictability matter. Parents want to know when they enroll their kid that the school they chose, the program they wanted, the teachers they liked, that all of this is going to stick around. That is, in point of fact, absolutely spot on.

Things I liked about Lara:

1. She’s solidly on the side of evidence-based reading instruction. There have been two educational issues in my lifetime where the conservatives were on the correct side, and phonics is one. (The other was the Profiles of Learning. If you don’t remember those, count your blessings.) Greta said that she’s a fan of science-based anything, but then attacked the budget allocation to train teachers to teach phonics and said that there’s an industry out there telling us children can’t read.
   
   I do think that reading curricula has become a big enough issues that there’s a danger that we’ll swing too far in the other direction and make kids who are fully literate do phonics drills and spend piles of money on the shiniest of shiny new textbooks and so on. But I also think this is a shift the district needs to make.
   
2. In a discussion of the achievement gap, Greta talked about how the tests were racist and everyone should just opt out, and teachers do progress evaluations for each student and that’s all that’s needed. Just with my own kids, I saw a really wide variety in how well teachers were tracking what their students were doing. I am not a fan of testing but I also don’t know how you manage accountability without doing at least some. (And that was Lara’s position.)
   
3. She is also committed to transparency (see above about how she’d livestream and record the finance meetings, which currently are open to the public but you have to literally show up in person if you want to know what happens at them.)

In thinking about who I would vote for, the thing I keep coming back to is the extent to which Lara sounds like a school board member and Greta doesn’t. The stuff Lara says — we need to make hard decisions, we need to build a “thriving system,” there’s been an erosion of trust, I want to listen to diverse stakeholder voices — this is stuff I’ve heard over and over in more school board races than I can remember.

The stuff Greta says — that people should be rioting in the streets (that’s not a paraphrase!), that we need to stop chasing shiny new objects (again, I think that’s a quote), that reading levels are made up, that there are groups that are enemies of the public schools — she does not sound like more of the same. She sounds like she would make problems for the rest of the board.

This might in fact make things worse instead of better. things have been so bad for so long I kind of think the troublemaker might be worth a try.

I’m also really struck by the fact that Greta clearly has a list of questions she’s itching to ask once she has the power to do so. Really specific questions. I have concerns about electing the former union president, because the thing is, the union’s job is to support the interests of teachers and the job of the board is to do what’s best for students and while these two things align a lot of the time, they don’t align all the time.

I think I would vote for Greta.

(A final note, for anyone looking at this because they have a preferred candidate in the race and just want to make sure she’s not an awful right-wing weirdo: they are both fine. You can vote for either candidate and get someone who will fight to make sure this district continues to support LGBTQ students, social-emotional learning as a concept, diversity initiatives, etc.)

ETA 10/8 to add:

I got an e-mail from a current school board member, Joyner Emerick. (Link goes to my post about last year’s race; they had a different first name but the same last name at the time.) Joyner (who emphasized they’re speaking solely for themself) feels strongly that Lara would be a better board member, and wanted to raise a couple of specific points. First, Joyner sits on the Finance committee, and says that Lara comes to observe those meetings every month; they do not recall ever seeing Greta come to one. Lara recently attended training with Edunomics on school finance, improving her preparation to serve. They appreciate Lara’s commitment to evidence-based literacy and are very concerned about Greta pooh-poohing evidence-based literacy instruction. (They noted that Greta has campaigned on her program to bring people in to read to kids, and while that’s a really nice program and valuable in various ways, it can’t be a substitute for direct instruction of decoding skills.)

Regarding the contracts in the consent agenda, Joyner said, “I’m not sure if the public can conceptualize how many contracts we are talking about, and how variable the purposes are. We’re talking about canned food for student lunches, software to prevent hacking, third party auditors for our annual audit, pest control, classroom furniture, light bulbs. […] There are also contracts of very high ethical value, like our school based mental health contracts with community orgs, which help us deliver the most culturally responsive services possible while deepening relationships with the neighborhoods where our schools are located. […] So, cutting outside contracts is not really as simple or favorable as some might think.” And also added, “We don’t have someone at Davis who sits around handling data requests all day. People do that work on top of their assigned duties. While I would never discourage folks from requesting data, I also know that adding more central office administrative positions to push paper around is likely not high on anyone’s priority list in a budget crisis. Like MFT, I would rather money be spent as close to kids as possible. Putting together info about dozens or hundreds of contracts is an extremely time consuming task. It’s not wrong to demand transparency of MPS and we have a lot of work to do there, but the lack of return on that data request doesn’t represent lack of transparency. It represents lack of admin staff capacity.” Finally: “Every contract over $100,000 (contextualize that in a $700 million dollar operating budget) has to be public and is in our meeting materials for business meetings on Board Book, with links to the contract and a description of what it’s buying. So if anyone, MFT or any member of the public, wanted access to all external contracts over $100,000, they could get them right now.”

So — yeah, I don’t know. I feel like both of these candidates bring valuable things to the table. I appreciate Greta’s confrontational approach but I also appreciate candidates who have sat through a lot of meetings to learn about the job they want to do, especially if they stayed for the boring parts.

ETA 10/25: John Edwards at WedgeLIVE interviewed both candidates. You can watch Greta here, Lara here. (It’s also available as a podcast, which is how I listened to it.) I also got an e-mail about an endorsement Lara received (from this year’s Minnesota Teacher of the Year); you can see all her endorsements here.

ETA 10/28: Fundamentally when I think about Greta’s strengths, one thing I come back to is something she brought up in her conversation with John Edwards, she has a lot of trust from the teachers and employees and if she says, “we cannot get the money we need and have to close schools,” they will believe her. When I think about Lara’s strengths, the thing I come back to is that she has spent months (maybe years) going to the finance meetings. Hardly anyone arrives on the board with in-depth knowledge of the finances. (I also come back to her commitment to evidence-based literacy.)

They would each bring really distinct things to the board.

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I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser!