I wrote about this race in the primary and the tl;dr is that my opinion has not changed: I would vote for Christin Crabtree and Collin Beachy.
Here’s who’s on the ballot:
Christin Crabtree (DFL-endorsed)
Stephanie Johnson
Collin Beachy (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Michael Baskins
In the months since the primary, we’ve gotten a new central issue in the race: the proposed “transformation plans” that would close 14 to 16 schools and were presented as a “well, obviously the board needs to pick one of these” set of options. Here’s the thing about school closures (and instability in general) — the district invariably loses students. (To open-enrollment in other districts, private schools, and charters.) Since the money follows the student, you don’t end up saving much. This has further been muddied by the insistance that the point of this plan is not to save money but to “provide a consistent experience” for students across the district.
Some resources on the race worth looking at:
- There’s a Voter Guide with a questionnaire that each candidate responded to. One of the questions was about “rightsizing” the school budget. (I hate that particular buzzword, it makes my skin crawl, but since it’s in the question I can’t really hold it against the candidates who used it in their answer.)
- There was a LWV forum on October 5th. Christin, Michael, and Collin were all there; Stephanie was not.
Stephanie Johnson
Stephanie Johnson still doesn’t have a website. I also can’t find her on social media. Given that she also didn’t come to the forum, I’m honestly not sure whether she’s actually still running.
In her response to the budget question on the Voter Guide questionnaire she said, “closing schools has to be on the table. We are years beyond the school board and superintendent mandating the CDD; since then, it seems district leaders have opted to look the other way rather than take on the truly tough decision to rightsize the district physically. We need to work together to avoid any more stalling of change.” Since she’s basically vanished from the race I’m not sure what her take is on the current specific proposals.
(She may have fully intended to come to the forum and had to miss for an entirely valid reason. But this is in fact why campaign websites, or campaign Facebooks, or campaign Bluesky or Instagram or Twitter accounts, or literally anything that lets you communicate with the voters you want support from, are such a good idea.)
Even if you like what Michael says on his website, I just want to note that he wound up in court for misusing campaign funds while running for City Council because he spent 20% of his campaign money on clothing. His website mentions no endorsements.
He is pro-school-closure. When he responded to the Voter Guide questionnaire he said, “To rightsize the MPS budget, the focus first needs to be on rightsizing the sprawling overcapacity that MPS has in school buildings. Nearly 40% of building capacity currently goes unused.” Which sure sounds like “we absolutely need to close schools.” At the LWV forum, the first question (12 minutes in) was about the transformation plan. He said that he’d been to some of the listening sessions and “frustration is valid due to the half-baked nature of the plan,” but his concerns were mostly with communication strategies: the district had not explained the advantages of the plan, or what district finances look like without the closures. Despite his rhetoric about transparency, he clearly didn’t want to say, on stage and out loud, that he wanted to close 14 to 16 schools in the district.
ETA 10/19: It has been brought to my attention that Michael Baskins also sought and received endorsement from the conservative group (more on them here) the Minnesota Parents’ Alliance (you can see the criteria they cover in their questionnaire and judge candidates by here. Unlike Moms for Liberty, they soft-pedal their conservative views, but that is a tactical difference, not an ideological one. I already did not support Michael Baskins, but this is an additional HARD NO and worth putting somewhere that I’ll see it when he inevitably runs for something else.)
Here’s what I said during the primary: Collin is a special education teacher who has served on the school board for four years and is running for another term. Everyone seems to genuinely like him. School Board member is a job that pays poorly, takes up a lot more time than it’s supposed to, involves getting yelled at a bunch, and is in general a factory for burnout, which means people rarely run for re-election and this creates real issues with institutional memory. So I approach Minneapolis school board races with a pro-incumbent bias when someone’s running again, and I definitely think Collin would continue to be an asset to the school board.
In response to the Voter Guide questionnaire budget question, Collin said, “Our transformation work recognizes that increasing enrollment and improving the student experience go hand in hand. The Board has directed the administration to develop strategies not only to attract new students but also to retain the families who already choose MPS. […] At the same time, we must make responsible financial decisions based on today’s enrollment—not the enrollment we hope to have five years from now. Building long-term trust with families requires both educational excellence and financial sustainability.” I read this as an acknowledgment that they’re going to have to close some schools, but I don’t think he was expecting a plan that closes a minimum of 14. At the LWV forum he acknowledged the strengths of the plan (every student would have a “guaranteed experience” regardless of where they live in the city) but then said the plan was not what the Board expected.
He also gave an interview to a Fox9 streaming show where he said that on one hand, “no decision has been made” and the plans could change, and on the other hand, doing nothing would mean another round of cuts to teachers, staff, and programming.
Here’s what I said about Christin during the primary: Christin is someone I know through social media (Minneapolis Bluesky, mainly); she was heavily involved in organizing against ICE this winter. She’s the kind of person who years ago I’d say “have you ever thought about running for School Board?” and I’m excited that she’s running.
In her Voter Guide questionnaire, she said, “Cuts and closures will not improve the health of Minneapolis; divestment is not a winning strategy for our future. […] MPS must use relational, data driven efforts to retain and attract families while partnering across jurisdictions to implement policies that keep families in Minneapolis. […] Funding from the state is a critical path toward budget stability in Minneapolis and public schools across Minnesota. Minnesota is currently ranked 26th in public education funding in the United States.”
In her response to the question about the closure plan at the LWV forum, she said that the district was being presented with a false choice and that her plan was to get the district’s internal house in order; to make sure there was transparency about school finance; and to empower the placement office and make sure they had multilingual staff. (The placement office is the administrative office that handles “which school, exactly, a kid is going to.” It was a basket case when my older kid was being placed at a school back in 2006 and it seems to be worse now. If you want kids to attend school in Minneapolis, a functional placement office is a key element.)
So. Speaking more broadly about this race: I will note that I don’t, personally, know what ought to be done to fix the Minneapolis Public Schools. “We should be getting more money from the State Legislature” is accurate, and might be possible with a DFL trifecta, but is not something that is actually under the control of the school board. (“We’ll make the legislature give us more money” is something I remember school board candidates saying over and over back during the GOP state trifecta in the early 2000s, and you can imagine how well it worked.) However, closing down fourteen schools and displacing over 3,000 students, around 15% of the MPS population, is going to result in losing a huge number of families. When the CDD was implemented back in 2021, about 14% of MPS students had to change schools, and over 2,000 students left the district. To be fair, a lot was going on in 2021. (This was pointed out to the school board in the spring of 2020 and they passed the CDD anyway.)
The thing about massive disruptions like this is that (a) They’re bad for students. Schools are not just buildings, they’re communities. Kids have friends, they know the teachers, etc. (b) They break trust. Sending your kid to school requires so many complicated layers of trust — in the teachers, in the staff, in the district as a whole. When you mess with that, you lose people. (c) They create a new decision point about where someone’s going to send their kids to school. You have to persuade people who chose MPS once to choose it again, and to choose it again in a situation where MPS has just screwed them and their kid over! At any given moment, a lot of Minneapolis parents are unhappy with MPS, but are disinclined to pull their kids out and send them somewhere else because changing schools is traumatic and difficult. If you’re already putting their kid through the trauma of changing schools, it gets a lot easier to just leave.
Also: the proposal is to close these schools and then let the buildings sit empty. It’s against either law or district policy (I forget which) to sell school buildings to charters (or, I think, private schools), and this creates the problem that there are relatively few groups other than schools that find a school building well-suited to their needs. This came up years ago with Howe school, which is once again on the block for closure. It got closed down in 2005. There was talk of selling the building. There was an arts group that wanted to buy it (this is how I got involved, actually), a developer who wanted the land for housing but wanted the district to pay the money to tear down the building, and a charter school that wanted the building. I went to the neighborhood meetings, which featured a man screaming “FUCK YOU” in my face with zero intervention from the facilitators. After a whole lot of money and time, the building continued to sit empty until in 2013, it was re-opened by the district as the upper campus of Hiawatha (Hiawatha School serves K-2, Howe serves 3-5.)
Something else that is a bad advertisement for MPS: empty buildings sitting indefinitely in a residential neighborhood. (The guy who screamed swear words in my face lived across the street from Howe. He didn’t send his kids to MPS. Also, he considered the two legitimate options for the building to be a school, or tearing it down to build houses. Had to be single-family houses, no multifamily. He was really mad that I thought an arts collective would be a pretty good use for it.)
Anyway. If you close 14 schools (or 15 or 16 schools), the district is going to lose thousands of kids immediately, and thousands more in the next couple of years because more parents will choose other options (private schools, charter schools, open-enrollment in other districts). A tremendous amount of the marketing that happens for MPS happens parent-to-parent. “Oh, your kid goes to [school]? What do you think of it?” When parents say, “We love our school” and says a lot of good things about it, you get more students. When parents say, “Well, we loved our old school but then MPS closed it down…” you get fewer.
So on one hand, I am a little frustrated that both Christin and Collin kind of dodged the question of whether Minneapolis should close any schools. And on the other, I am skeptical that the district can get out of its financial problems by closing schools because every time you close schools you lose so many students. And both Michael and Stephanie seem to treat closing schools as a central part of the solution.
(There’s a whole side thing where the district is now saying they’re not running a deficit, their budget is balanced and the purpose of this plan is not to save money but to use their resources better. But, OK. MPS has had a massive deficit crisis multiple years in a row, don’t try to pretend that’s not going to happen again, and also, if you don’t have a deficit because you’re understaffing a bunch of schools — that’s what the whole “everyone should have the same experience in every school” seems to be talking about, that a bunch of schools don’t have an art teacher, or don’t have a librarian — that’s still a deficit, IMO.)
But also, part of choosing who to vote for involves choosing people. There are four people on the ballot. One never got around to setting up a campaign website or even a campaign Facebook; one is a doofus who spent 20% of his campaign funds on suits when he ran for City Council. I am not 100% satisfied with either Collin or Christin, but I am absolutely convinced that I trust their common sense and their approach more than I trust the other two.
I’ll wrap up by noting that in digging around for information on what candidates were saying about the transformation plan, I ran across a thread on Reddit where someone from a small group of parents shared an alternative transformation plan. It still closes a small number of schools but moves the communities intact to other sites, prioritizes keeping neighborhood schools, and — I actually thought this was the most interesting — has a detailed plan for recruiting and retaining students in MPS. (There are certain infuriatingly recurring themes to school board races and one is, “we need to attract and retain students.” There are suggestions, including really simple suggestions, that have been made over and over and over and never implemented.)
This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.
I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.
