Tag Archives: Minneapolis school board

Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board, District 3

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Shannon Gibney is running unopposed. Shannon is great (she’s a local writer and I have met her various times in our capacity as Fellow Local Writers; I also love her books). I would almost certainly tell you to vote for her anyway, but also: no one’s running against her. I am posting this entirely because sometimes, when I don’t post about an unopposed candidate, I get confused, worried e-mails from people wondering when I’m going to write about the race. Here you go! Vote for Shannon!

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.

Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board, District 5

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There wasn’t a primary in this race, because only two people filed. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Becca Dryden (DFL-endorsed)
Molly Chase

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 that included all the people running for School Board Districts 1, 3, and 5. So Abdul and Ben for District 1; Shannon Gibney for District 3 (she is running unopposed); and Molly Chase and Becca Dryden for District 5.

Becca Dryden

Becca is an organizer with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools and was heavily involved in organizing her school community (to provide monitors, mutual aid, etc.) during Metro Surge. In addition to the DFL endorsement, she’s endorsed by a ton of individual elected officials. A couple of things I particularly appreciate on her website: she’s not as anti-tech as me but she’s in favor of a lot of limits and in particular barring contracts with “techno-fascist” companies. Her response to the school closure plan includes a demand that they actually call it what it is and drop the pretense that this is about “transformation.” She talks on her website about strengthening the Gender Inclusion policy, and training school staff to keep students safe from ICE.

Molly Chase

Molly Chase is a nonprofit consultant and has served on the boards of a number of arts organizations. She’s also the mother of a first grader. I appreciate that she’s vehemently anti-tech-in-schools and brings finance experience (in both the corporate and non-profit worlds).

(It’s interesting to me that so many people are running on a “GET TECHNOLOGY OUT OF THE CLASSROOMS” platform this year — it feels like a very abrupt shift, and I’m not sure what drove it. Was it having AI forced on us from every direction? studies on social media and kids? Molly, in her Voter Guide questionnaire response, comments that “an enrollment issue that deserves more attention is parental concern about the gamification of early learning. Momentum against big tech in the classroom is building fast among families, and I believe it’s already shaping enrollment decisions in ways MPS hasn’t caught up to yet.” This may be correct.)

Molly has no endorsements from politicians, although she has a funny page where she acknowledges that one purpose of endorsements is to make sure someone isn’t a secret Republican and says, “I’m a Warren variety of Democrat. I’ve voted Dem/DFL in every election since I first qualified to vote. […] I’m not financed by a corporation or a PAC. I’m not secretly a Republican. Or MAGA. Or a book-burner. Or someone who claims to love public schools but undermines them with voucher schemes and other nonsense.” All of which is good to know. She also has a number of enthusiastic community endorsements from people who’ve worked with her on nonprofit boards and so on.

I would vote for Becca. The thing I actually found most helpful in terms of making up my mind was the LWV forum. There were some questions where Molly seemed very out of her depth; at some point she talked about how a cheap thing to change would be school hours, which … no, that’s really not cheap, that’s incredibly complicated because of transportation factors. Later in a discussion of the achievement gap, she talked about wanting to lower class sizes to 13-18 kids and talked about how we needed “the financial will to make it happen,” and that just seemed divorced from the financial realities of the Minneapolis school district, honestly.

ETA: I got an e-mail from Molly saying that she felt she’d struggled in the forum to communicate her ideas in the allotted time, and she had expanded her website to include more information on what she wants to do. I am linking to the page.

Looking at these school board races really does make me appreciate Minneapolis, though. Intra-party disagreements still matter, there are real differences among the candidates, and also: no one here is a secret Republican, no one’s trying to ban books, no one’s trying to terrorize our LGBTQ+ students or our immigrant students. I appreciate that so much.

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.

Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board, District 1

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There wasn’t a primary in this race, because only two people filed. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Abdul Abdi (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Ben Lattimore

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 that included all the people running for School Board Districts 1, 3, and 5. So Abdul and Ben for District 1; Shannon Gibney for District 3 (she is running unopposed); and Molly Chase and Becca Dryden for District 5.

Abdul Abdi

Abdul is running for re-election and I think has been on the board for just one term. (If someone has had opponents, I can look at my old posts, but I usually don’t write about people when they’re unopposed.) In addition to serving on the school board, he’s a software architect and a father. He has been the Treasurer on the current school board.

Ben Lattimore

Ben Lattimore is a Business Ed teacher. The issues he’s running on include more effective financial oversight (“It is clear MPS needs better finance and accounting processes and governance. The same district office that has been losing track of millions in special education expenses (that could have been reimbursed by the state), is saying there is no way to stabilize the district’s budget besides this school closure plan? I am not buying it” and less technology (“My primary tech-related initiatives are: (1) Transition away from ‘one-to-one’ student laptops in favor of shared laptop carts; (2) Stop the current policy of issuing iPads to students in PreK – 2nd grade; and (3) Adopt a stricter, phone-free school environment policy from bell-to-bell.”)

During the LWV forum, Ben said he was not opposed to school closings in principle but he was appalled by the plan that’s been presented; it contains no evidence and no data and is saturated in corporate jargon. His website has a long, detailed, passionate case against the plan that was presented. I will note that at one point he says, “We have ~55,000 school aged youth living in the MPS district boundaries. MPS currently enrolls ~55% of those students. Getting that number up to 78% (~43,000 students) would put MPS buildings at full capacity.” That would require 13,000 kids to move back to the Minneapolis Public Schools from charters, private schools, etc. During the Great Recession, a lot of kids did move back to MPS from private (because dropping your private school tuition and moving your kid over was an extremely easy expense to cut for many families) but I’m not sure how those numbers compare.

Ben has no endorsements and one of my concerns about candidates with no endorsements (especially when they’re running for School Board) is that they’re secret Republicans, but watching the LWV forum was very reassuring on that point. He was very clearly a DFLer.

ETA 10/19: OR MAYBE NOT. It has been brought to my attention that Ben Lattimore 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 Ben Lattimore but this is an additional HARD NO.)

As I mentioned on my post about the At-Large race, I generally have a pro-incumbency bias with the Minneapolis School Board because this is a terrible job, and decision-making has suffered over the years in part because of a lack of institutional memory.

I think my biggest question is whether it’s fair to blame Abdul Abdi, as Treasurer and person who’s served on the finance committee, for MPS’s worst financial fuckups in the last few years. (To name a couple: the district lost out on tens of millions of dollars of reimbursement from the state for special education expenses because they screwed up coding. They screwed up their taxes and had to pay a $5 million penalty to the IRS. Several Finance department employees were fired or forced to resign after diverting money from a health care trust fund to an investment account. This wasn’t embezzlement, to be clear, they thought that it made sense to temporarily invest that money, and they may have been correct, but this also looked shady enough that the district spent a bunch of money on a forensic audit.) The thing is, these were not errors made by the School Board; they were made by district staff. The Board does oversee stuff like whether the Finance department has adequate staff, so this reflects poorly on their past decisions, but there’s also tremendous pressure to cut “overhead” and “administrative stuff” and not all the things (teachers, counselors, etc.) that have direct contact with kids.

Fundamentally, part of why I approach school board races with a pro-incumbent bias is that it’s really easy to blame the Board for everything that went wrong and assume that replacing them will solve the problems, when in fact it removes the people who know why the stuff went wrong in the first place. I think I would vote for Abdul Abdi, but this is a hard one, because Ben Lattimore seems smart and knowledgeable, and I also like his anti-tech stance. ETA: one of my Bluesky friends lives by Abdul Abdi and says “Abdul Abdi is my neighbor, his kids all went to MPS schools, and he is against the current school transformation plans. He’s also just a really nice neighbor so I will be enthusiastically voting for him again.” (I thought that was worth adding.)

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.

Election 2024: Minneapolis School Board, District 6

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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.

Continue reading →

Primary Elections 2024: Minneapolis School Board At-Large

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There is one seat, and three people are running; two will advance to the general election in November.

Kim Ellison (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Elena Condos
Shayla Owodunni

Kim Ellison is almost certainly going to make it through to the general election (she’s DFL-endorsed and the incumbent) so rather than deciding which of these three I most want to see win, I’m going to decide which of the other two I most want to see advance. (I have a general bias towards Minneapolis school board incumbents, because it’s a hard job, very few people stick with it, and the lack of institutional memory is often a problem. However, I’m not a huge fan of Kim Ellison.)

Elena Condos ran in 2022 for the seat in District 5; her website this time is identical to her website last time, and she doesn’t have a campaign Facebook or Twitter or in general seem to be doing much. (She does seem to have a personal Facebook but she’s shared nothing about the race that I saw.)

Shayla Owodunni became interested in the job by volunteering in the schools, and got so engaged in it that she set up a YouTube channel where she reads picture books and then started digging into the district finances and concluded that her background in corporate finance and accountability could actually be really useful. She’s got a campaign Facebook up and held a meet-and-greet; a teacher on Twitter who went to meet her described her as “lovely” and “the real deal.”

Anyway, despite the corny running gardening joke on her website (she’s very into plants so she starts out with “seeds of change” and that theme never lets up!) I like her. For the primary, this is an easy choice: Shayla Owodunni.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I get a lot of satisfaction by pointing people at fundraiser that I can then see fund. I may mix things up later but for now, if you’d like to make a donation to encourage my work, please send some money to this young adult raising money for top surgery. (Ly is someone I know personally; they were a good friend of my kids when they were younger, and they were possibly the very first person I ever knew who used they/them pronouns. They grew up into an activist and work for TIGERRS, a support organization for trans and intersex young people.)

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board, District 5

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Confusingly, all the school districts in the state have district numbers (Minneapolis is District 1) but also Minneapolis is split into 6 geographical areas for Park Board and School District seats. This seat is on some ballots in South Minneapolis but not others. This was made extra confusing by redistricting — if you’re uncertain, you can view your sample ballot on the Secretary of State’s site by putting in your zip code and address. This seat is currently held by Nelson Inz, who is not running for re-election.

In District 1, Abdul Abdi is running unopposed. In District 3, Fathia Feerayarre is running unopposed. The School Board reps from Districts 2, 4, and 6 are not on the ballot this year; those seats will be up for election in 2024.

District 5 has two candidates:

Laurelle Myhra
Lori Norvelle

Laurelle Myhra is an Anishinabe woman who directs a wellness clinic; she’s a licensed family therapist and one of her top priorities is “culturally-relevant and trauma-informed education and curriculum.” She is vice chair of the American Indian Parent Advisory Committee.

One hesitation I had about her is that she describes herself as Christian on her first page, and that can be a red flag for anti-trans bigotry specifically. I e-mailed her to ask, and she responded to say, “I do not personally support discrimination of LGBT or any other marginalized group. In fact, I’m seeking endorsement by a LGBT advocacy group.” (I checked her endorsements and I don’t see that one, so I do not think she got it.)

Lori Norvelle was a middle-school math teacher until recently (and then burned out and quit). Prior to being a math teacher, she worked as a special education assistant and a substitute teacher. She’s also an MPS parent and her major priorities could kind of be summed up as “repairing the damage” (technically, that’s her second priority; her first is recruiting and retaining staff, but that’s totally also “repairing the damage,” I think, and her third priority is “reclaiming our success as a district” which on closer inspection of details like “careful research in advance of making decisions and allowing time for feedback,” I’d sum up as “trying not to break anything worse.”) I like these priorities. They make a lot of sense to me.

The thing I find most appealing about Laurelle is that she would bring expertise about trauma and recovery, which would be genuinely useful right now. But in this race, I would go ahead and prioritize experience in the classroom; I think, post-strike, that adding teachers and recent former teachers to the board is potentially a path toward healing. I have been thoroughly persuaded that more people coming from the teachers’ perspective on the Minneapolis school board would be a really good idea. Also, she seems to have a clear idea of where Minneapolis is as a district. I would vote for Lori Norvelle.

So a week or two back, it looked like WordPress had deleted most of my subscribers? But now it’s back to saying I have 10,143 instead of 473. But if you rely on e-mail to notify you I’ve posted, and this is the first post you’ve seen this year, you should know I’ve posted a bunch of other posts! Also, if you’re not a subscriber, plugging in your e-mail in the subscriber box (you may have to do this on desktop rather than phone) will get you an e-mail every time I post. That might not sound appealing, but if it does, now you know.

If you’d like to make a donation to encourage me to keep working on these, I am highlighting a science teacher at Sullivan STEAM magnet who needs some better computers so his students can actually program the cool robots they got. Or, you can donate to the Movement Voter fundraiser I created; I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and the fundraiser is still active.

In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNet and signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven and the NOW REOPENED Uncle Hugo’s (it’s at 2716 E 31st St in Minneapolis, in the former Glass Endeavors.)

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board At-Large

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Well, this turned into kind of a clusterfuck of a race. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

KerryJo Felder (DFL-endorsed)
Collin Beachy (DFL-endorsed)
Sonya Emerick
Lisa Skjefte

In the primary, I said I would vote for KerryJo Felder because the school board suffers from chronic lack of institutional memory due to people rarely serving more than one term (KerryJo is not an incumbent, but served one term from 2016-2020) and Sonya Emerick because I was impressed by their responsiveness and thoughtfulness. It turned out that part of why I hadn’t heard back from Collin was because he’d had COVID — and I felt bad about that, but also, it was a primary, the DFL-endorsed candidates can be expected to sail through a primary, and so I was not super worried about it.

Lisa Skjefte has no website, although she has been coming to candidate forums.

I’m going to put a break here and FYI: this is going to get long. If you want to skip straight to who I would vote for: Collin Beachy and Sonya Emerick.

Continue reading →

Primary Elections 2022: Minneapolis School Board (District 5)

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Confusingly, all the school boards have district numbers (Minneapolis is District 1) but also Minneapolis is split into 6 geographical areas for Park Board and School District seats. This seat is on some ballots in South Minneapolis but not others. This was made extra confusing by redistricting — if you’re uncertain, you can view your sample ballot on the Secretary of State’s site by putting in your zip code and address. This seat is currently held by Nelson Inz, who is not running for re-election.

There are four people on the ballot:

Laurelle Myhra
Leslie Haugland-Smith
Elena Condos
Lori Norvell

Laurelle Myhra

Laurelle Myhra is an Anishinabe woman who directs a wellness clinic; she’s a licensed family therapist and one of her top priorities is “culturally-relevant and trauma-informed education and curriculum.” She is vice chair of the American Indian Parent Advisory Committee.

One hesitation I had about her is that she describes herself as Christian on her first page, and that can be a red flag for anti-trans bigotry specifically. I e-mailed her to ask, and she responded to say, “I do not personally support discrimination of LGBT or any other marginalized group. In fact, I’m seeking endorsement by a LGBT advocacy group.” Which reassured me a bit about her intentions if not her specific expertise there. But — she would bring a lot of expertise about the needs and traumas of Indigenous kids (and expertise about trauma-informed education generally, which I think would be genuinely useful right now.)

Leslie Haugland-Smith

Leslie Haugland-Smith wrote a letter to the editor about the schools that was published in the Star Tribune in June. I can find nothing else about her: she doesn’t seem to be on either Facebook or LinkedIn. Definitely falls into the category of “not actually running.” EDITED TO ADD: the coworker of one of her kids saw this post and sent me a link to her website, so I’ve added the link! She wants to increase enrollment, lobby the legislature for more money, and ensure that students graduate “with a sense of responsibility and purpose.”

Elena Condos

Elena Condos listed her LinkedIn page as her campaign site when she filled out her affidavit of candidacy, and when I started researching this, that’s the only page I could find. (I have complained a few times about people using their personal Facebook as their only campaign conduit so let me just say — LinkedIn is so much worse.) From this I could see that she really liked hashtags (#powerwoman #changemaker) but not much else.

She’s now got a website up, where she has an acronym to tell you what’s important to her (“TISA: Transparency, Innovation, Security, Achievement.”) She goes on to elaborate on those slightly — for example, “Security enhanced learning: Adapting our schools and staff to engage with problems before they become a police event.” That could be either very good or very bad and without more information on what she even means here, it’s hard to say. She has a management background and says, “I have over 20 years of experience in organizational management from partnering to create a strategic vision to day-to-day people and operation leadership.” My response to everything in that statement: no thank you.

Lori Norvell

Lori Norvell is the endorsed DFL candidate. She’s a parent and also worked for the Minneapolis Public schools for almost ten years as a sub, a special education assistant, and a teacher. According to her LinkedIn, she quit last year and now works as an Executive Assistant for the Hennepin Theater Trust, which makes me think she’d probably have some insight into burnout, retention, and teacher support. Her priorities look solid and she has a ton of endorsements.

So — okay, I’m going to note that on August 9th, we’re having a primary. The two top finishers will go on to the general election in November. I would vote for Laurelle Myhra in the primary election while acknowledging that I would probably vote for Lori in the general. I am confident that Lori will advance to the general so the question is, who among the other candidates will bring issues to the table that I’d like to hear discussed before November? And the answer is absolutely Laurelle, with her expertise in trauma. Absolutely. So that’s who I’d vote for in August.

In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNet and signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven. You will also be able to get them from Uncle Hugo’s when it reopens at 2716 E 31st St! (and maybe by mail order now? I’m not sure how much mail order Don is doing while getting ready to re-open.)

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded (or, in the case of the Movement Voter fundraiser, continuing to raise money past their goal). I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and that fundraiser is still active. (Also, I owe some embarrassing readings of my juvenalia to the Internet.)

I also went looking and found two DonorsChoose fundraisers for classrooms at Bethune Community School in North Minneapolis: math manipulatives for pre-K students (this is such a good idea) and a nice book organizer for a first-grade classroom where the shelving is coming apart.

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board At-Large Primary

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There are two vacancies, and no incumbents are running. School Board member Josh Pauly (elected in 2018) resigned in March during the teacher’s strike and Cindy Booker was appointed to serve out his term; she is not running. Kimberly Caprini stepped aside when she was not endorsed by the DFL.

Here’s who’s running:

KerryJo Felder
Lisa Skjefte
Harley Meyer
Jaton White
Collin Beachy
Sonya Emerick

ETA 10/27 — I want to note this post was written in the primary season. I am working on a post for the general election and my recommendations will not be the same.

KerryJo Felder (DFL-endorsed).

While there are no incumbents running, KerryJo has served a previous term on the school board, as the representative for North Minneapolis; she lost to Sharon El-Amin in 2020. While on the board, KerryJo was a strong advocate for the Northside schools and opposed to the CDD (comprehensive district design), and in particular, opposed to pushing it forward at the beginning of the pandemic.

With the school board, I tend to have a bias in favor of incumbents who are running for re-election, because I’m pretty sure serving on the Minneapolis school board is one of the worst elected jobs out there — you work extremely long hours for very little money and part of your job is to listen politely when people show up to say that you hate children. And that was true before the right wing added “go to the nearest school board meeting, spew transphobia” to everyone’s to-do list. It’s an extremely hard, literally thankless job, and very few people want to do it more than once, which means chronic problems with a lack of institutional memory.

I have a generally favorable impression of KerryJo. She’s also endorsed by the DFL and by the teacher’s union. I would cast one of my votes for her.

Lisa Skjefte

Lisa Skjefte is a staff member at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center and has been in the news for things like overseeing the Native Prom. However, she has no campaign website of any kind that I could find, and her Facebook page does not reference her candidacy in public posts. I think she considers herself to be running, but it’s unclear how I would find out more about her goals if elected. I would not vote for her.

Harley Meyer

Harley Meyer spent about a decade living in Thailand and teaching there; he developed a proprietary method for teaching ELL students English and (he says) for teaching high school algebra to second graders, and he is running for school board because he wants to put his personal research into practice in Minneapolis schools.

Do I sound skeptical? Here’s the thing: the vast majority of the time, when people think they’ve discovered an easily replicable magic to teaching kids some skill that’s typically hard-earned, they have not. I would also, honestly, really question the value of teaching high school algebra in elementary school. What elementary schoolers are often learning is a bunch of math-related skills that are in fact a lot more broadly useful than algebra: they’re learning arithmetic, fractions, decimals, all the foundational pieces that they’ll hopefully draw on for years to come to know why a sign offering something for “$2.33 each, or two for $5!” is funny. My older kid did an enrichment program with algebra in early elementary school that was pretty great, and that was something more kids should have access to, but it also wasn’t high school algebra, it didn’t replace Algebra 1 and 2 later on.

I sent everyone an e-mail about reading instruction (phonics vs. “balanced literacy,” basically) and got back a prompt response in which he expanded on his educational theories, which includes a dismissal of “the philosophical debate between ‘Whole Language’ v. ‘Balanced Literacy’ v. ‘Phonics'” as ” a debate created by textbook publishers to sell their materials. It has nothing to do with helping people to learn to read.”

Here’s the thing about curricula, basically just across the board: they kind of all suck but I really do see them as a necessary evil, because kids are not taught by one person from K through 8th grade, they get passed from teacher to teacher, and if you don’t have some sort of guide to what they cover when, important stuff get skipped or else taught over and over.

(Edited to clean up some stray text, and can I just say, I AM VERY FRUSTRATED WITH WORDPRESS THIS WEEK. ***heavy sigh***.)

little arithmetic, a little geometry and a little statistics, a little algebra, etc.

I kind of think Harley Meyer should write a book about his educational theories and approach, and sell it, because then people could try it out and see if they thought it worked well for other people or just for him. I do not think he should be elected to the Minneapolis school board, though, so I wouldn’t vote for him.

Jaton White

When I started this writeup Jaton’s website wasn’t working, so I did some Googling and turned up some news articles about the Northside Achievement Zone (she’s Director of Wellness). She now has a website up, but there isn’t a whole lot there. (A video that looks like it should have sound but does not, a couple of goals that suggest you can click for more info but nothing loads.) I would not vote for her.

Collin Beachy (DFL-endorsed)

Collin Beachy is one of the two candidates endorsed by the DFL (the other is KerryJo). He’s a special ed teacher who works at Transitions Plus (a school that helps students with significant disabilities with the transition to adulthood).

His “Why I’m Running” page is interesting, because it’s stuff I broadly agree with but a lot of it is teacher-centered. His first priority is doing an examination of why the strike happened and how to avoid a strike in the future. His second listed priority is “high expectations and clear goals,” but this doesn’t talk about goals regarding student achievement, this talks about getting money from the state. Third is “accountability and focus,” but I’ve read that set of bullet points three times and I’m still not sure what he actually wants to do. He mentions “vetting the flow of information coming from the administration” and “enacting more oversight of the administration and their cabinet” which honestly sounds to me like adding yet another layer of administration, this one to oversee the administration. The next point, “equitable programming,” is fine, as is “recruit and retain BIPOC staff.”

He genuinely strikes me as a lovely person, and maybe a teacher-centric perspective on the school board would add something we need post-strike? I like him, but I think right now he’s my #3. (You get two votes.)

Sonya Emerick

Sonya Emerick is the queer nonbinary autistic parent of a disabled child, and is on the MPS Special Education Advisory Council. Their website is fairly spare, but their Facebook and Twitter have more details on their priorities. I e-mailed everyone a question about reading instruction (phonics vs. “balanced literacy,” basically) and got back a prompt answer from Sonya that made it clear they (a) pay attention to the science, (b) know exactly which curricula use it, and (c) pay attention to the weaknesses of phonics-based curricula (“I do believe that [Science of Reading] informed methods need to be delivered in culturally sustaining ways, which requires thoughtfulness across instructional design, environments, materials, assessments, and requires actively recruiting educators of color and supporting and valuing those we already have. I also think increased partnership with families and communities around literacy would benefit some of the students facing real belief gap barriers at school.”) Anyway, I was impressed with their response and their knowledge about the issue I asked about, and I think MPS would benefit from having a school board representative with personal expertise on accessibility issues. I would vote for Sonya Emerick.

In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNet and signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven. You will also be able to get them from Uncle Hugo’s when it reopens at 2716 E 31st St! (and maybe by mail order now? I’m not sure how much mail order Don is doing while getting ready to re-open.)

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded (or, in the case of the Movement Voter fundraiser, continuing to raise money past their goal). I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and that fundraiser is still active. (Also, I owe some embarrassing readings of my juvenalia to the Internet.)

I also went looking and found two DonorsChoose fundraisers for classrooms at Bethune Community School in North Minneapolis: math manipulatives for pre-K students (this is such a good idea) and a nice book organizer for a first-grade classroom where the shelving is coming apart.