Main takeaways:
- A district climate initiative, named MPS Together, seeks to address feedback from parents that the district schools are not always welcoming for BIPOC families and for families where English is not their first language.
- There are four phases to the initiative, which were interrupted during the early pandemic.
- The district is trying to hire climate coordinators to assist schools in achieving their climate goals. The coordinators can also help address hate and bias incidents.
- There is a strong focus on professional development related to school climate.
- Having more two-way communication with parents is a priority.
Minneapolis Public Schools is in the process of implementing a districtwide initiative aimed at making its schools more inclusive, respectful and welcoming to the diverse students, families and staff that make up the district. Improving school and district climate is one of four goals of the district’s new strategic plan, approved in February 2022 by the school board. The initiative, focusing on “district climate,” is named MPS Together.
“We know we serve so many families from different backgrounds,” Derek Francis, executive director of Equity and Climate, told Southwest Voices in an interview in August. “Embracing that. Letting our families know you’re welcome here. We see [you]. We acknowledge you and your identity. That’s a central part of our school district.”
A vision for positive school and district climate
In August, Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and Francis shared their vision for school and district climate in an interview with Southwest Voices.
“Derek and I always say climate is really hard to explain because it’s not a physical thing, but it’s that feeling when you walk into one of our buildings, when you hear about MPS, when you see interactions between students and staff– all those pieces build up and create a climate that feels welcoming, a place where people can learn, Cox said in August. “Great climate provides this space of access to learning and also provides a motivation to learn.”
Cox said that being able to rely on the positive connections and relationships that underlie a positive climate can help district leaders and educators focus on common values to make the best decisions for students, families, and communities.
Francis acknowledged the challenges that the district community has faced over the past two and a half years.
“We navigated a lot of stuff. No other school district had a major murder in their city that went global. And in addition to that layer in COVID and we went on strike,” Francis said.
The Origins of MPS Together
The MPS Together initiative is rooted in findings from the district’s Parent Participatory Evaluations, Youth Participatory Evaluations, and the district’s Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment for Human Resources. A common theme throughout these assessments of the district was that Minneapolis Public Schools has not felt welcoming for, or respectful towards, BIPOC students, families and staff, and those whose preferred communication language is not English.
Recommendations from the parent evaluations included a request that the district hire more bilingual staff, provide more interpretation services in schools, eliminate cultural bias in rules and discipline, and provide professional development on addressing incidents of student to student discrimination and bias.
Another goal of the climate framework was to assist schools in creating “a cohesive climate and culture” after the changes to school boundaries, pathways, and magnet programs as a result of the Comprehensive District Design, which started with the 2021-22 school year.
A Four Phase Plan Disrupted
MPS Together was originally created as a four phase plan to be completed from Spring 2020 with full implementation in the 2022-23 school year. Much of the planned work has been delayed by disruptions in the district in the past three years.
Phase one of the plan, described as “identifying our beliefs and expectations,” was completed in spring of 2021, and culminated in the identification of four values to guide the initiative:
- equity, representation and anti-racism;
- physical and emotional safety and wellbeing;
- shared decision making and voice; and
- relationships, trust and communication.
The second phase included sharing with the district community about the climate framework, and the beginning of development of strategies for schools and departments to implement. The work was completed between April and October 2021.
The district is currently on phase three, called “Building Up Our Communities,” which is focused on the hiring climate coordinators, developing climate goals for each school, school climate indexes to measure progress on improving school climate, conducting a climate survey, developing a district wide Hate and Bias Incident Protocol, and updating the district’s teacher evaluation system to include so-called equity competencies. Originally planned to be completed by spring of 2022, much of this work was delayed because of the disruptions in the district last year.
Phase four was originally planned for 2022-23, and was expected to be the continuous improvement phase.
Ongoing work to implement the climate framework
During the current school year, the district continues to undertake work to implement the climate framework. Status updates for some of the work has been shared as part of updates to the school board. Southwest Voices was able to obtain updates on other parts of the climate framework through an email request to the district.
Funding for the climate coordinators, and other climate-related work within the district, was a budget priority for the school board in developing the 2022-23 budget. The school board has funded school climate coordinators for this year to support the implementation of MPS Together. As of August, ten of the twelve positions had been filled. That team is led by Francis. The climate coordinators role is to support principals and schools as they work on their climate goals this year. This year, for the first time, each school is required to include a climate goal in its school improvement plan.
At the November 22 Committee of the Whole meeting, Francis reported 78% of schools had developed a climate goal as part of their school improvement plan, and 58% of schools had communicated this goal to the school community. Sixty-four percent of schools had reported hosting at least one event that included family, community or staff relationship-building.
In a December 9 email response to Southwest Voices’ request for a list of school climate goals, the district said, “Every school should now have a climate goal as part of their School Improvement Plan. Families can get this information directly from their schools.”
The plan for phase three called for the district to administer a climate survey, and to develop a climate index to measure climate in schools. The climate index is still under development, according to the district.
The climate survey, called Cultivate, was completed in Fall 2022, but the results have not been reported yet. The district is administering the survey again this fall, and expects to share the results in January 2023.
Phase three also included the development of a districtwide Hate and Bias Incident Protocol, a standardized process to respond to an incident of hate or bias within the district. Originally scheduled to be completed in December 2021, development of that protocol is still ongoing. According to the district, the full committee met most recently in November 2022, with subcommittees meeting the first week of December 2022. The full committee is scheduled to meet again in January 2023.
The district did not respond to a request for information about whether the Standards of Effective Instruction, the district’s teacher evaluation system, have been updated to include equity competencies.
The role of site councils in MPS Together
The district has asked each school to include a goal in its school improvement plan that focuses on school climate. According to Cox, those goals will be developed by each school’s principal and Instructional Leadership Team, in consultation with the school’s site council. Site councils are envisioned as a group of parents, educators, and community members who act in an advisory capacity for building principals to guide site-based decisions.
However, according to the district’s Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment on school site councils released last spring, many schools did not have a site council last school year. The district reported that as of November 2021, just 21 of 57 schools confirmed the existence of a site council, while 26 of 61 sites submitted site council bylaws. Schools located in the attendance zones for Southwest and Washburn High Schools were the only areas where at least half of the schools had a site council.
In response to a request for updated site council data, the district said, “Currently 32 of 34 elementary schools, 15 of 18 middle and magnets, and 13 of 16 high schools have established Site Councils.” This district did not share which schools are still missing Site Councils.
At Lucy Laney, Principal Lisa Pawelak said the school has an active site council and the families and community at Lucy Laney are very engaged. But she questioned the role that site councils play in school climate.
“I mean we have a site council. I don’t know that I would say that that’s one of the big levers of school climate,” Pawelak said. Pawlek did say the site council is an effective tool for parent engagement.
The role of climate coordinators in the MPS Together initiative, hate and bias incidents
The climate coordinators will work with principals and building leadership to support schools in achieving their climate goals this year. Climate coordinators will be available to facilitate conversations about building climate, and also to support educators and principals at schools in building the skills to respond to specific incidents related to hate or bias that impact school climate.
“The equity and school climate coordinators are very strong educators who have worked in previous roles in education, whether it’s school counseling, a Dean or a social worker,” Francis said. “We have so much variety [of experience] on the team. Every time I’m in a space with the team I learn something new about a skill or area that they’re supporting a school around.”
Climate coordinators will also be available to schools if they do experience a hate or bias incident. “There’s times when you need a team to talk to,” Francis said. “‘How are we going to respond? How are we going to talk about what just happened?’”
Cox emphasized the importance of the relationships educators have with students when responding to incidents of hate and bias.
“If staff are seen as the educator but also the facilitator, those conversations are made much easier if, as adults, we can be learners and thinkers alongside our students,” Cox said.
Andersen Middle School principal, Tara Fitzgerald, said her school dealt with multiple incidents of hate and bias last school year. She said that such incidents are an issue nationwide, but she feels like it is a particular problem for middle school students whose later elementary school years were disrupted by the pandemic.
“As sixth, seventh and eighth graders who were out of school for two and a half years. You were this elementary age kid that is suddenly immersed into a world of figuring out my identity. I’m figuring out where I belong. And I don’t know how to do that because I’ve been out of this social setting for two or three years,” Fitzgerald explained.
She described behaviors where students were making comments about others because of their home language, race, gender identity or sexual orientation. While some of the incidents were the result of underlying hate or bias, Fitzgerald said, “Ninety percent of the cases it’s really just a lack of education.”
Students were using words that they didn’t really understand, but knew they had a “shock value,” Fitzgerald shared.
The district climate initiative includes professional development for educators and principals
A core part of the climate initiative includes professional development for educators and principals.
“The school climate and equity team will be putting together professional development that will go to all building leaders that they will lead in their buildings next week specifically around school climate and equity,” Francis told the school board on August 23. He also shared that there would be ongoing opportunities for professional development on these topics throughout the school year.
For Lucy Laney’s equity and climate professional development before school started, educators continued the school’s tradition of visiting each family.
“That's not something new for us. It’s something that we do every August,” Pawelek said. “We all go out into the community. We do a little scavenger hunt. We eat in the community. We visit businesses. And, we visit every family.”
Pawelak has been at Lucy Laney since 2007, when she started as a social worker. She said many of the educators have been together for over a decade. Because of their long-term relationships, she says her staff is focused on finding each other's strengths and becoming a more effective team.
Fitzgerald, the principal at Anderson Middle School, which is home to the district’s Spanish Dual Immersion program for middle school, said her school is focusing on their core value of inclusion this year. Professional development before students returned to school centered on “how do you create inclusion in all the areas- in your family events? In your classroom? In your advisory?”
The school changed the structure of its advisory period this year in the hopes of creating a more inclusive period for students.
“We went so far as to switch to an advisory model that’s not taught by one person but two,” Fitzgerald said. “If you don’t feel included by one of your teachers, we hope that that second person will be an added value for students that might not have that first connection.”
Fitzgerald said that some staff members have been reluctant to engage in anti-racism work.
“I mean there are some teachers who left because they don’t like that. And we feel like, ‘ok, that’s ok.’ We want people here that are willing to do the work and being anti-racist is hard,” Fitzgerald said.
Southwest Voices asked MPS to provide a brief description about the climate and equity related professional development done at each school to start this year. As of this time, the district has not responded to this request. Without this information district-wide, it is not possible to know whether the intentional and intensive work that Pawelak and Fitzgerald have undertaken with educators at their buildings is the norm across the district, or the exception.
Sarah Cooper-Evans, an MPS parent and Speech and Language Pathologist at Andersen Middle School, shared a bit of skepticism about the professional development in the climate framework.
“If you get [professional development] about that from Davis [Center] it’s not going to go over that well. But at a school-level, I think if there is trust then it can,” Cooper Evans said.
She stressed the importance of principals building trust with teachers. “I don’t think the principals are going to have a lot of impact putting in place policies that are not asked for or valued by the teachers,” Cooper-Evans said.
Parent engagement that includes two-way communication and accessible language translation
Parent engagement is another component of the district’s plan to build a positive school climate. In an interview with Southwest Voices in August, Francis said his department was planning a series of district-wide family events this year on topics related to school climate.
He described these events as “proactive family engagement,” which will include facilitating conversations about race and ethnicity with kids. He said other topics might include gender identity and sexuality, social media, mental health, and college and career readiness.
Southwest Voices asked for a calendar of these family engagement events. In an email response, the district said, “There are ongoing events at every MPS school to create more welcoming, positive environments. However, there is not a calendar list of these events. Every community schedules these events pertinent to their school community needs and interests.”
As part of the district’s leadership retreat this summer, attendees were given orange t-shirts that read “MPS Together.” Cox said that they have been wearing these shirts out to community events throughout the summer and fall, and community members have started to notice and identify MPS employees this way.
“We’ve been thinking about how can we spread that spirit of team MPS to our families and our staff members who want to join, too?” Cox said.
At Andersen, Fitzgerald shared how the school has been working towards more two-way communication, where families and the school are communicating with each other. The school changed the responsibilities of advisory teachers to encourage more conversation between parents and the schools. “We want them to reach out to the families and ask questions,” Fitzgerald said of the advisory teacher communication role.
Fitzgerald explained that these new expectations started with open house this year where advisory teachers were asked to solicit from families basic feedback about how they like to communicate with the school, such as email or phone.
At the site level, one barrier to family engagement is a lack of translation services for families whose preferred language is not English.
A district-level parent evaluation documented that a parent was locked outside of their child’s school for ten minutes in the winter because they could not communicate in English via the intercom system.
In the most recent school budget, schools are receiving an allocation for translation services, ranging from $3000 to $12,000 per building. But it is unclear if this is sufficient for all schools to meet the needs of families.
“We realized that our schools have different amounts of funding for that so we have the central office provide a budget code line for [schools] to use for translation and interpretation,” Cox responded when asked about the need for translation and interpretation services for inclusive family engagement.
At Lucy Laney, which has seen an increase in recent years in Spanish-speaking families, Pawelak said the school has a half-time EL teacher who is fluent in Spanish, a member of the office staff who speaks conversational Spanish, a student teacher who is fluent in Spanish and an educator who is fluent in Hmong. She described these staff members as very accommodating saying “They’ll drop everything to come [help interpret.]” But, for example, if a family came to a site council meeting and needed translation services without communicating that in advance, the school might not be prepared to accommodate that need.
Alternatively, at Andersen Middle School, Fitzgerald described how translation is built intentionally into the school culture at family events as part of the school’s focus on inclusion this year. In the most recent budget, Andersen received $12,000 for translation services for this school year. Andersen also has multiple bilingual staff members because of its status as a Spanish language dual immersion program.
Fitzgerald said much of the work the school is doing around inclusion this year comes from reaching out to families to ask them what they need in order to feel included in events. One of the things the school prioritizes is having interpreters in Somali and Spanish at all family events.
Although some English-speaking parents expressed annoyance at first, Fitzgerald said that family events are translated sentence by sentence into both Spanish and Somali.
“Literally I say a sentence, then they say it in Spanish and then they say it in Somali. And that’s kind of how we just do things. And we know it takes longer. It is sometimes exhausting but we feel it’s important for everyone to be in the same space and feel like they belong,” Fitzgerald said.
The need for improved school and district climate is ongoing
As the implementation work for MPS Together continues this academic year, it is unclear whether the proposed work will be enough to transform climate within Minneapolis Public Schools. The district has continued to see disproportionate decline in Black students, in particular. As part of the 2021 parent evaluation findings, one Black evaluator shared that their “community is tired of giving feedback without seeing tangible change.”
In an interview with Southwest Voices, “Fatima,” a Somali mother of an MPS elementary student, shared how she has struggled to find a school that is culturally affirming for her son. Fatima’s name has been changed for this article by her request.
Fatima and her son are in their fourth MPS elementary school in as many years, after trying two neighborhood schools and a magnet school.
Fatima moved her son to a different school this fall after a warning from another parent of color that her son had been assigned to a teacher, who is white, and, who the parent claimed, didn’t “have a safe classroom for kids of color.” Originally, she had been pleased with the school, because, even though it is predominantly white students, there were several Black teachers in the building that she looked forward to her son having as teachers.
Fatima reached out to the principal, who is white, before school started, to request a different teacher, but she says that after having already moved one student of color out of the classroom, the principal did not want to move another student of color out of the class. The principal assured her that the teacher was receiving anti-bias coaching, and offered to have regular meetings with her to make sure her child was doing well in the class.
The incident made her feel disrespected.
“Don’t expect us to put up with that. I can’t stress how much my child will not be experimented on and practiced on,” Fatima said. “[The principal] has a job. And, I also have a job as a parent. It’s to advocate for my kids. At the end of the day I told her, I’m not committed to this school or this district. Quite frankly, I have an obligation to give my kid a quality education and I’ll go wherever I need to.”
The switch to a new school was possible because Fatima reached out to district leadership, explained the situation, and they helped her transfer her son to a different school. Although the new school doesn’t have any teachers of color that she is aware of, the principal is a person of color, and the school has more students of color. Fatima said that while her son will not have a classroom teacher of color, she feels like having a building leader who is a person of color makes up for that. She feels like if she has an issue in the future, a principal who is a person of color would be more responsive.
The district has developed an ambitious plan to make its schools more welcoming and respectful for the diverse students, families and employees that are a part of MPS in response to feedback over several years. The school board was intentional last year in funding the roles to support implementation of this plan, and including it as part of the district’s strategic plan. But after significant delays, many parts of the plan are still incomplete.
In the meantime, parents like Fatima continue to work to find a place within the district that feels welcoming for their students and families. As noted in the 2020-21 Parent Participatory Evaluation executive summary, “evaluators warned MPS their ‘community is getting tired of giving feedback without seeing tangible results.’”
