Minneapolis Public Schools District 6 Board of Education Director Ira Jourdain’s  last school board meeting on Dec. 10. He served two terms on the board. Jourdain was first elected in 2016, and was re-elected in 2020.

Jourdain made his final comments at the end of the board meeting, highlighting his advocacy for Northside students and his role in making it a districtwide practice for elementary schools to have 30 minutes of recess every day.

Jourdain will be replaced by Greta Callahan in January. District 6 is located in Southwest Minneapolis.

Jourdain is a Minneapolis Public Schools parent and advocate with a background in social services. Jourdain is a member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe, and spent most of his eight years on the board as the only Native American member of the board.

On Nov. 26, the board’s finance committee honored Jourdain for his service on the committee.

Jourdain spoke with Minneapolis Schools Voices about his time serving on the Minneapolis Public Schools school board. A transcript of that interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Melissa Whitler: What accomplishments are you most proud of from your time as a board director?

Ira Jourdain: One is definitely 30 minutes of recess for our students. It’s a personal communication skill development that you cannot teach out of a book or in a classroom. Two is supporting our finance department and making sure they have the tools necessary to make sure finances are in tip top shape as they can be. They won numerous national awards and all the stuff because they have support and they have the team and knowledge to do so.

MW: Do you want to add a third?

IJ: Strengthening our literacy and making sure that we have media center specialists in all our schools for the first time and in a generation or two.

‍MW: What is something that is still unfinished on your to-do list?

IJ: One of them would be reorganizing and restructuring Harrison Learning Center in North Minneapolis.

It creates a negative stereotype of the school to prison pipeline for our predominantly African American boys in our district. I hope that this is an essential piece to our school transformation process moving forward because I have yet to hear it really discussed in broader terms.

Note: Harrison Education Center is a special education setting for high school within Minneapolis Public Schools.

‍MW: What do you think your experience as an MPS parent has brought to your role as a board member?

IJ: I think being relatable to people, either in attendance or watching online. I'm sharing my experiences first and foremost on the dais, in a meeting, about my kids' experience, about my experience, past and present, as a parent. It’s relatable to parents from all over the city.

People have learned to appreciate over the last eight years, and that was something that I myself did not see on the board prior to myself. There've been parents on the board before, but no one really being relatable in that aspect.  

MW: Are there ways where you think your perspective as a parent has influenced how you voted or influenced a policy?

IJ: Last year, fifth grade band. Talking about my experience with my kids having access to fifth grade band, and other students did not at that time. Now we have it in all the fifth grade sites.  We were talking about taking it away and some schools can afford to have it and some schools can’t.

Examples like the recess [policy], having the media center specialist, the fifth grade band.

MW: There is this tension in our district, I think, between top-down decision making, where the board or the district administration says everybody has to do something one way. Or leaving decisions up to the school.

When decisions are left up to the school, some schools are going to put money into band, but another might choose dance or science, or not have extra funding for anything. We end up with different programs at different schools this way. The examples you're giving are a top-down model.

IJ: Prior to myself getting on the board you had some schools that had 15 minutes of recess and maybe a handful of 30 minutes of recess.

At the time they're called “high poverty" schools that only had, like the 15 minutes of recess, 20 minutes of recess, while some people had 30 minutes. It became more of an equity issue.. I was like, well, everyone should have 30 minutes. My kids have 30 minutes.

I think we've made some great steps with having even just a halftime [media center] position, and moving forward we've made the foundation that someday have it be not just a part-time position, but also make it a part of staffing so schools don't have to worry about their media center specialist.

MW: For media center specialists, there are still inequities across schools because some schools have funding to buy up the position to fulltime and have media as a specialist. But you are okay with that type of site based decision-making still leading to inequities across schools?  

IJ: Yes, we are going to provide the bare minimum. And that that would be an underlying factor to it. Some decisions need to be left up to the individual site.

MW: Last spring, when the resolution came forward to provide a separate building for Anishinabe Academy, I remember you expressed being thankful that as the only Native American board director you had not had to bring forward that resolution. Could you talk a little bit about why that was important to you, and maybe what it means to have other board directors also advocating for Native American students?

IJ: I didn't want to just be the voice for American Indian students, obviously, which is why I was not ever the MUID/PIE representative. It's good to have other non-Native people attend these meetings and get to know our Native students and our Native community.

I appreciated the other board directors stepping up and learning about our Native students and not just saying, “Oh Ira can handle it.”

Note: MUID/PIE is the Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors and Phillips Indian Educators. Minneapolis Public Schools has a memorandum of agreement with these organizations that governs the services the district provides for Native American students enrolled in the district.

MW: Out of the current board members, in my observation, you have been the most vocal about saying that the district should reduce the number of schools that it operates. What do you think that you understand, or what are you willing to say, that other board directors won’t?

IJ:  For one, the historical perspective. I've been through a school closure process before as a parent. When they closed Longfellow Community School, my son was in fifth grade. I remember that board process and what that looked like to parents.

Just really being keenly aware of our finances. It is a numbers game. No doubt we have way too many schools and not enough students to justify having that many sites open. And it is weighing down our finances. That affects everything.  Our transportation system, our staffing, our programming.

Closing schools is not going to be the end all be all. We have to restructure our programs as well.

I've always been one to just say things point blank. That's not a critique of anyone else. If anyone's followed me over the last eight years, you know, I'm just pretty blunt.

This is something that I've been very vocal about now for several years. We need to close schools. In my opinion we should have closed schools a year or two ago.

Coming off a pandemic. Rolling off CDD. You have a new board turnover. Trying to catch everyone up to speed has just been really a grind. I think people need to really focus on our finances.

We can talk about equity and programming all day long, but if we don't have our finances in order, that's not going to be able to pay for anything. If we continue digging ourselves into deficits because we haven't made our choices of closing schools, readjusting our boundaries. Our transportation system needs to be again redone to match our changing school climate and what our buildings look like.

I’ve been out there telling people this is what's coming. It may not be this year, but it has to happen. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

MW: Many people in our district say they really like a small school, where all the adults can know all of the kids. Why can’t the district keep operating those small schools?

IJ: One of the things about a small school is that it doesn't have the demographics to generate enough funding to keep the doors open. Former Finance Director Thom Roethke said it’s closer to 400 students now to keep a building open. When I started on the board it was 320. Now it's closer to 400 to keep the school operating efficiently, but with enough staff and supports in place.

MW: And that's for an elementary school?

IJ: That's for elementary, yes.

MW: If I am a parent, and I see my child’s school’s enrollment doesn’t have 400 students, maybe my child’s school can’t even hold 400 students, that would make me sad. As a parent I’ve picked that school for my child because I like it. The people who care for my child at school might lose their jobs. Why shouldn't I fight against the district closing my school? Why would it be better to be in a bigger building?

IJ: When you look at school closings elsewhere, proponents like to say, yes, your child will go to a larger school, but we will also have, in theory, a consolidation of resources. So if you close A and B and you move everyone to school C, school C will now have a lot more students, but they will have essential resources. If you have, say, three schools, they all offer band, you consolidate everyone into one school, it's just one big band program with which could in theory accumulate more resources.

MW: Or maybe the school could have both band and orchestra?

IJ: Yes. So you can grow a program, in theory, with more students and yes, orchestra. You could have a more robust choir program, or robust arts and theater. Again, that's coming from the proponents.

MW: Other districts have either recently closed schools or are facing the same situation. I am thinking about Denver Public Schools as an example where I believe they have been discussing closing a dozen or so schools for about three years now. It seems really painful, to me, for a community to be discussing something for so long. Do you think our community is ready for that?

IJ: I think people are waiting on us to make a decision. I think people just want to have some idea of what's coming. And I think the longer we drag it out, the more anxiety we're just going to build up among students and parents and community folks.

I think that people are ready to have a conversation. They know that our finances dictate that.

Because we've tried to right-size the district without closing schools. That was what the CDD was for. The CDD was to reorganize our district to make our district run more financially efficiently. It did not work for a multitude of reasons.

MW: A lot of the focus has been on elementary schools potentially closing. Do you think middle schools and high schools would be impacted by what's coming with school transformation?

IJ: Oh for sure. There has to be some discussion as well on that level. Our middle schools and high schools, what do they look like? Southwest High School, they used to be one of the biggest high schools and now they're down to 1,200 students. It's a quiet building whereas it used to be very busy, very packed. As a result of the CDD, other schools have grown exponentially larger.

Do we need to close a middle school? Do we need to shift our high school boundaries again?

Note: Southwest High School enrollment in the 2019-20 school year was 1,948 students, before the COVID-19 pandemic and Comprehensive District Design.

MW: When I talk to parents, I see a lot of disparity in what is offered to students at the middle school level, especially between Northside middle schools and Southwest middle schools. Things like world languages and arts programming, for example.

IJ: That's the conversation. Do you close one of the middle schools in north Minneapolis and consolidate? Add resources at one of the remaining middle schools? They have three over there. Do you close one and then divide those students? Half go to Franklin, half go to Olson? Or do you close Olson?

It's enough to make your head spin sometimes. Again it's the demographics of students and the population that those schools can support. As you move forward, I think you're gonna see the board have those conversations towards our middle schools and high schools for sure, no doubt.