Minneapolis School District is facing a potential teacher strike and a $75 million budget shortfall. But Minnesota’s second largest school district, serving 26,076 students in 2024, is showing additional signs of strain: last week, the school board voted to allow the elementary school Lake Harriet Lower to use $22,000 of crowdfunded money to hire a teacher emeritus to work as a reading interventionist.
The Lake Harriet Community School PTA raised the funds for the teacher emeritus to serve on staff. Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) have long been Tocquevillian social organizations that create community buy-in and trust for schools. In particular, the Lake Harriet Community School PTA has been tax-exempt since 1945. Examples of common PTA initiatives include donations for the arts, classroom supply drives, and building or grounds upgrades.
While financial and physical gifts have historically been given to the Minneapolis School District and approved by the Superintendent, a December 2024 rule change required that all gifts be manually reviewed by the school board and approved by a two thirds majority. This case is one of the first major cases reviewed by the school board containing such a large sum earmarked for a particular staffing purpose.
In the October 14 school board meeting, Deputy Superintendent Ty Thompson read from an email purportedly sent by Lake Harriet Lower Principal Ness, which argued that the funds were needed because Lake Harriet Lower is not a Title I school, and so does not receive adequate funding for Tier 2 and 3 reading interventionists.
Title I funding is federal funding designed for low-income and academically struggling school districts. Funds are often used for academic support programs.
However, the dearth of Title I funding at Lake Harriet Lower wasn’t immediately clear. A Minnesota Department of Education Data Report from 2024 (the most recent year available) notes that Lake Harriet Lower received $46,217.18 in Title I funds in a district allocation. As the school doesn’t receive Title I dollars generated by the student driven funding formula, but rather through the district’s reported Title I expenditures at the specific site, the school could be framing the Title I discussion through the lens of per-student funding. Lake Harriet Lower Elementary has a site council whose purpose is to provide guidance on the use of Title I funds.
It’s a complex situation. While Lake Harriet Lower does receive dollars through district distribution that originated in Title I funding, it doesn’t receive specific dollars generated by the student-driven funding formula and thus receives a much smaller amount of Title I funding than other schools in the Minneapolis district. It also spends less in general. Lake Harriet Lower spent $19,698.13 per pupil in 2024, while the similarly-sized North Minneapolis school Webster Elementary received $337,776.67 in Title I funds and spent $24,870.68 per pupil.
Local activist Sarah Spafford Freeman slammed the school board’s decision, calling it “plainly inequitable.” She pointed to the disparity between (majority-White) schools in Southern Minneapolis who tend to have active PTAs flush with cash, and the (majority-Black or Hispanic) schools in Northern Minneapolis who do not, arguing that the practice means that only students without robust school PTAs feel the effects of recent budget cuts. Minneapolis Public Schools board member Sharon El-Amin remarked in the October 14 meeting that a future solution might be to require PTA funds to be pooled across the district.
The geographically large, dense, and socially diverse Minneapolis Public School District, it appears, contains so many unique populations that it is struggling to adequately serve all its constituents. A failed piece of 2015 legislation attempted to carve the district up into six more manageable small districts that could give specialized care to students. As concerns about budget shortfalls, wealth inequalities, bussing routes, and adequate targeted academic services mount, it might be time to revive similar efforts that keep district leadership as close to the ground as possible.