With Labor Day in the rearview mirror, it’s safe to say that summer vacation has officially ended. And for more than 250 students, this Tuesday marked the very first day of school at the newly opened East African Elementary Magnet School in St. Paul, Minnesota. The school is the first of its kind in the nation and offers language support in Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, Somali, Oromo, and Tigrinya.
“It’s real,” principal Dr. Abdisalam Adam told URL Media partner Sahan Journal a little over a week before school started. “No longer a dream.”
It may be a dream come true, but reaching this point was filled with a few more bumps than in years past, with school districts facing continued enrollment declines and teacher shortages.
It was continued enrollment declines and student transfers to charter schools serving immigrant communities that led St. Paul Public Schools to launch the new elementary school, betting that if the district provided culturally responsive resources to the city’s large immigrant population, it would attract new families and stem the district’s shrinking enrollment.
“This is an important day for St. Paul Public Schools,” Superintendent Joe Gothard told Sahan Journal. “Some would say this is an important day for the nation, in recognizing the importance of being culturally responsive in a way that meets the needs of families, and the education they desire for their children.”
Across the state of Minnesota, getting to the first day of school has been a challenge, to say the least. Less than a month before students once again filled the halls, the state received the green light from the federal government for its teacher licensing plan — preserving $219 million in federal special education funding and creating a temporary patch to address the shortage of qualified teachers.
Laura Mogelson, the legislative liaison for the Minnesota Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, told Sahan Journal that while she was happy the state’s plan was accepted, she was concerned about the solution’s limited scope and its ability to meaningfully address the need to adequately train new educators to teach students with special needs.
“We know that preparation and support really matter and affect retention, because this isn’t just a shortage,” she said. “This is also a retention problem.”
The teacher shortage isn’t just a Minnesota problem, it’s a nationwide problem exacerbated by the pandemic that, like most problems, disproportionately impacts communities of color and those with low socioeconomic status.
On top of that, schools across the U.S. are losing students at a staggering rate. Between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2020, enrollment in U.S. public schools declined by more than a million students. And since a large portion of funding is tied to the number of students a school has enrolled, the domino effect can be catastrophic for local school districts.
As URL Media partner Epicenter-NYC reports, officials are concerned that a decrease in funding could result in school districts’ ability to provide the same level of service and programming for students.
The worst part? This lack of funding often leads to further stagnation in teacher pay and working conditions, which makes it even harder to recruit new teachers and retain the ones who are already there, which in turn negatively impacts student achievement, and could lead more parents to withdraw their children from the public school system, fueling additional budget shortfalls.
Perhaps school districts experiencing these issues should take a page out of the St. Paul Public Schools book and take a leap of faith to try something new and create schools that are more responsive to the unique needs of teachers, parents, and students in their communities.
“You can continue to do things the same way and you will see trends continue,” Gothard said. “Or you can say you know what, this is a unique opportunity in our history to do something different.” —Alicia Ramirez
Uplift. Respect. Love.
