Changes loom in Osseo schools with budget shortfall

Decisionmaking time approaches for the Osseo school board, which will decide on Tuesday whether to accept a plan that would close two elementary schools, reconfigure four others and change boundaries across the district. The plan would displace about 2,000 pupils, the most controversial part of the district's attempt to address a $16 million budget shortfall.

As part of the plan, Fair Oaks Elementary in Brooklyn Park and Cedar Island in Maple Grove, both K-6 schools, will become pre-kindergarten to third grade if the proposal is approved. They would feed a fourth- to sixth-grade program at Oak View Elementary, also in Maple Grove.

Parents from all over the district have turned out in force at school board meetings, many speaking against the possible loss of the school communities they've nurtured over the years.

Fair Oaks, in the far southeast corner of Brooklyn Park, has nearly 50 percent English language learners, and most of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch. While its parents have not generally protested the loudest, they also fear the implications of the move to a school where the majority of students are English-speakers. And some believe they have the most at stake.

The school employs Spanish speakers. There's a clothing exchange for kids who need it. The school nurse has connections for kids to get glasses when their parents lack insurance.

"We have been working on this for several years," said Ana Markowski, a paraprofessional at the school and co-president of the Parent-Teacher Organization. She is a native Spanish-speaker from Cuba and has become a liaison for the school's substantial Mexican contingent.

"When the child comes here, the family doesn't have to worry about anything. ... This is their safety nest. Here they feel secure, they feel they can come here and we understand them and we can help them."

Fair Oaks principal Michael Thomas called an all-school meeting on Feb. 12 to go through the proposal line by line with parents, with help from a coterie of translators and district representatives.

"In all my years of working in diverse communities, I've learned that face-to-face has the most impact," he said. "I didn't expect them to come out in matching T-shirts. That's not what the community does here. They really look to the building-level leaders and administration."

The pressing issues

About 75 families came out for the meeting to voice their fears and concerns. Among them:

• Would students be required to transition to Oak View?

• Would students lose income-based government aid, such as Title 1, at Oak View?

• Would removing half the students from the school closest to their homes mean more difficulty for families to get to school events?

And most significantly, Markowski said, Fair Oaks parents are afraid that they'll have to try to communicate with a school that doesn't understand them, their language or culture.

"If we don't have anyone to communicate, that hurts academically also," she said. "Because then the parent doesn't know what to do."

It turns out that fourth- through sixth-graders still can open-enroll anywhere inside or out of the district, that they'd keep their access to breakfast and lunch, that some supplemental aid will stay with the schools, while other types of aid will follow the students who need it, based on family income.

A promise to 'make it work'

And while the schools' administrators are careful to neither oppose nor advocate for the district's plan, the principals at Fair Oaks and Oak View say they'll meet the challenge.

Oak View Principal Nancy Wavrin noted that she spent her earlier years in the district at the now-closed Orchard Lane Elementary and at Garden City, both of which served very similar populations to Fair Oaks'.

"I think I have the competence and the knowledge to make it work," she said. "We will first and foremost meet the needs of our students, no matter what building they're in. The heart of the teaching comes from the quality of the teachers we have and the leadership in the building."

And the three schools are looking at creating pen-pal relationships between future classmates, at sharing artifacts between schools, at aligning their communication and disciplinary policies so students will know what to expect.

"I'm excited for the potential," he said, but "I don't have rose-colored glasses; there will be short-term implications that are going to be hard."