What has changed 5 years after controversial redesign of Minneapolis schools?

Five years after Minneapolis Public Schools passed a sweeping, controversial overhaul, leaders are now confronting many of the same problems they had sought to tackle — a major deficit, enrollment challenges and persistent achievement gaps.

The unpopular plan passed by Minnesota’s third-largest school district in 2020 notably averted school closures. Instead, leaders shifted magnet schools to the center of the city and created new attendance boundaries in a bid to achieve racial balance, create equal opportunities and cut transportation costs.

In the meantime, busing costs have soared, the number of racially segregated schools has remained essentially unchanged, and many Black and white families left the district in the wake of boundary changes.

Enrollment has recently ticked up, but the extent to which the plan can be credited for that growth remains unclear.

Many parents say division over the plan and its bungled implementation destroyed trust in the district, and emotions are still raw even five years later.

Now, leaders may have to finally face hard decisions about closing and merging schools.

“I believe in what the [plan] was trying to do in bringing more equity to school boundaries and enrollment,” said Erika Brask, an Uptown resident who sent her oldest daughter to Minnetonka schools and her youngest daughter to the FAIR School for Arts, a public magnet school downtown. “But five years in, I’m not sure it accomplished what it set out to do.”

In Minneapolis, the district projects a shortfall of at least $25 million in 2026-27, according to a report issued when the board approved this year’s budget in June. A district built to serve 45,000 students had only about 28,900 students in grades K-12 last October. That compares to 32,023 students in 2020-2021, before the district redesign changes took place, prompting some families to leave.

“Yes, this is a specific thing that’s going on here in Minneapolis,” Board Chair Collin Beachy said. “But in many ways we’re really no different than a lot of districts around the country who are having to make some radical, difficult choices simply because of the consistent lack of funding to schools.”

It can be “tough to see” significant cost savings from a district redesign that doesn’t close or consolidate schools, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab, a Georgetown University research center dedicated to education finance. That’s particularly true if a community doesn’t buy into the plan on the front end, she said.

“Before you talk about transforming other things in a district,” Roza said, “I think you have to start with just the basics and first execute on delivering the mission of teaching kids to read and do math.”

The Minneapolis Federation of Educators also opposed the plan in 2020.

And they point to some bright spots: the recent enrollment bump, the popularity of Spanish dual-language programming and fifth-grade instrumental classes added for every student in the district.

The plan’s authors, which included former Superintendent Ed Graff and other district leaders, predicted the boundary changes would drive some families away. Black and white families led the way in the flight from the district, according to two University of Minnesota professors who studied the redistricting and the call to integrate in a city where it’s historically been a tough sell.

The gist of their findings that have yet to be published: “If boundary changes aren’t done in a way that really considers integration, they often tend to increase segregation,” U professor Rachel Widome wrote recently in an email.

Ira Jourdain, a former school board member who opposed the overhaul, said one of the biggest selling points for the district redesign was reducing the number of racially isolated schools.

“That never happened,” he said, adding that he was largely skeptical of the claim at the start. Still, he said district leaders should be analyzing pockets of success and what parts of the original plan may not have been fully implemented.

In 2020, district leaders also predicted enrollment losses in each of the first two years of the reshuffling, but added that they expected the declines to eventually level off and student numbers to begin to climb.

An influx of Latin American migrants helped buoy enrollment in recent years, but Minneapolis schools are still well below capacity.

Associate Superintendent Yusuf Abdullah pointed to the success of several magnet schools, particularly the booming-in-popularity Spanish dual-language schools, and Hmong and Somali programming. Magnet schools, he added, “are really, really working hard to uplift their themes and uplift the staff.” But there are budget pains to contend with, he said.

For Jim Clark, the redistricting dealt a harsh blow at the start. He was then principal at Windom Community School near the Richfield border, overseeing a Spanish immersion program that was disbanded.

“We had an incredible community,” he said.

Many of the families left for programs in Richfield and Edina.

But many kids also went to Emerson Dual Language Elementary School in Loring Park, where Clark wound up as principal before retiring at the end of the 2023-24 school year.

Some say the success of the magnet schools was impeded by a lack of marketing as well as budget pressures after one-time COVID funding dried up.

At Emerson, the school was bursting at the seams, and across the district, Ecuadorian immigrants were helping spur an enrollment turnaround. But when an Ecuadorian family showed up in August 2023 seeking to place their first-grader, Clark was told by district administrators that there was a freeze on registrations at his school.

“I almost cried, knowing that the school was the best for him,” Clark said, adding he feared the freeze was due to his school approaching the designation of being a racially isolated school.

Southwest High, a previous school destination, draws from a white, affluent area of the city, while North High is predominantly Black, with 80% of students qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunches. In addition, the North Side has a reputation for gun violence.

Those attendance changes garnered the loudest public outcry. Some south Minneapolis parents immediately sent their kids outside the district while others tried out their newly assigned school.

At North High, Principal Mauri Friestleben estimated that, in the five years that the school’s new south side boundaries have been in place, the school has enrolled a total of about 15 white students and about 75 to 80 Black and Latino students from the south side.

Five years ago, Friestleben was given a spreadsheet to call families to welcome them to the new North High destination. When it came to parental concerns, she heard comments ranging from the illogical to the racist. But some feedback made sense, such as Metro Transit dropping off students near a liquor store, she said.

Friestleben said she doesn’t consider white enrollment to be a kind of accreditation.

North, which last year had nearly 600 students in a school built for twice that number, has drawn at least 50 new students a year after the boundary changes, despite losing a prime band of its northern boundary to Camden High.

Friestleben heard from her community about the desire for high social and academic standards, and after making it the school’s focus, North Side families who had been opting out began opting in, she said.

Advanced course offerings are up and spirits are high, she added.

ReNee Pettis, a North High graduate and president of its booster club, said one of her children chose to leave DeLaSalle for North because of the community connection it provided.

Looking back over the recent enrollment gains, Friestleben said: “What I don’t think people realize is what it took to grow, period. And then what it took to grow in spite of the attendance zones. It took an amazing amount of work on the behalf of this staff.”

“With that, the parent talk really picked up at the bus stop,” Mason said. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to move.’ A lot of people just had decided they’re going to go to St. Louis Park.”

When Edith-Nicole Cameron’s son finished eighth grade at Anwatin, only three other former Kenwood Elementary classmates were there with him.

The family gave North High a look, but the school didn’t have the cross-country running and robotics opportunities he wanted, and Cameron managed to get her son into Southwest High. There, a different issue awaited him: class sizes of as many as 40 kids in its core offerings, she said.

A pivotal part of the plan was to make program offerings equitable, and by taking fifth-grade music citywide, the district addressed a common problem facing small schools: They are sometimes unable to afford programs geared to “serve the whole child,” said Jenny Arneson, a former school board member.

At Bethune Arts Elementary recently, two fifth-graders settled into chairs — one with a clarinet and the other an alto sax — for what looked like a private lesson.

More instruments now are on order in the middle schools and high schools.

“I can say there is increased interest and demand, which is a good thing,” said Lori Ledoux, K-12 arts content lead for Minneapolis Public Schools.

Still, the districtwide courses also have had to overcome budget cut threats.

Five years after the “comprehensive district design,” or CDD, passed, there has been very little direct mention of it in school board meetings. There’s also been no CDD progress report presented to the board since January 2023.

Leaders now are discussing a new “transformation” plan to build enrollment and potentially close or consolidate schools. The board last week asked district administration to deliver a report about such moves by April — a long-awaited step toward resolving chronic budget woes amid uncertainty over federal education funding and policy.