Hundreds of St. Paul students stay home to oppose Hmong program overcrowding

Hmong parents in St. Paul set out Monday to voice their frustrations with the state’s second-largest district through a novel form of protest: keeping their kids at home for the day.

Hundreds of kids stayed home Monday, organizers said, to show opposition to a lack of buy-in on a plan to address overcrowding at a popular Hmong dual language and culture school. It’s left families once again feeling silenced and dismissed, they said.

Their aim is to ease pressure at Txuj Ci school by splitting off and moving its Hmong Studies program to a former East Side early-learning center. But the proposal, which could come to a vote at a school board meeting this week, has yet to win over Superintendent Stacie Stanley.

She wants any facilities changes to be considered as part of a districtwide building review.

Sai Thao, a parent organizing the stay-at-home protest, said that as many as 900 students could be kept out of school Monday. And that’s not just at Txuj Ci, she added, but at schools citywide.

The protest marks the first time in decades that parents frustrated by district inaction had resorted to withdrawing children from school for a day, said Joe Nathan, founder and former director of the Center for School Change, now known as Catalyst for Systems Change.

He has worked closely with the Hmong American community and the charter schools that serve them.

At the school’s lower campus — serving preschoolers through fourth-graders — students eat lunch over a four-hour stretch — some as late as 2 p.m. Hallways teem with students, and the gym, which hosts a Hmong New Year celebration, can get so packed that some parents have to stand outside.

Parents also find it difficult to sit with their children in class, said Thao, who has a first-grader at Txuj Ci.

“That helps me understand that my child does not have the kind of space that she needs to develop,” she said.

St. Paul has found success building enrollment through its culture and language programs. In addition to Txuj Ci, the district has opened schools dedicated to Mandarin, French and Spanish immersion. Two years ago, it added an East African Elementary Magnet School, pushing the total number of students in such programs to more than 1,300.

Hmong parents have eyed two charter schools — Hmong College Prep Academy and Community School of Excellence — and expressed a desire to place their children in a similar grades K-12 facility. But Jackie Turner, the district’s executive chief of administration and operation, said the K-12 model is not in the best academic interest of students. Nor could St. Paul Public Schools find a parcel of land large enough to build such a facility, she said.

Plans now call for a single pre-K through eighth-grade Txuj Ci building, but not for another five to eight years — also a sore point with many Hmong parents.

The workgroup, in the interim, has proposed relocating Hmong Studies to the early-learning center, allowing Txuj Ci to pull back its fifth-graders from the upper campus. That would cost $2.6 million to $3.5 million, the district said. A second option, shifting the program to Hazel Park Preparatory Academy, has a $1.4 million to $2.4 million price tag.

A potential drawback of the workgroup’s favored option: The program would be too small to afford the number of specialists needed to provide a well-rounded education.

Over the past two months, Stanley and school board members have visited Txuj Ci and the two potential landing spots, and also met with staff, students, community members and Hmong leaders, Erica Wacker, a district spokeswoman said.

“[This week’s] vote will take all of this feedback, as well as the financial and districtwide implications, into consideration,” she said.

A few Hmong parents now are weighing a run for school board next year, Thao said, but she is not one of them. She believes she has more power as a parent.

And she knows what she wants.