Yesterday, we looked back on 42 years of reforms in Minnesota.

But how did the state get to that point?

Today, we start at the beginning.

———-

September 21, 2021
A Tale Of Two Schools
Molybdenum Priestley, StarTribuneSunVillager Weekly Shopper

Willow Brockley-Stensrud-Mauer-Hoff, age ten, is in her third school in five years.

“Daddy keeps moving us farther and farther out”, says Ms. Brockley-Stensrud-Mauer-Hoff, a fifth-grader at Fidel Castro Middle School in Annandale. “He says we need to stay at least two tiers of suburbs away from the ‘scum'”, she adds, doodling in a notebook.

Ashley Brockley-Mauer, 55, a life coach who works for the State Department of Health in downtown Minneapolis, drops Willow off at school before getting on the train to go to her job in downtown Minneapolis. Her life partner, Ian Hoff-Hoff-Stensrud-Hoff, 58, was recently laid off from a position with the Minneapolis Department of Green Enforcement. He’s seeking a position with the Stearns County Lifestyle Patrol – but things look dismal. “There were two hundred applicants for one opening”, he notes. “But I look at the interregnum as a bit of a growth experience”.

Annandale, once a Republican stronghold, has had its politics switch drastically in recent years. When the city was connected to the Northstar Line, the city was inundated with Minneapolitans. Drawn by an excellent school system, low housing costs and low crime, the urban expats – 99.8% white, registered DFL members – quickly put their imprint on the town.

“Once we took control”, recalls Ms. Brockley-Mauer, “thanks to Instant Runoff Voting, we instituted rigorous Green environmental standards and sustainable growth practices on regional businesses, and outcome-based juvenile justice and corrections practices. We gave the teachers and public employees unions voting seats on the City Parliament, and instituted the “FairBallot” for all city spending votes, abolishing the non-progressive secret ballot. We also put a price cap on local homes to make sure housing would remain affordable, and established a living wage ordinance for all jobs. We also began the “Diversity Through Unity” program at the school system”. She nods with satisfaction. “It was about then that Willow was born”.

Despite the improvements, problems started cropping up. Crime rates inexplicably rose, student achievement dropped, and the available housing stock, mostly built in the 1990s, wasn’t being renewed. A wave of business bankruptcies rapidly followed, and area unemployment zoomed upward.

“Temporary hiccups on the great progressive leap forward”, Brockley-Mauer asserts. “We’ve kept DFL legislators in office in this district for the past ten years, so things are bound to improve.”

The troubled-but-cozy suburb has its share of controversies, of course. Malcolm X High School briefly instituted a Junior ROTC Program imported from Saint Paul to help bolster achievement among troubled suburban teens.

“It was great”, recalls Justin Yetterboe, 17, of Waite Park. “Before JROTC, I was a shiftless, paint-huffing skate bum. Sergeant Xiong – the JROTC leader – changed all that. He taught me some pride in myself. He made me reach for more.”

But the program was cancelled last year amid a flurry of controversy. “This was the sort of thing we left Minneapolis to try to escape”, says Mr. Hoff-Hoff-Stensrud-Hoff, a key activist in getting the program scrapped. “Halliburton Bushitler Chimpy Chimp”, he adds, reprising his closing argument at the public meeting that led to the cancellation of the program and the public burning of all its course materials.

“We moved out here to get the life we wanted, and we will have it”, he nods with emphasis.

———-

Fifty miles east-southeast, 13 year old Anna Strachan and 14 year old LaKeisha Morris sit at computers in the rough-hewn looking but cozy classroom at Phil Krinkie Academy, a charter school in Saint Paul.

“The teachers here preach one thing only – your life is your responsibility, and you’re the only one who can live up to it. So have some self-respect”, says Morris, the daughter of Shondra and DahnDre Morris of Saint Paul.

“We built this school ourselves, from the ground up, once we took over the old building”, recalls DahnDre Morris of the school’s early years after it took over the former Arlington High School, off Rice Street in Saint Paul. “I didn’t want my kids going through what I did”.

“No kidding”, adds his wife. “The only thing I remember learning in four years of high school was that I needed self-esteem. But I never did learn why!”

Parents of four kids ages six through 17, the couple is used to hard work. DahnDre is a CNC machinist with PowerTec, a precision parts manufacturer in Saint Paul. Shondra runs a soul food restaurant on Rice Street. “Rice used to be a wasteland, just empty storefronts and crappy bars”, Shondra remembers. “Now, the biggest problem is finding space for the new businesses that are moving in”.

The couple, newly-married and with a baby back in 2005, tried moving out to suburban Burnsville to raise their young family. “It started out well”, DahnDre explains. “The schools and the city were pretty free of some of the inner city BS”.

But then, about the time of the great Mortgage Meltdown of 2008, things started changing.

“As the inner city got more run down and torn down”, DahnDre starts, “and about the time gas prices rose up so that I couldn’t drive to work, more and more of the white, middle class types started leaving the city – for pretty much the same reason we did. Lower taxes, better schools, etc, etc.”

“But”, Shondra interjects, “they brought their politics with”.

Taxes zoomed. School achievement started dropping. Crime skyrocketed.

The final straw came in 2017. “The school called and said they’d caught DeShawn, our oldest, huffing paint. They suspended him…”, DahnDre reports, eyes wide with amazement he still visibly feels “…not for huffing, but for skipping Gay Pride class. They called it a “hate infraction”. Can you believe that?”.

(Burnsville school district Diversity supervisor Poppy Fleeber declined to comment on the case).

So the Morrises moved back to Saint Paul, drawn not only by the ample cheap housing, but by a subtle but intense change in atmosphere.

“After some of the scandals that happened in the late ’00s and early teens – the Saint Paul Land Grab, the Minneapolis Atheism Accord, the Met Council Sex Ring, that sort of thing, people took a look around. And they saw it was time for a real change”.

The turning point was the 2013 election of Mayor Annaluisa Lopez, the first Republican elected mayor of Saint Paul as a Republican since the mid-1900s.

“I led quite the coalition”, Lopez recalls via phone from her office in Washington, DC. Sworn in last January as Minnesota’s first Latina Senator, Lopez led a motley collection of supporters – Asian free-enterprise activists, Afro-American education reformers, Hispanic social conservatives, and Eritrean and working-class white crime hawks – against a phalanx of traditional DFL constituencies. “Everyone predicted we’d lose and lose big”, Lopez reminisces. “The turning point was when Garrison Keillor called me Tija Tomasina (broken spanish for “Auntie Tom”)”. The outrage filled Lopez’ electoral sails – she beat incumbent Chris Coleman 51-49$ in the ’13 election, despite Council President Dave Thune’s call for Governor Pogemiller to declare martial law, famously claiming “A Republican Mayor would be a natural disaster”.

She slashed taxes and city bureaucracy, and instituted a “homestead” program for vacant housing and commercial property, privatized public housing, and instituted a citywide “Smack Down Crime” program, giving cash prizes for the most creative capture of criminals by civilians. “Some liberals from Lake Elmo called it “vigilante justice”. We just called it fun!” Lopez remembers.

Lopez rode to victory in 2017 by a 60-40 margin over DFL challenger Marcy Piffle, a middle school teacher, performance artist and pro-Palestinian poet.

“That”, says DahnDre Morris, “was the first time I voted Republican in my life”.

“I told you so!”, Shondra laughs, nudging him. Shondra voted for President Palin in 2012, and a framed picture of Ronald Reagan hangs on the wall of her restaurant. “Some of the old timers give me guff about it. But not much”.

DeShawn, their oldest, has turned things around since his run-in in Burnsville. He graduated from the Krinkie Academy last fall, and just started attending the Naval Academy a few weeks ago.

“I shudder to think what would have happened had we stayed out there in Burnsville”, DahnDre shakes his head. Then, eyes wide open in disbelief, he jumps to his feet. “I gotta show you this!” he bellows.

“Oh, yeah”, says Shondra. “This is hilarious”.

DahnDre returns with a letter on Burnsville City letterhead. “It’s a demand that we move back and be happy to pay for a better People’s City of Burnsville!”

———-

Monday? Well, not every part of Minnesota fared as well as Rice Street.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under History And Its Making, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.