Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Why are families leaving St. Paul schools? It’s a mystery. Now that the staff member doing the survey has been let go, we may never find out.
Looking at the chart, there appears to be some overlap in causes since the percentages work out to 114% and even under Common Core math, that’s not a reasonable answer. But just looking at the top three responses, I think I detect a pattern.
40% said “We moved.” I wonder why they moved? Better job outside the district? Seems unlikely, the economy isn’t that robust. Maybe they moved to GET outside the district? But why would they do that? Who’d want to leave the vibrant diversity of Frogtown to live in monochrome, monoculture Woodbury?
36% said “the school was unsafe.” But St. Paul just adopted new discipline policies to let Children Whose Lives Matter run wild. That’ll cut down on reported discipline statistics which will be a big help, won’t it? After the news accounts of violence in the last two years and the “don’t-bother-to-catch-go-straight-to-release” policy in effect, why would families think schools would be unsafe?
30% said “child was harassed/bullied.” Well that’s just whining. All kids are harassed and bullied, especially kids with Privilege who deserve it. That’s no excuse to leave the school. Pulling your kids out of our school costs us pupil-day money and that’s a racist hate crime.
Yep, it’s a total mystery why parents are pulling their kids out of St. Paul schools. Luckily, there are paid consultants to offer possible suggestions, some cited in the article. More arts classes might help. Different languages, smaller class sizes, better special education. Maybe training, to teach parents not to expect so much from schools like order, discipline, learning.
I hope they figure it out soon. A child’s education is not an experiment you can do over if it fails the first time, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to avoid a life of misery. All those minds would be a terrible thing to waste on fantasy feel-good foolishness.
Joe Doakes
I’m not saying “Making the schools crappy” was a diabolical DFL plot to make conservative-leaning people leave Minneapolis and Saint Paul, to consolidate control forever in the hands of the DFL.
But if it were their plan, how would it be working any differently?
It’s not rocket science. Parents love their own kids more than they love teachers, schools or unions. You have ONE JOB, educators. If you can’t do that, you are merely money disappearing down a large, swirling vortex.
TBS,
I might add, based on my interactions with many teachers that I have met over the years, useless!
Perhaps the DFL can drive families out of the city, but it would seem that without this “reproduction” thing, they’re going to have some trouble keeping things going.
For that matter, if they insist on trying to make Pig’s Eye and Murderapolis into a new Detroit or Gary, that’s a great reason for the legislature to severely restrict the freedom of cities to make some of these decisions. I’ve thought for a while, for example, that Congress ought to severely restrict what DC can do–it’s a hazard to the whole country, and the city obviously cannot govern itself.
St. Paul could quickly end up in the same place, sad to say.
When I moved back to the area let’s just say that nothing inside the 494/694 loop was even considered as a place to live. I still view it as a trial to have to go to something inside the loop, so it takes a lot to get me to consider evening going in there.
I knew my kids were in swampy, fetid water every time we had a parent’s conference. After meeting the teachers it was very instructive how long it would take my wife to describe one or more of our kid’s teachers as “moron,” “dipstick” or “idiot.”
And it always happened.
My advice to today’s parents: Home school!!!!!!!!!!!