A Minneapolis parent on how she ended up being the only person regularly reporting on the district that serves the state’s largest city — and how district coverage has gotten even more challenging in recent years.
By Melissa Whitler
The year before my son started kindergarten, I wanted to learn more about our neighborhood school. At the time, I was a stay-at-home parent of a preschooler. Information was hard to find.
I ended up watching school board meetings and reading anything I could find about the district. Eventually, I started live-tweeting school board meetings because nobody else was doing that. That was around the end of 2018 or early 2019.
Around the same time, I began taking ceramics classes and fell deeply in love with making pottery, which still occupies lots of my free time. And then schools closed for a year in 2020, which turned everything upside down.
Charlie Rybak and Andrew Haeg started Southwest Voices, a neighborhood newsletter, at the end of 2021. Charlie saw my Twitter feed. He asked me if I would be willing to write about the school board meetings for his newsletter. They had hired Melody Hoffmann as the editor, and she is also my primary editor.
I was hesitant to say yes. I had intended to find part-time work when my son started kindergarten, although I had no specific plan. I definitely wasn’t considering being an education reporter.
But I told Charlie I would give it a try.
I definitely wasn’t considering being an education reporter.
How it started
We published a couple of longform pieces in early 2022, one about the impact of school closures during Omicron that I’m still really proud of and the other about the district’s budget crisis.
The budget article also grabbed a lot of attention. That surprised me because it was mostly just district documents that had been sitting out in public for years for everyone to see.
At the end of 2022, my school reporting moved into its own newsletter, Minneapolis Schools Voices. We now put out a monthly newsletter during the school year that links to our school reporting each month, plus links to other education reporting and some other information.
Subscriber growth has been steady, and our open rate remains high.
What parents and community members want
A lot of my reporting focuses on board meetings and the district budget. My role is part-time at 10 hours per week. That’s been my choice because I want to have time for ceramics and parenting.
When I have capacity, I enjoy reporting on things besides meetings and the budget. Charlie and Melody and I talk a lot about finding a balance in my reporting, and that’s something we’re still adjusting.
Covering the school board meetings feels important to me because there isn’t another outlet doing that consistently. Lots of outlets cover city council meetings. And there is lots of reporting on the state legislature. But the Minneapolis school district is mostly ignored by the local press corps, except for a few key meetings each year.
I think there is an audience for “feel good” education stories, about one school or one classroom, one event. I’m not as interested in those stories in our district because we have a lot of students and a lot of schools. And our district has a lot of challenges.
I’m more interested in what the district or state is doing that impacts the educational experiences of all MPS students, not just a one-off experience for a few students. I look for stories where I can weave a situation at a school into something larger, like a recent article I wrote about a teacher navigating the state licensure system or a school advocating for an accessible playground, which revealed that the district’s current policy doesn’t match its values for inclusion.
My background is in economics and data analysis, so I get drawn into that. I want to see the data. I want the details. A lot of my reporting is on the budget.
The district has declining enrollment and operates many schools that have lower enrollment than schools in surrounding districts. The state does not provide adequate funding to meet student needs in a district like Minneapolis. There has been a growing structural budget crisis since about 2017 that the federal ESSER funds helped to mask.
If or how the district will address its fiscal challenges is going to continue to be a significant story.
In 2021, longtime Minneapolis-based education reporter Beth Hawkins (above) talked about the highs and lows of Minneapolis schools coverage: The reinvention of Minneapolis schools coverage.
Coverage changes since 2021
As a parent in the district, I think that the local education coverage is incomplete. There are times when I am the only reporter at school board meetings. It’s odd being the only press in the room as a part-timer for a tiny outlet.
Since 2021, almost all of the reporters have moved off the Minneapolis schools beat.
Sahan Journal’s Becky Zosia Dernbach has stayed on the beat, but she covers stories across the metro and sometimes statewide. Mara Klecker was the dedicated Minneapolis education reporter at the Star Tribune, and I think she has now added statewide coverage to her beat. Eder Campuzano (also at the Star Tribune) has moved off the education beat.
The Reformer occasionally covers education but doesn’t have a dedicated education reporter, as far as I know. And they are also a statewide outlet. Former LAist education reporter Kyle Stokes at Axios will occasionally write about education or MPS. Elizabeth Shockman at Minnesota Public Radio is covering education statewide. And every now and then, The 74’s Beth Hawkins will dig into something local.
I might be the only person who is exclusively covering the school district serving the state’s largest city, and I’m just part-time.
I might be the only person who is exclusively covering the school district serving the state’s largest city, and I’m just part-time.
Wish list
I would love for there to be a long-term investment in sustaining a team of local education reporters to take on this beat. The community needs people who are committed to covering education, learning the ins and outs of the district. I would happily fade away quietly into the ceramics studio if that happened.
Our district’s kids and families deserve that type of coverage of a government entity that plays such an important role in many of our lives. Minneapolis is the fourth largest district in the state. I believe it employs more teachers than any other district in the state. It serves the children and families of the largest city in the state. And it has a structural budget deficit that it is running out of time to address. All of this also probably applies to St. Paul.
There are multitudes of stories about the district that never get written. The budget story sat untouched for at least four years before I wrote about it. But there’s so much more.
There are multitudes of stories about the district that never get written.
For example, three years ago, the district underwent a significant redesign of its school boundaries and placement policies. At its heart, that plan challenged white, middle- and upper-class parents, like myself, to choose integrated magnet schools. With the exception of the Spanish immersion program, those white, middle- and upper-class parents have just stayed in their predominantly white, middle- and upper-class neighborhood schools or left the district entirely.
The district invested about $100 million in facilities as part of the plan. There has been no major retrospective about that. The superintendent who led that process resigned. The district leadership involved in the plan has mostly left. All but one of the board members who voted for it chose not to run for re-election. There’s probably three or four longform articles to be written just on this.
Melissa Whitler Is on Twitter at @SWV_Melissa. You can read her here.
Previously from The Grade
What happens when a non-traditional podcast fills in to cover school board meetings?
The reinvention of Minneapolis schools coverage
Finding the quiet stories underneath the screaming
