Minneapolis Outsider Report: A Conversation with A Teacher

On Sunday February 15, I was in a busy Minneapolis coffee shop picking up a sandwich and coffee before my 5 hour drive back to my home in Iowa City. While waiting for the sandwich to be made I overheard a group of about 6 people busily chatting about the latest updates on their Signal chat regarding their neighborhood ICE Patrol.

I watched smiling people walking their dogs in the welcome sunlight. Notably though, I found myself sitting next to someone who was willing to share their experience of what it has been like to work within the Minneapolis school system since ICE descended upon the Twin Cities. When I confessed that I had been hoping to talk to someone working within the school system the first words out of their mouth were: “I am in no way ready to go on the record and I don’t think any of my colleagues would either. We have student privacy to protect and so many other things to consider. Besides that, we are all exhausted.” I asked them if there was anything in general that they would be willing to share with me.

Speaking only in generalities they shared with me the following, which I will attempt to recall to the best of my ability:

-There are many students who are not attending in-person classes due to safety concerns (this includes children of all skin tones and legal status backgrounds)

-The schools responded to this by making online learning available

-Many students and their families do not feel safe enough to attend the online classes. The risk is that online classes allow others to see into their homes, overhear voices nearby…and to identify who is on screen. Thus, it’s not considered safe.

-If a student does not attend classes for 15 days, they are then removed from the student rolls, which means the school district or school (I am unsure exactly which the speaker meant here) loses the state money for that student.

-Losing funding for missing students means that all children within the school system are impacted. Services that are paid for with that money are impacted.

-The downstream economic impacts of losing funds are very real

-Some teachers have tried to encourage students trapped at home to keep learning by delivering materials to them at home. In many cases this is unsuccessful because the family does not want anyone coming to their home and exposing their location. Also, they don’t know that they can 100% trust anyone coming to their home to deliver supplies. It’s already been documented that ICE is impersonating mutual aid delivery, so this is unfortunately a reasonable fear to have.

-I was told that there are cases of school teachers and admins trying to help children come back to school in-person by arranging rides to the school grounds via parents who are less likely to be questioned about their immigration status. In the examples they gave, I was told it was unsuccessful.