Over the past decade, Minneapolis Public Schools has faced many challenges, some external and some of its own making. The district continues to have a structural budget deficit and is using one-time funds to balance its budget. It has also struggled to recover from academic, attendance, staffing and enrollment challenges that were exacerbated by the pandemic.

Now that the district has reached a tentative contract agreement with its teachers and education support professionals union, attention will shift back to looking at structural challenges in the district.

Southwest Voices asked the district to share some data-backed, positive trends it hopes to build on in the future years. Leaders shared about investments in early literacy, a state grant to address chronic absenteeism, a new teacher apprenticeship program and two consecutive years of increasing enrollment.

The district says it is making investments to address these challenges – and there have been positive, early signs, including two straight years of increased enrollment after several years of decline.

In February 2024, the school board hired Dr. Lisa Sayles-Adams as superintendent. Before her arrival, the district had been led by Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox after Superintendent Ed Graff resigned in June 2022. Nearly two years into her tenure, Sayles-Adams has overseen the passage of two budgets, overhauled the district’s senior leadership, settled a teacher contract in 2024 that provided unprecedented raises and was named the Superintendent of the Year for the state.

Early Literacy

To comply with the READ Act , a state law, the district is investing in professional development for teachers and a new foundational skills literacy curriculum for early elementary students. The district selected LETRS for professional development, except for bilingual educators who must complete CORE.

The first phase of professional development, which includes elementary teachers in kindergarten through third grade, as well as English Learner teachers and some special education teachers, must complete professional development by July 1, 2026.

The district reported in June in its Local Literacy Plan that 66% of its phase one teachers have completed or started the required training. Senior Academic Officer Melissa Sonnek told the school board on Nov. 18 that just over half of the district’s phase one teachers are on-track to complete the required training on time.

According to Director of Literacy and Humanities Brandon Button, some teachers will not meet the state deadline, and will need an additional 4-5 months to complete the training. He described the delay as due to logistical challenges registering approximately 1,000 teachers for the first phase of training.

In October 2024 the district said that many teachers had delayed starting training because the district and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers had not reached an agreement on how to pay teachers for the training. At the time, only 81 teachers were on-track to complete the training by deadline.

In addition to professional development for teachers, all 44 of the district’s elementary schools are using a new foundational skills curriculum called UFLI for grades kindergarten through third grade. The state rated UFLI as “highly-aligned” with the science of reading. For 33 of the schools, this is their second year using UFLI. This is the first time in at least a decade that all elementary schools are using the same literacy curriculum.

Students need a foundational skills curriculum like UFLI to learn the connection between letters and sounds to decode words. The curriculum takes about 30 minutes per day of instructional time.

Elementary schools are also using UFLI as an intervention for fourth and fifth grade students who need extra help learning foundational reading skills.

Research shows foundational skills alone are not sufficient for students to learn to read. Students also need a “knowledge-building” curriculum to learn the vocabulary and background information to understand the words they read.

The district continues to use Benchmark Advance for its knowledge-building literacy curriculum, even though the curriculum failed the district’s own audit in February 2023. The district originally planned to stagger adopting UFLI and a knowledge-building curriculum one year apart. The plan called for selecting the curriculum last year, testing the curriculum this year and using it in all schools in the 2026-27 school year. But the district did not do this yet.

“There will absolutely be a curriculum review that will be starting this year for our K-5 knowledge-based curriculum,” Sonnek said in an interview with Southwest Voices.

However, Sonnek said she did not yet know what the timeline would be for all students to have access to a knowledge-building curriculum in the elementary grade. She said the district is trying to balance students’ need for a knowledge-building curriculum “as soon as possible” with the capacity of teachers to implement it. These are the same concerns the district had in June 2024 when they decided to delay selecting a knowledge-building curriculum for a year.

Sonnek told the school board on Nov. 18 that the district was currently recruiting members for a committee to select a knowledge-building curriculum. She said the committee will start meeting in December.

Southwest Voices asked the district to provide data to support the positive impact of the UFLI curriculum for students. The district provided data on one school, Nellie Stone Johnson, which began using UFLI last school year.

After starting UFLI, the number of students at the school who are making typical or aggressive growth has grown from about 40% of students to over 70% of students in the spring of 2025.

Percent of kindergarten and first grade students at Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School making typical or aggressive growth on the FastBridge Early Reading assessment

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Although proficiency rates at the school remain low, in order to increase the number of students on grade level, schools must first help students make more than a year’s worth of typical academic progress in a single year. This is what the aggressive growth category measures.

Though it’s impossible to know without data on other schools, Nellie Stone Johnson may be an outlier. It has additional supports for literacy that aren’t available at most other district elementary schools. Each K-3 classroom has a full-time literacy coach, in addition to the regular classroom teacher, according to Principal Kelly Wright. The literacy coaches are part of the Total Learning Classroom program through Reading Corps.

The coaches split their time between providing extra reading instruction to students, called intervention, supporting classroom teachers during the school day, and providing coaching on how to improve how they teach reading. The school also has three intervention teachers through the district’s Title I funding.

Nellie Stone Johnson was also part of a previous, multi-year Groves Literacy Partnership. The Groves Literacy Partnership brought evidence-based training and coaching for teachers, plus a foundational skills curriculum aligned with the science of reading, to six elementary schools in the district.

The extra staff means Nellie Stone Johnson is able to offer intervention to every student who needs it, Wright says.

The district is currently only funding intervention teachers in Title I schools. At least one school, Lake Harriet Elementary, was approved by the school board to use PTA funding to hire a literacy intervention teacher.

The district shared this fall’s student assessment data on Nov. 18, but did not include data for individual schools. Overall reading proficiency rates for kindergarten and first grade students are 48%, down one percentage point compared to last fall, and down five percentage points compared to the 2022-23 school year.

Chronic Absenteeism

Following distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Minneapolis Public Schools saw an increase in chronic absenteeism, like most districts across the country. During the 2021-22 school year, 51% of district students missed more than 10% of school days — a threshold where academic gaps begin to compound. That percentage dropped to 39% of students in the 2022-23 school year, and has remained flat at 36% of students for school years 2023-24 and 2024-25. Prior to the pandemic, about 21% of district students were chronically absent each year.

Native American and Black students are more likely to be chronically absent than other students.

Two thirds of Native American students and 53% of Black students were chronically absent during the 2024-25 school year compared to just 18% of white students, according to data provided by the district. Across all three groups, however, chronic absenteeism has increased since before the pandemic.

Minneapolis is one of twelve districts statewide participating in a three year pilot program on student attendance that started last year. The legislature approved $4.7 million, of which Minneapolis will receive $1 million.

Director of Student Retention & Recovery Colleen Kaibel says it is still too early to see results from the first year of the pilot program.

With the state pilot funding, Minneapolis is supporting three central office positions, and paying stipends of $1000 each to school staff that volunteer to be part of the program. The 20 participating schools also receive $600 each to purchase supplies or host activities related to their work.

The district has three tiers of support through the pilot program. The first level is a student-led attendance team. Last year, students planned events like “Spirit Week” designed to promote attendance and a sense of belonging.

Schools participating in the Attendance Pilot Program

At schools receiving the second tier of support staff members volunteer as mentors to one or two students who need support to attend school regularly. The goal is for students to develop a personal connection to at least one staff member, with the hope that this helps students feel like they belong at school.

The highest level of intervention is targeted at students already known to be chronically absent. Staff work with school social workers to provide a long-term intervention which incorporates the whole family.

Minneapolis has also operated an attendance program called Check and Connect for over three decades. That program currently operates in 21 schools with 28 staff members who are a mix of district employees and AmeriCorps volunteers.

Schools with Check & Connect program and the number of students served

Enrollment

For the second year in a row, the district has had an increase in enrollment. Last year, the district posted a net gain of 910 students, and this year added another 244.

The district is uncertain what has led to the increase in enrollment the past two years, according to Deputy Superintendent Ty Thompson. In an interview with Southwest Voices, Thompson said the district is still studying what is behind the uptick.

Enrollment had declined every school year since 2015-16, dropping nearly 23% from its peak by the 2023-24 school year. The district’s enrollment is still 14% below its enrollment levels before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The district hired former state demographer Hazel Reinhardt to project enrollment in the district for the next decade. At a June school board meeting, she predicted the district will lose between 1200 and 2800 students over the next decade. The main driver of this decline, according to Reinhardt, is lower birth rates and fewer families choosing to raise their children in the city.

Districts like Minneapolis that have lost enrollment to charter schools, open enrollment into suburban districts or private schools almost never bring those students back, according to Reinhardt.

About half of the new students last year are from an increase in students remaining in 12th grade for more than one year, Reinhardt said. This includes a subset of students who receive special education services who receive transition services through the age of 22. Some English Learners are also allowed to remain in high school for more than four years.

But the increase in students in 12th grade is a temporary increase due to the pandemic, representing students who fell behind academically, Reinhardt said. She noted she has seen a similar trend in other districts in the state.

Previously, the district estimated that it has enrolled over 3,000 new students who are Spanish-speaking during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. Administrators do not track the immigration status of students but the majority of students are believed to be new immigrants.

Last year, 23% of district students were English Learners. The number of English Learners increased 21% between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Education.

The district has increased the number of Hispanic students by 15% compared to the fall of 2019, according to state data. At the same time, Black student enrollment has declined by one third, and white student enrollment declined by 16%.

English Learner students require additional services to help them learn English. While the state increased aid to school districts to support English Learners in 2023, Minneapolis Public Schools will spend about $17 million more than its state and federal aid to support English Learner students this year.

To attract and retain students, this year the district changed how it places students who want to attend a community school other than the one assigned by their home address. It calls these out of area placements. In 2021, as part of a reorganization called the Comprehensive District Design, the district limited out of area placements to no more than 5% of a school’s enrollment, according to district records obtained as part of a public records request.

Thompson said she was unaware of the 5% placement figure, but said that she believes the current threshold is 10%.

The district placed 1,601 students out of area from waitlists over the summer. Previously, the district had waited until after school had started to move students from waitlists.

Placements were made to fill the budgeted enrollment for schools, but not above so that class size caps were not exceeded, according to Thompson. The district also placed 589 students who live outside the district.

Southwest Voices asked the district for the number of students placed at each school out of area, but the district did not provide the data before publication. The district used to provide this data every year on its website but stopped after the 2023-24 school year.

Licensure Program

Minneapolis is the first school district in the state to be accredited to license teachers. Last year the district began a teacher apprenticeship program that combines earning a bachelor’s degree with a teachers license, while working for the district. The two-year long program included 14 apprentices in the first cohort who will earn their license in the summer of 2026.

The first cohort of apprentices work in a special education classroom with a licensed special education teacher who serves as their journeyman teacher. The apprentice is paid as an education support professional, and does not pay any tuition.

A second cohort of 12 apprentices started this fall. This cohort will earn an elementary education license in the summer of 2027.

The district developed the apprenticeship program to address two of its challenges. First, the district’s teachers do not reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of its students. So one aim of the program is to help the district diversify its teacher workforce. Second, like many districts, Minneapolis has struggled to hire special education teachers.

Although the district cannot guarantee positions to the apprentices, it does plan to offer the cohort members what it calls an early contract. This will allow apprentices to participate in the district’s internal hiring process for filling teacher vacancies for the 2026-27 school year.

Ryan Mulso, who leads the apprenticeship program, says that with the addition of the apprentices the district anticipates that it will not have any special education classroom teacher vacancies next school year.

Mulso is enthusiastic about the benefits of the program for the district’s students as well as the apprentices. He said three of the 14 apprentices were able to buy a house after joining the program, knowing they would have the future salary and reliability of working as a licensed teacher.

If hired by the district, teachers who have completed the apprenticeship program will then be paid according to the salary schedule for licensed teachers.

The district will continue to face challenges in the years ahead, but the district is making investments in improving early literacy instruction, addressing chronic absenteeism and training the teachers it needs, which may help it improve outcomes for students in the future.