Education

For the past four years, West Ottawa High School student Lacey Vande Bunte has given up her Sunday afternoons to rebuild computers. MORE »

Two opportunities to speak out on budgets, local and state:

The Minnesota Coalition for a People’s Bailout and the Welfare Rights Committee are organizing a campaign to demand a “People’s Bailout” of increased and extended aid to the poor, protection of public education funding, and no layoffs. The campaign kicks off with a protest at the state capitol on Tuesday, January 6 at noon, during the opening session of the state legislature. MORE »

“In Minneapolis, you have an expectation that children will succeed, an attitude of ‘yes, you can do it!’” observed a Swedish teacher, part of a group from Uppsala, Sweden that visited Minneapolis public schools in late October. MORE »

Cindy Reuther knows sex discrimination firsthand. The businesswoman remembers learning, shortly out of college, that she was earning less than male colleagues doing the same job. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. But that was just the beginning. MORE »

It’s an imperfect plan, but Normandale Community College is willing to go ahead with it anyway. MORE »

The high schoolers in Claire Hypolite’s chemistry class are clustered in little knots of desks, heads down and pencils flying as they grapple with packets of homework problems. They toss solutions and gossip back and forth in English, Somali, and Hmong while they work. Watching this entirely generic classroom scene, it’s hard to believe more than 80% of these kids were failing this class only a few months ago. MORE »

Education is a long-term investment. School initiatives can sometimes take decades to reach fruition. However, the payoff is well-worth the investment. While educators have been asking for the tools they need to give our children opportunities to succeed, the state has been near silent, abrogating their fiscal responsibility to local property taxpayers to pick up the tab. A new idea gaining steam at the capitol, would not only reverse this trend, but could also create conditions for another “Minnesota Miracle.” MORE »

When Princess Chomilo-Kisob enters college next fall, she will have already received college credit, saved thousands of dollars for her family, and gotten over the initial anxiety and intimidation that often accompanies the transition from high school to college. All of this has been made possible through the Post Secondary Education Options (PSEO) program. MORE »