MPS: Northside community must recruit North High’s next 9th grade class

Parents, students and community members last week successfully caused the Minneapolis School Board and superintendent to change their minds and allow North High School to stay open to new students next year.

However, the victory comes with a caveat. The North Side community, principally the Committee to Save North High, has been challenged to recruit 125 students for next year’s ninth grade class. This appears to be a formidable task, but the coalition seems determined to take it on.

Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson had proposed last week that North be closed next fall and reopened in 2012. Many interpreted this as a move to quiet the community protest and believed that, once closed, North High would not reopen.

Along with voting to allow for a ninth-grade class next year — if the community meets its goal — the school board also approved a proposal to bring in a design team that will work with “community stakeholders” to redesign and create a “new” North High in 2012. This proposal raised questions among the coalition about who the district will consider as “community stakeholders.”

Also questioned is exactly what the school board means when they refer to North High as a “failing school.” Students say they are being measured by the wrong yardstick. Judging from their eloquence in defense of their school at board meetings and in community meetings, something is clearly being done right at the beleaguered school.

As many in the Save North High Coalition have said, the effort to save North High is about more than North High. It is an opportunity for real community participation in the life and education of its children. It is an opportunity to build a school from the ground up and rejuvenate the spirits of a community battered by self-doubt, opportunism, unemployment, foreclosures and youth violence.

—News Analysis by Mel Reeves