Looking for bright spots in schools?

Over the past decade, Minneapolis Public Schools has faced many challenges. 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.
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.
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 (807 N 27th Ave.), 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.
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. (More details in the online version of this article at southwestvoices.news.)
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 has not shared student assessment data publicly since February. Administrators described other positive trends in academic outcomes to Southwest Voices but did not share data to substantiate their claims.

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 12 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.

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 1,200 and 2,800 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.