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Kate Towle, Minneapolis parent update to the Minneapolis Parent Forum on June 21, 2005 meeting with Speaker of the House Steve Sviggum.

Dear Listserv Members,

Mpls. parents Linda Lincoln and I joined parents and advocates from St. Paul NEAT (Network of Education Action Teams) to meet with Speaker of the House, Rep. Steve Sviggum, about funding for public education.  There were about 12 of us.  Four of us, including me, were interviewed by the St. Paul Pioneer Press prior to the meeting.  After the meeting, Fox 9 reporter Timothy Blotz interviewed me and Julie Schultz Brown, representing ISAIAH (a coalition of congregation-based community organizations that advocate for community issues).

Our primary points were that:

• Gov. Pawlenty needs to continue the work of the Task Force that had begun to examine the true cost of educating children in MN, taking into account children’s circumstances and special needs.
• Public education is a public investment that needs to be funded with public dollars.
• We’re concerned about ALL MN children—and stages of parenting and education.
• We want funding that’s accessible (that the public can understand and stand behind) and that’s sustainable (stable from year to year)—and not dependent on funding measures, like casinos and racinos, that are unpredictable.

Rep. Sviggum was cordial and accommodating in the early part of the fifteen minutes.  We were all loud and clear with our messages.  Linda Lincoln made a great case for the benefit to her child of being in a classroom where diversity is embraced and honored, while speaking to the very real challenges of classroom children who come into our system with few English-speaking skills.  I spoke of the 68% of families with free and reduced lunches in Mpls., the costs in closing our achievement gap (3rd highest nationally after Detroit and Philadelphia), and our very real need to invest in our children now so they can become contributive citizens later.

As one St. Paul parent tried to build a case for early childhood education—and a sliding fee scale for pre-schools, Rep. Sviggum became very defensive and adamant that he disagreed with her, and that early childhood education access was really not part of this debate.  He did not try to clarify if he understood the parent correctly.  NEAT president, Kathy Klumb, chimed in to help, but Sviggum emphasized the point that we were saying different things, and that early childhood education and K-12 education were separate issues.  Sviggum pointed out then that our time was up, and that he had to move on to his next appointment.  At that point past-president of NEAT, Jennifer Armstrong, stated that she wanted him to hear out concerns about early-childhood education.  He said that he needed us to respect his time and would not agree to such forums in the future if we did not.  Jennifer (who is now “past” president and has some political capital) decided to leave the meeting.  However, Sviggum gathered the rest of us around his table to talk about how much he supports Pawlenty’s proposals and that’s where the real answers lie.

We’ve been told, since the meeting, that a similar type of exchange occurred with the Spanish-immersion principal who met with Rep. Sviggum following our meeting.  We did feel as though we got many of our points across and that the House Speaker is clear that we do need to increase funds for quality education.  The question is how much, how sustainable and how much the average citizen will be held accountable to this investment.   We must all continue to work on advocating strongly for quality early childhood education.  We also realized that if the Speaker does not have time to hear us out, we may need to rely on the press to help us clarify and elaborate upon our message.

Kate Towle
Marcy Open School, Minneapolis
Great River School, Saint Paul

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