Dulcie and her family, who live in the Twin Cities metro, are afraid every day when they leave for work and school.

“All of my friends are staying at home. No one comes out. It gets to me,” said Dulcie, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution from federal agents, who have been detaining citizens and legal immigrants.

Recently, Dulcie began driving her parents to work every morning before school, as early as 4 a.m. — because she is afraid they might disappear.

“I would rather do that than never hear from them. I’d rather know at least where to look for them then never hear a single word from them probably,” she said.

Like many area schools, Dulcie’s school is offering an online option for students worried about coming to school, but she has continued to go to school in-person, even if she doesn’t always feel like it.

“Most of the time I don’t even want to go because everything just feels so depressing,” Dulcie says.

The nation’s conscience has been shocked by high-profile incidents of federal immigration enforcement agents engaging children, including��apprehending on his way home from school.

But the impact on children and their families extend beyond these viral incidents, affecting the lives of children and families broadly across race, immigration status and economic class in the Twin Cities. The ongoing immigration surge of around has created a climate of fear — not just for the criminals and undocumented immigrants they claim to be targeting — but for ordinary families trying to maintain the routines and normalcy of childhood.

“We are just kids, and instead of being kids and living our lives as kids, we have to step up and support our community,” said Taleya Addison, an 18-year-old senior at FAIR School for Arts in downtown Minneapolis. She said her best friend’s father has been in ICE detention for weeks, and his mother is a stay-at-home mom. The family is struggling, so Addison has been picking up groceries and running errands for them.

With a Trump executive order in hand allowing stepped up immigration enforcement around schools and churches, federal agents have detained at least nine students in Columbia Heights, which canceled school Feb. 2 after feds were observed stalking bus stops and schools around arrival and dismissal.

Duluth Public Schools, Fridley Public Schools and Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union, against the feds, alleging the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedures Act by rescinding the sensitive areas policy that had previously protected schools from immigration enforcement activity.

Among the many incidents around schools:

On the day of Renee Good’s killing, immigration agents deployed chemical irritants and smoke outside of Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. After the murder of Alex Pretti, federal agents deployed smoke outside of an elementary school in Minneapolis.

On Jan. 14, federal agents were spotted gathering outside of an elementary school around dismissal time .

Roseville schools reported that on Jan. 21 immigration enforcement agents used a school parking lot as a staging area.

Parents interviewed by the Reformer said immigration agents have lurked outside of schools in Minneapolis, and one said agents in a vehicle concealed themselves in the parent pickup line at a suburban school, while staff scrambled to get students safely inside.

Federal agents have also been confronted after around in the Twin Cities.

On Jan. 14, Area Public Schools reported that a parent waiting at a bus stop had been taken by federal agents. And on Jan. 23, Public Schools reported that two students and their parents had been taken by federal agents in an incident witnessed by another parent in the district.

On Jan. 15, transporting students and staff from St. Paul Public Schools were stopped by federal agents.

On Jan. 27, Public Schools reported that two of its vans had also been stopped by federal immigration agents while students and staff were on board. And on Jan. 29, reported that federal agents had boarded a bus while students were on board.

The�����ڴǰ������ spoke with more than a dozen Twin Cities teens, parents of younger children and teachers to understand the impact on the daily lives of children. Their experiences range from the minor inconveniences of having extracurricular activities postponed or canceled, to fearing for their own safety leaving the house for school or work.

Students have gone missing from school

Heather, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution against her students and school, teaches English learners at a middle school in the Twin Cities. Since her district introduced an online learning option, her typical class of 20 students is down to just four or five students in person. Many students are also not showing up online either.

Although absenteeism has been worse since the killing of Good on Jan. 7,�� Heather has had students regularly missing school because of concerns about immigration enforcement since November. One student has temporarily moved in with family out of state because their parents believe they are safer there.

Heather said she is concerned that many of her students who have moved to online learning might never come back to the classroom.

Student absenteeism is also putting some funding at-risk for Minnesota school districts. When students miss more than , districts are required by state law to drop students from enrollment. Most K-12 school funding in Minnesota is tied to , averaged over the school year, so as students remain absent for extended periods, districts will start to lose funding.

Significant short-term and long-term consequences for children are already well documented

Researchers have previously shown the impact of intensive immigration enforcement, beginning with short-term effects like missed school and increased anxiety.

When immigration enforcement increased in last year, students missed 22% more days of school, with the youngest students missing the most days. Missing school is tied to lower academic outcomes.

But the long-term impacts extend beyond academic outcomes. In the year following an on a meatpacking plant in Morrison, Tenn., in 2018, researchers found consequences for children’s wellbeing up to a year after the raid.

They documented more suspensions and expulsions from school for student behavior, and a doubling of serious mental health disorders including substance use disorder, depression, self‐harm, and suicide attempts or ideation. Children were more likely to be victims of sexual abuse in Morrison in the year following the raid.

The Morrison raid was a single incident that resulted in detention of about 100 adults. By contrast, Minnesota has been subject to intense, ongoing enforcement actions that have now lasted for over two months and affected thousands of families.

Recent research in Florida suggests the impact extends beyond families caught in the enforcement dragnet. A recent study of , where immigration enforcement increased significantly at the start of the second Trump administration, found that student test scores dropped for American-born Spanish-speaking students just as much as for those born outside the U.S. They also found a decline in test scores for Hispanic students broadly, not just those who speak Spanish.

The same Florida study also showed that the impacts were more significant for students in middle and high school, among girls and students already struggling in school. And, for schools with higher concentrations of poverty, increased immigration enforcement had a larger impact on students, controlling for other student characteristics.

Once higher rates of absenteeism kick in, the negative effects can spread to an entire school community. Teachers struggle getting students back up to speed after they miss even one day of classroom instruction, data show. And, research during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that students and families can struggle to resume attending school regularly when their routine has been disrupted by time away from in-person learning.

A student alters her daily routines after a killing near her home

Children in the Twin Cities aren’t just facing the threat of federal detention. Hattie, a Black high school senior who declined to use her last name for fear of federal retribution, lives near where federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti. The killing, along with the continuous presence of federal immigration enforcement activity around her home, has created a fearful atmosphere. She and her friends have quit taking their customary strolls around the neighborhood or taking the bus to get around.

Hattie said she doesn’t feel like she is a target for federal agents. As a Black woman, however, she knows they would see her, and assumes they’d read her as an opponent.

“I’m scared to go out there because you really never know when or where or who or why,” Hattie said.

She said she has noticed subtle changes in her school, like more Latino students choosing to attend online and extra security around.

“I can definitely see the difference in who takes the bus, who’s walking home,” Hattie said.

She’s struggled to manage the stress.

“At least for me, personally speaking, I’m not really coping. It’s just like, let’s just make it to the next day and not be targeted,” Hattie says.

Like many others around the Twin Cities, Hattie has also been spending her time helping to organize donations and support for people staying at home for their own safety. She said that while people definitely need food, households sheltering in place also need toys and activities for children stuck inside, assistance getting medical care, and even help taking laundry to the laundromat.

Effects of immigration enforcement felt in suburbs

Eve, who has one parent who is an immigrant to the United States, attends high school in a suburb of the Twin Cities. Although she and her family haven’t had direct interactions with federal agents, she has been impacted in smaller ways: A friend’s birthday was moved out of Minneapolis because the friend group comprised a diverse group with many immigrant parents.

Eve, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution from the feds, said that despite the challenges, the crisis has yielded some positive outcomes, like seeing small gatherings outside of her school at dismissal expressing opposition to ICE, and demonstrators on overpasses and street corners regularly expressing similar sentiments.

Eve’s school has also had ongoing fundraisers to help support those more impacted by immigration enforcement. Seeing people come together and express opposition to what is happening has been a silver lining for her, she said.

Eve’s mother said that she has expressed concerns about her father, although he is a naturalized citizen. Although Eve said she thinks most of her classmates and teachers are opposed to what is happening, her mother said Eve has expressed concern about a few students expressing racism and hatred of immigrants at school.

Dulcie is the only person in her friend group of Latinas that is attending in-person school. She said almost all of the Latino students at her school have chosen the online option. The school’s Latino Club has moved its meetings online.

She said some of her teachers struggle to simultaneously manage classroom and online instruction. Some of her classes have a Spanish-speaking co-teacher or aide, which she said is helpful for keeping the online students on-track. But most of her classes lack this additional support.

Her friends are doing their best to log into online classes, and keep up with the teacher. In her classes without an aide, Dulcie said, she has started using her cellphone in class to text with her friends online to help them keep up. Her school, like many in the Twin Cities, has a strict no cellphone policy. But she said her teachers understand.

Counselors at Dulcie’s school, which is racially and economically integrated, have been collecting donations for students and their families impacted by the federal siege. Dulcie said that she hasn’t asked for any help though because she feels guilty when others need more. She is also concerned that students attending online are feeling more disconnected from school, and are not aware of the assistance available through the school.

Most of her friends are no longer leaving their homes. While online school allows them to stay safely inside, she said that many are growing restless and bored, spending too much time on their phones or screens, like during the early days of the pandemic.

But in some ways worse, because at least during the COVID pandemic, her friends were leaving the home, Dulcie said.

Dulcie said she worries that if the intensity of immigration enforcement activity continues, she and her friends could miss out on important milestones, like prom and graduation. It is already keeping her friends from celebrating their birthdays.

“I’ve gone through two historic moments already,” Dulcie said, referring to the COVID pandemic and murder of George Floyd. “It’s like, too much.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

Today, with thousands of federal agents targeting Minnesota schools, bus stops, day care centers and other places where immigrant parents gather with their children, remote learning options have been revived in numerous districts, with varying degrees of success. And, unlike the pandemic-era emergency measures, the steps schools are taking to keep kids safe are anything but uniform. 

In many schools — especially those that enroll diverse student bodies — who can show up and who can’t changes by the day, forcing teachers to improvise continually. Still confronted with the absenteeism, mental health crises and lost learning of the pandemic shutdowns, educators know what’s being lost — and exactly which children are going to suffer the disproportionate impact of an emergency now in its ninth week.   

Two St. Paul Public Schools teachers recently gave The 74 glimpses inside their classrooms. In his 18th year on the job, John Horton teaches at Barack and Michelle Obama Montessori, where classes contain multiple grade levels and the student body, as he puts it, “looks like the people that live in St. Paul.” So far, all 28 of his first, second and third graders have been in school, every day.

Across the city, in the equally diverse Como High School, 31-year veteran Eric Erickson teaches a host of subjects where current events are inescapably relevant: AP Psychology; a University of Minnesota College in the Schools government course; and U.S. history, co-taught with an English learner instructor. 

As improbable as it sounds, the families of Horton’s pupils want them physically present in class and have moved mountains to get them there safely. But the divides in in-person attendance in Erickson’s classes are illustrative of a deepening inequity. He knows that a persistent chasm of unequal opportunity is likely to yawn wider. 

Until the abduction of a child or violence at or near their school forces them into the spotlight, most Minnesota educators have been too fearful to speak out, using their names and those of their schools, about what it’s like in classrooms right now. Yet Horton and Erickson, both of whom have been Minnesota Teacher of the Year finalists and/or semifinalists, told The 74 they want people to know what school is like in this unprecedented moment. 

These excerpts from conversations with them have been edited for length and clarity.

Who’s in class in person, and who isn’t

Horton: Children really, really thrive on structure, routine, predictability. The problem that’s different from COVID to now is that during COVID, even though things were upended, there were still some structures and routines and things in place. But with the way things are heading right now, those things aren’t present anymore. 

Our school has some teachers that have been reassigned to take on virtual learning. They’re pausing their in-person job and moving to the online school. They’re teaching children who haven’t ever been to online school. So it’s a whole new program and a whole new mode of instruction.

My classroom has 28 kids normally, and I have 28 kids still here. I have a very good relationship with a lot of the families, and they really wanted to stay in person as a community. There’s definitely some fears and anxiety, but for young children, that predictability is really important. 

We are fortunate to have a community of volunteers keeping watch around the school. We have precautions in place for children who don’t feel safe waiting for the bus. There’s been a lot of community- and school-level action that has helped mitigate the fear. But there’s a lot of anxiety about leaving the house. 

Erickson: The students who are not here tend to be students with brown skin and black skin. And in many ways, this division along race and ethnicity makes this version of virtual learning feel a lot more like battles we thought we had overcome in the Civil Rights Movement, and with equal access to opportunity and education.

The difference in who’s here and who’s not can be seen in the difference between a U.S. history English-language cohort and a senior-level, University of Minnesota college-level government course. I’ve got 95% of my seniors in college-level government present, and about 30% of my co-taught U.S. history classes are online. But our English-learner classes, some of them are less than half in attendance in person. 

(Students are) not able to listen to their (in-person) peers and process what’s happening. They’re living in isolation with their family and social media as connectors, as opposed to the support of peer-to-peer and caring adult interaction. 

We are still their teachers. They are still on our class lists. We are pushing out lessons, videos, documents and assignments to students in their homes. But there’s no substitute. Students who miss live instruction and interaction with peers and their teachers cannot obtain the same quality of education.         

What they’re hearing from students��

Horton: The challenges the kids are experiencing at home and in the community are real. Children talk openly about the immigration crackdown. They’re making posters and expressing their frustration. A couple of my kids have been to protests. A few of my kids have had knocks at the door and agents enter their homes.

And, of course, a lot of children are aware of what’s going around the community because of parents’ stress. In a lot of ways that’s very similar to COVID, where families are trying to isolate children from everything that’s going on and yet the children know something is going on.

I don’t know if I can share all my stories. There was an incident at a child’s house a couple weeks ago. And that was scary. The child was scared, the family was scared. I was shook. They called me Sunday at 6:50 in the morning to tell me what was going on. Some of the people in our community are going through a lot, and they don’t have a lot of people they might be able to know or connect with or trust.

I’ve worked with these families for three years in a row, and I have good relationships. There’s a lot of blessings with that and also heartbreak. It’s really hard to hear what’s transpiring, but I’m also really surprised by the outpouring of love. 

When they’re struggling through traumatic events — and our city has been through so many over the last few years — children also need a sense of hope and joy. To see their friends, to have things they know how to do, be it an art project or something. Having those things, those distractions, those avenues are really important. The children that have been coming to school have been very happy in my class.

Erickson: When we are debriefing the current events in the news cycle, Minneapolis and St. Paul are at the center of a federal surge that has drawn the attention of the world. It’s imperative that we’re able to discuss, analyze and evaluate the impact of the situation surrounding us. I take pride in listening to my students, taking their questions and helping them think critically about what we’re experiencing in relationship to what we’ve studied with the Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. 

They ask appropriate questions. They see injustice. They observe an overreach of federal power. They notice that the guardrails are off with regard to checks and balances. Congress is not holding the Executive Branch accountable. Court decisions are not necessarily checking the expansion of presidential power. They wonder if it’s their time and place to exercise their First Amendment rights.

How students are expressing themselves������

Horton: This is a Montessori school, and we believe in honoring children’s voices. The posters children have written are very simple. They say “ICE out.” Or, “Leave our friends alone.” “You are not welcome” is one of my favorite ones. The kids are expressing themselves through art. Having that outlet is so important. 

The kids started a food shelf in the classroom. And they’re collecting money for the [a St. Paul nonprofit that helps refugees and immigrants resettle]. Two children are carrying around a box, collecting change. 

Families have donated gift cards to support other families. To see all the people coming together, that makes me hopeful.

Erickson: We saw a highly organized, peaceful student protest on Jan. 14, a week after Renee Good’s killing, where students from across St Paul high schools — mostly public, but also peers from private and charter schools — converged on the state Capitol to call out the injustices they’re seeing and to ask for human decency from the federal government. 

We were fearful as a school community about what might happen to them if they exercise their freedom of speech and freedom to assemble. We were inspired to see them advocate for themselves. We, of course, did not attend or endorse the student walkouts. But parents and community members coordinated to serve as unofficial marshals and watch over the routes they were taking to the Capitol, and to be there for support, to be observers of their constitutional rights. 

There were three students in the room with me, the other 20 were at the rally. We were able to watch a livestream. And as we observed democracy in action, two of their classmates gave speeches on the steps of the Capitol. One addressing the humanity of all people and immigrants being the backbone of this country, and another addressing the impact of ICE’s actions. They were articulate messages — positive and hopeful in tone — while also criticizing the overreach of the federal government.

Their own mental health

Horton: Well. Oh boy. That’s a doozy of a question. My job is to make sure the children are safe and secure, and sometimes that means that you have to co-regulate with them. You have to show them what calm, caring and compassion looks like. And also anxiety. You need to model it: “I’m feeling this way, and this is how I can deal with it.” It’s almost like you’re teaching as you’re feeling, which is tough. 

And then my own children. You know, what they hear when I talk at home. I’m trying to be a really good role model, and that comes first. Sometimes as an adult and a parent and someone in the community, you just have to put aside your own preferences for the good of the group. 

Talking to children about hard things is important, but they can only take so much at a time. As a teacher, and especially a teacher of young kids, having difficult conversations is part of life. But they really need time to process things. Talking briefly about these incidents and then giving them an opportunity to have a say and have some hope and have some joy in their life is very important.

The hardest thing for me is I know the impact it’s having on our families. That’s really hard. And I also know it’s impacting staff. There’s staff that carry around documents now, and they’re scared to go out. 

I keep using the word “community,” but I really have found a lot of comfort in that. You know, comfort with the children, the families, the staff. But to say it’s easy would be a lie. 

It’s a relief in some ways that they can be together. Just being in community is such a powerful thing for the people out protesting — even in our classroom.

Erickson: As much as I pride myself on teaching from a non-partisan perspective and analyzing political issues and the role of government with objectivity, seeing the harm to our students and families has caused me to choke up more than once in class while listening and guiding discussion on these matters. 

Yes, it has taken an emotional toll on teachers. Teachers love and care for all of our students. To have 30% of them not be able to reach school and go to your class where they belong is a cruel and sad injustice.

The longstanding rule prohibiting federal agents from targeting schools was repealed Jan. 20, 2025, the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a press release. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.” 

The suit names Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, her department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and numerous federal officials as defendants. As of press time, DHS had not responded to The 74’s request for comment. 

At a press conference in Nogales, Arizona, on Wednesday, ICE Director Todd Lyons — a defendant in the suit — praised the Trump administration’s policies. “We didn’t need any new laws,” he said. “We just need the ability to enforce the ones we have.”  

White House border czar Tom Homan has insisted immigration agents have “de-escalated” actions and that 700 will soon leave Minnesota. But education leaders say schools are being targeted as intensively as at any point in the last two months. 

Even with the promised reduction, the number of agents still in the state would be larger than the 2,000 present when Minneapolis mother Renee Good was killed by ICE a month ago.    

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos — depicted in a photo that went viral worldwide as he was abducted wearing a knit bunny hat — from a Texas detention center and escorted home to the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights on Feb. 1 by Texas Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro. 

The next morning, however, ICE agents stationed themselves in at least one school parking lot in the district, and a bomb threat was received, Superintendent Zena Stenvik . Multiple Columbia Heights students detained in recent days have yet to be released.       

The lawsuit lists numerous examples of federal agents occupying and detaining staff in school parking lots, following superintendents and school board members, tackling and tear-gassing students and staff, pulling day care workers from their cars, arresting parents and students at bus stops and pulling over school vans transporting children to school, among other actions. 

As a result, the complaint states, districts have been forced to cancel classes and create online learning alternatives for students — including non-immigrants — whose families can’t safely leave their homes. In several school systems, more than a third of children are absent or learning online on any given day. Absentee rates are much higher in programs specifically geared for immigrants. Many students have simply disappeared. 

Because Minnesota uses daily student attendance numbers to calculate per-pupil funding, impacted districts anticipate a loss of revenue, the lawsuit states. One of the districts that brought the suit, Duluth Public Schools, has spent more than $500,000 worth of staff time planning new security measures in response to the enforcement surge. 

Over the last two months, half of the district’s administrative team’s time has been spent planning responses, Duluth Superintendent John Magas told The 74. “We know students can’t learn unless they feel safe,” he said. “Right now there is a great sense of lack of safety, especially among our historically underserved students, based on what we are seeing.”   

The complaint filed by the Duluth school system, Fridley Public Schools — which has twice been forced to cancel all classes because of ICE activities at or near schools — and Education Minnesota says federal agents’ actions “violate the Administrative Procedure Act and constitutional protections, and that DHS failed to adequately consider the educational and community impacts when it rescinded prior guidance limiting enforcement in sensitive locations.”

No district or taxpayer funds are being used for the lawsuit, Magas said. Much of the cost is being borne by the teachers union.  

From 1993 to 2025, immigration agents were required to have advance, written approval if they believed exceptional circumstances merited an exception. School bus stops were explicitly named in the policies as being off-limits. Immigration officials were required to report agents’ activities near protected areas. 

“The presence [of ICE] agents conducting investigative activity at schools, or in venues where children’s activities occur, has always been a point of particular sensitivity,” a 2007 version of the rule explained. “Accordingly, it is important to emphasize that great care and forethought be applied before undertaking any investigative or enforcement type action at or near schools, other institutions of education, and venues generally where children and their families are present.”

In 2021, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum reaffirming the “fundamental … bedrock” principle behind curtailing enforcement. The agency, it said, “can accomplish [its] enforcement mission without denying or limiting individuals’ access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship and more.”

“The budget negotiations going on in Congress right now, we’ve heard a lot of things about body cams and things like that,” said Magas. “I haven’t heard a lot about a .”

In Rochester, Minnesota, January absenteeism overall was 42% higher than in December but up 116% among students receiving English learner services and 108% among Latinos, according to Superintendent Kent Pekel. Of the district’s 15,500 students, more than 200 recently enrolled in the district’s existing online school, while an average of about 550 were absent on any given January day. 

In the last few days, however, enrollment has rebounded. It’s hard to know exactly what’s prompting the return, Pekel told The 74, but families he has spoken to say they are nervous but also want their kids in school. Informal networks of educators and parents have been out in the community dropping off food, providing rides and making sure families know children are missed.   

Unlike other districts, Pekel said, Rochester’s schools don’t seem to be a target of immigration agents. “They have been near our schools, but we haven’t had instances of them being on our property or circling schools,” he said. But if that were to change, enrollment would likely fall. 

“One incident could wipe that out.”

“In high school, a lot of students will be like, ‘Oh, what happens if they don’t like this aspect of me?” said Sheikh Ali, 17, a student at Fridley High School just north of Minneapolis. “What happens if I’m not intelligent enough for this role? What happens if I can’t communicate enough?”

On a whim, Sheikh Ali applied to Genesys Works, one of the country’s largest high school internship programs, and was accepted. Her confidence grew as she learned communication and technical skills at the national organization’s summer training sessions.

Now, just a few months later, she’s thriving as an intern at headquarters of the SPS Commerce software company in downtown Minneapolis, working on the technology helpdesk aiding employees with computer and other device issues. 

“When I saw the fruits of my labor, I was stunned,” she said.

The Genesys Works non-profit has been working with students like Sheikh Ali since launching in Houston in 2002 with a goal of connecting high school students to paid internships that go beyond typical afterschool jobs and can start them on paths to fulfilling careers, often in the��white collar world.��

Such internships are rare despite all the lofty talk nationwide about creating more work-based learning opportunities for students that let them try out different fields and can lead to good-paying careers. Fewer than five percent of high schoolers have a chance to do an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit.

But Genesys Works has found a formula that gives companies — not just nervous teens — the structure and confidence to succeed with internships. Genesys Works has placed nearly 1,100 students in internships at 202 companies in eight metropolitan areas this school year: Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Tulsa and Washington, D.C.

While many work in small, local companies, interns are also landing spots at corporate giants like Target, Accenture, 3M and Medtronic, often in the information technology, marketing or human resources departments. Students typically work 15 to 20 hours a week their senior year for $14 to $18 an hour, depending on the market. 

“We’re focused on building careers and building pathways for students and giving them access to what it looks like to work in a corporate environment and to be part of a team,” said Mandy Hildenbrand, Genesys Works chief services officer.

Helping students find out if a career is right for them or what skills and certifications they should pursue in college is incredibly meaningful to success. 

“We want to make sure that we’re putting students in those types of roles,” Hildenbrand said.

Genesys Works’ model, in which the non-profit acts like a hiring and staffing agency, is key in clearing a major block to high school internships nationally — coaxing companies wary of hiring high school students to take the leap. 

Genesys Works takes on duties that companies often don’t want to bother with, removing administrative burdens that scare many employers away. These include recruiting students and reviewing applications, pairing students with mentors, working with schools so students have time to work and acting as students’ employer of record so interns are on Genesys Works’ payroll and covered by the nonprofit’s insurance.

Genesys Works also adds another step that only a few internship programs do well — training students before sending them to companies. Genesys Works has each student complete an eight-week summer training program of professional conduct and some technical skills, including use of Microsoft Office applications.

In return, companies pay Genesys Works about twice the students’ hourly wages.

“Everybody wants work-based learning, but it’s very difficult to figure out how to do it,” said Hildenbrand. “We take the heavy lifting off of the schools and off of the corporate partners.”

Allison Barmann, executive director of Genesys Works in Minneapolis, the city with the most interns in the program, said the support structure makes a big difference to employers.

“Sometimes we’ll talk to corporate partners who are like, ‘Oh, well, we’ve never had a high school internship before. Like, that’s too much work’,” Barmann said. “No, no, we’re doing the hard part for you. You just have to find some work for these young people to do and find a good supervisor to help challenge them.”

Peggy Krendl, a senior managing partner of the Fortune 500 company Accenture, agreed that Genesys Works’ model makes it much easier for a company that doesn’t have youth training programs or staff to hire younger, short-term employees. Companies also rarely have relationships with school districts that allow students to miss class to work.

Accenture has taken on the second-most interns through Genesys Works nationally, behind only medical technology giant Medtronic. 

“We don’t have to worry about that at all, so it’s an entire infrastructure and onboarding support network that we get working with Genesys Works,” said Krendl.

The summer training is a big part of that support, especially for teenagers who have never held a professional job. Students spend eight weeks in the summer between junior and senior year learning six bundles of skills — communication, time and project management, work ethic and professionalism, problem solving and critical thinking, collaboration and teamwork, and initiative and independent work. 

Students are then evaluated three times over the summer on their progress to determine their “workforce readiness.” Students are rated as to how well and often they show traits including punctuality, taking feedback well, willingness to learn and for setting plans with timelines for completing tasks.

Students are even rated on how well they stay attentive and participate in online sessions.

“We have to keep you guys engaged and focused,” instructor Ravin Boihr told students at a training session last summer. “During your internships, you may be on screen four hours a day, the same way you are here, and your supervisor is counting on you to remain active and engaged in getting your work completed.”

She stressed: “We have to make sure that we confidently are placing you guys to them.”

Lauren Loeffler, who manages interns for SPS, said students may come without specific skills, but those that make it through Genesys Works hiring process always view the job as part of building a career and want to do well. She said she sees few of the problems — behavior, tardiness, lack of work ethic — some employers might imagine in hiring students this young.

“The earlier they can kind of be exposed to the workforce, the farther ahead they’re going to be when it comes time to find that full time job,” Loeffler said. “To answer some questions that might scare future employers — like they kind of make this story up in their head — I have never seen a behavior issue. I have never seen students blatantly doing a bad job because they don’t care, they don’t like it. They are extremely motivated to do a good job.”

Land O’ Lakes, the dairy and agricultural products company based just outside Minneapolis, is so invested in the program that it takes about a dozen interns from Genesys Works each year. The interns, as at most companies, don’t work directly with the core products and services — they don’t actually make the butter at your local grocery store — but in information technology, security or other support services.

Luke Kocon, telecommunications manager for Land O’ Lakes, has two interns a year in his department, typically helping manage distribution of computers and phones to employees.

Kocon said the first few weeks are a big adjustment as students acclimate to a new culture and expectations, but they learn quickly.

“It’s mutually beneficial,” he said. “There’s definitely a ramp up period, right? But my two interns that are with us right now are delivering just as any member of my team.”

“They usually surprise me with how much they can get done and how quickly they adjust to the workflows,” he added.

Salim Kadi, a senior at Blaine High School north of the city, said his internship at Land O’ Lakes is an adjustment from a previous job he had as a cashier at Target, which was more focused on rapid-fire work with customers than handling several projects on a deadline. While his tasks are not an exact match for his hopes of working in computer science after college, he is excited for the rest of this year.

“It helps me gain experience and (understand) how the corporate world works,” Kadi said. “Even if I don’t get a position that’s like my career, I still learn how to be more professional in a corporate setting. I can also learn how to network and talk to other people too. And I can still ask about things that I want to learn about, that’s going to align with my future career.”

Land O’ Lakes, like many other companies in the program, often keeps interns even after their senior year as they move on to college. Yareni Flores, now pursuing an associates degree at Century College, remains with Land O’ Lakes’ information technology department two years after finishing her senior year in the internship.

Flores, 18, said the internship taught her a lot of professional skills.

“Back in high school, you wouldn’t really see me being here because I did not like talking to people,” Flores said. “It was my first ever job too, so I learned how to manage my time more, and how to be more responsible.”

Sheikh Ali, like Flores, said the internship can really help students grow. So she urged students to overcome their hesitancy and make the leap.

“It’s something that you really have to push for,” she said. “You really have to just try hard.I feel like having courage to pursue Genesys works is something that’s really needed.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

They started showing up shortly after the now viral video was posted to YouTube, claiming Minnesota day cares run by Somali Americans were rife with fraud. The video showed no real proof of that claim and has since been . They came anyway.

The first time it happened, the day care received an anonymous call from a woman brusquely asking them to open the door. When Fay, the owner, went outside, a man was already there recording. “There’s nobody here,” he was saying into the camera on his phone.

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“Can I help you?” she asked him. The man said he was there because of Nick Shirley’s video. He wanted to see the children.

“I’m not going to let you in,” she replied. “There are kids here.”

“If you’re not lying,” he told her, “let me in.”

Fay, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her identity over fears for her safety, didn’t waver. Even under normal circumstances, she would never let an unknown man enter the day care and come near the children, much less film them, and certainly not under these circumstances, as a Somali day care provider who suddenly feels like she has a target on her back.

It’s been like this for over a month. A pair of young men turned up one night looking through the windows until a nearby business owner walked up to them and asked them to leave. Another time, an older man came twice in one day with a paper in hand, trying to pull open the doors.

“Does he want to get to the kids? Does he want to shoot us?” Fay wondered. She called the police.

Child care providers in Minnesota — especially Somali Americans — are facing high levels of harassment in a city besieged by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. As strangers continue to show up asking to get access to the children inside, there is also the constant fear that ICE may come for the parents, the children or their staff, a large portion of whom are immigrants. Nationwide, about child care workers are immigrants, almost all of them women. It’s a fear now extending from child care to schools, with parents standing up adhoc networks to support providers, teachers and other immigrant families.

“I really love America more than I love anywhere in the world, and now I am feeling scared and sad and humiliated,” said Fay, who has been in the country for more than 20 years, is an American citizen and has been operating her center for nearly a decade.

The video YouTuber Nick Shirley posted just after Christmas alleged widespread fraud at day cares in Minnesota that were siphoning government funds but not providing care for any children at all. In the video, Shirley goes to multiple Somali-run day cares. Some appear closed, others do not let him in when he asks to see the children. Unannounced inspections by state officials into the centers following the video found them operating normally, and nearly all have prior going back years that further prove they have been serving children. Some fraud at child care centers in Minnesota has been previously , but there is that widespread fraud is taking place.

Nevertheless, the video has created a powerful narrative of rampant abuse, drawing the attention of the president and precipitating a drastic surge in ICE activity that by many accounts has turned South Minneapolis into something resembling a war zone. Already, have been killed by federal agents and — including — have been hurt and detained.

“As a child care community we are feeling attacked and we are an easy target: Child care historically has always been done by women and especially women of color in an exploitative practice,” said Leah Budnik, the board secretary at the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children, a child care advocacy organization.

After Shirley’s video, the Trump administration put a freeze on child care funding to the state, though funds are still available . The administration also asked for additional documentation such as attendance records and student information from providers, an effort that Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families has ratcheted up by sending members of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to parse through paperwork. That means that armed law enforcement is now joining in on the compliance checks, raising questions from providers about the need for that step — particularly around children.

“I can understand the need for the state to have people-power to go in and collect documentation the federal government is asking for in very short notice, but bringing armed law enforcement into child care centers is probably not the right way to do it,” Budnik said. “It does make people feel scared and criminalized.”

Cisa Keller, the president and CEO of Think Small, a nonprofit that works with many of the state’s child care centers offering additional education and support services, called the administration’s response to Shirley’s video a “kneejerk reaction” that is ultimately going to harm providers who had nothing to do with the false allegations. Most of the nine programs in the Shirley video, she said, are programs her staff has worked directly with.

“We are in and out of those programs with coaching and professional development, and we have a presence as part of the system,” Keller said. “We would be able to see if something was going awry.”

Instead, what’s happened is an escalation of a situation where children are going to be the most directly impacted, she said.

In the Twin Cities, where the bulk of ICE activity is taking place, the situation has boiled over to full panic. Providers are losing staff to the ICE raids because immigrant staffers are either being arrested or choosing to stay home. Some families the providers serve are , not taking their children to school or day care to avoid ICE.

Dawn Uribe, the owner of four Spanish-immersion preschools in Minnesota, said two of her staffers have been detained by ICE. One of them was on break at work in early January when it happened and called a supervisor to let them know they were being taken away and to please inform their family.

Since, a vast community mobilization effort led by parents has sprung up to support staff, centers and other families.

Over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend this month, a group of about 20 grandparents and parents showed up to a two-hour training at one of Uribe’s day cares to learn how they could step in as volunteers should the school lose additional staff and be unable to meet teacher-to-student ratios. (By law, day cares must adhere to strict ratios for child safety; in Minnesota there can be to every teacher, for example.) The parents and grandparents who showed up learned about shaken baby syndrome, how to do accident reporting and how to ensure kids are accounted for at all times should they ever need to be called on to step in.

The parents, Uribe said, are also delivering food to staff, taking parking lot shifts to watch for ICE and ensure teachers get safely to and from school, and standing watch in the lobby.

“The community in general, the Twin Cities in general, we don’t like what’s happening and we are going to stand up and say that this is wrong,” Uribe said. “Every time there is a training offered [in the community] people are there and they’re showing up to help their neighbors, they’re showing up to take groceries, they’re showing up to protests to be an observer and record what’s going on. That part’s powerful.”

Sarah Quinn, a mom of two in Minneapolis, said parents at her older daughter’s elementary school had been working together to take food to immigrant students and their families since ICE first showed up in the city in early December. When reports that ICE was patrolling near the schools started to circulate, parents stepped in to give kids rides to school using spare booster seats and car seats. They got an estimated 50 kids back to school in December through those efforts.

But then came Shirley’s video and the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Calls for aid flooded in. The preschool Quinn’s son attends got so many harassing calls in one day that police had to be sent to the school.

Parents started to set up school patrols, stationing volunteers in the parking lot and in their neighborhoods to make sure kids, families and staff could come and go to school safely. The number of parents doing food deliveries to other families’ homes shot up.

“People said ‘jump’ and we all kind of said, ‘How high?’” Quinn said. “As parents who care about our neighbors and who love this part of Minneapolis life that is diverse and involves immigrant families who have really just been responding as neighbors.”

They have also resolved to be more careful, watching everyone who comes and goes from the schools to make sure they are not inadvertently letting anyone in behind them who could harm the kids. In Chicago late last year, ICE agents entered a Spanish immersion preschool and detained a worker .

“We are not going to be Minnesota nice,” Quinn said.

Parents in Quinn’s daughter’s elementary school were made aware in December of a child in her grade who had not been at school for a week. They later learned the child’s parent had been detained and the other parent was keeping the child home out of fear.

When Quinn went into her daughter’s class recently to do a holiday craft, she realized the missing child was her daughter’s deskmate.

It’s presented a quiet challenge among the parents in the immensity of this moment: How do you talk to a second grader about what’s unfolding around them?

“We have had to find a lot of different ways to talk to our kids about how to be safe. Our children know the word ‘ICE’ and they know the word ‘ICE agent,’” Quinn said.

They’ve developed something of a mantra between them.

“What do we want?” Quinn may ask.

“We want them to leave,” the kids will reply. “We want all of our immigrant friends to feel safe.”

Wine moms? Try PTA moms. 

It is indeed mothers who, throughout the Twin Cities, form the vanguard of community organizing to keep their kids’ classmates and educators safe. But many of their efforts to supply food, rent money, medical treatment and even veterinary care to people too endangered to leave their homes are ad hoc, emergency extensions of the parent networks that, in normal times, raise money for the things not in their school’s budget, organize events and fulfill teachers’ school supply wish lists.����

Over the last month, parents who belong to PTAs and other Twin Cities school support groups have tapped their collective organizing and fundraising expertise to meet extraordinary needs that school systems and local governments are hard-pressed to address.   

When COVID forced students and teachers online six years ago, schools were pressed into service to meet families’ basic needs. Now, as some 3,000 federal agents target bus stops and school playgrounds in search of immigrants, the need is more profound, according to Minnesota parents who are trying to help.��

This time, there is no federal relief funding, no government infrastructure to coordinate ordering Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots for students forced into distance learning, no eviction moratoriums for those who can’t work, no meal box deliveries and frequently no secure way for principals and educators to communicate to their broader school communities.

Instead, there are dozens of GoFundMe campaigns, organized by parents who, in the last three weeks, have tapped their networks to organize patrols to keep children safe as they move from home to school and back, to deliver diapers and formula and, as Feb. 1 draws near, to crowdsource rent money.

Because many of these fundraising campaigns identify vulnerable school communities and individual parents and educators — and because so-called mutual aid networks have become a prime target of federal agents — The 74 is not linking to them. In addition to K-12 schools, some of the funds are intended to meet needs at day care facilities and afterschool programs. 

Not all the funds show how much has been raised, but many have running tallies. Some have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars — eye-popping, but, according to organizers, not nearly enough to stave off the anticipated wave of more than 1,600 evictions expected when February rents go unpaid.        

Contrary to the “wine moms” trope, these parents say their efforts are a natural, if unfortunate, extension of the ways in which school-based groups normally attempt to fill gaps. Some of the funds are specifically dedicated to paying for diapers or prescriptions, while the largest are for rent.  

The parents are also screening people who want to join secure neighborhood online communications channels to try to stop federal agents from identifying and following people delivering supplies. Network members hope the same vetting processes are helping recognize opportunists posting scam solicitations.   

“We’ve seen [federal] agents posing as parents to try to infiltrate some of these safety patrols that are happening,” says a mother with two elementary school pupils in Minneapolis. “The level of vetting happening in these virtual spaces is really something.”   

City residents mobilized online to support one another in the chaotic days after George Floyd’s murder by police officers in 2020. The outside provocateurs identified by state officials then were , Proud Boys and other far-right militants who circulated in neighborhoods, sometimes planting homemade explosives in alleys and hedges and setting fire to gas stations, and public buildings such as . Neighbors teamed up to patrol and to alert one another to the presence of outsiders.   

The skeleton of an infrastructure, then, already existed when heavily armed federal agents poured into residential neighborhoods — haunting their schools — over the course of the last month.  

Some districts, such as suburban Fridley Public Schools, have publicly acknowledged that they are accepting donations to distribute to struggling families. Others, though, are quietly letting parent networks know which families staff have been in contact with, and who has the greatest need. 

“We have had schools call our organization and say, ‘We know this family hasn’t been coming to school, can you step in,’” says a Minneapolis mother and advocate whose child attends school in the neighborhood where ICE and Border Patrol agents recently killed two legal observers.��

“The power that is coming from PTAs and school site councils and neighborhood organizations is just considerable,” says the mom. Her two children go to affluent schools where some parents have written five-figure checks.

“We’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that’s hardly the actual cost to our city,” said another mother with three children in high-poverty Minneapolis schools. “Public schools are on the front lines of everything ill facing society — and that’s no different now.”

Demonstrations are taking place throughout the Twin Cities, she continues, but the parents and educators finding health care providers who can make home visits or locating someone to take in children whose parents have been detained didn’t ask to be the spine of the resistance.  

“I wish they would stop calling us protesters,” she says. “Far from being ‘paid agitators,’ we are paying for it, literally.” 

For weeks, parents and teachers throughout Minnesota have been reluctant to share specifics about the steps they’re taking to protect their school communities. But the killing of an ICU nurse by federal agents over the weekend — the second shooting captured and shared worldwide on cellphone cameras — finally brought their reality to the attention of the outside world, speakers told reporters.

A crying mom described driving her kid’s terrified classmates to school in the Minneapolis neighborhood where agents killed another mother, Renee Good, three weeks ago. A school board member who publicly criticized ICE for detaining a preschooler said she woke up to find an ICE caravan idling outside her home. A superintendent detailed how she arranges transportation for at-risk school staffers’ — and then joins her school security workers on patrol. 

The superintendent, Fridley Public Schools’ Brenda Lewis, said her suburban district has been “targeted”: “We need helpers. We need leaders, advocates and people of influence to step in and help end this.”

Educators narrated the fatigue of working a full day and then spending hours volunteering, delivering food and other essentials to families in hiding — only to find themselves tailed by caravans of heavily armed federal agents.  

An American government teacher-turned-state lawmaker shouted as he described walking below an FDR quote chiseled into stone in the hall leading to the state Senate chambers: “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”  

As the speakers took turns, a tiny pink origami rabbit sat on the rim of the podium. To one side was a poster of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained coming home from preschool Jan. 20. Conejo means rabbit. In a now-iconic photo of a federal agent grabbing Liam by his Spider-Man backpack, the boy is wearing a homemade knit bunny hat. 

As she approached the podium, a woman identified only as Elizabeth broke down. “I practiced this and practiced,” she said, crying, before saying that as she feeds her kids breakfast, she keeps an eye trained on a closed group chat in her neighborhood, where Good was killed three weeks ago.    

If the group says it’s okay to leave, she loads her kid in the car and then picks up classmates whose parents can’t leave home. At school, they’re greeted by people trying their best to make the citizen safety brigade that flanks the walkway from the street to the school entrance look like the fun squad: “Our neighbors with the amazing frog hats and the giant smiles. The dog walkers who have changed their routines to include the school. And the retired teachers — who cannot stop caring for our kids.”

Still, sometimes that’s not enough to reassure the most frightened pupils. “That is when my small child walks up and says hello, and offers to walk them into school,” she said. 

The ride home? “I try to find a playlist and I imagine the parent who hasn’t left their home in seven or eight weeks, trusting me, a stranger, with their kids, who can barely communicate with them, making sure their kid gets home and walked to their door,” she continued. “All of this is racing through my mind as I am checking my mirrors for safety and still singing along to K Pop Demon Hunters. 

“While I love that I have these experiences, it is their parents who should be in the car, singing along and hearing the stories of the day.”     

Mary Granlund is a parent and school board chair in Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Liam is a student. She said she watched as agents pulled him from the car bringing him home and steered him up the steps to his house, where they told him to knock on the door to see whether adults would come out. 

Liam and his father were taken and flown to a detention center in Texas, where a judge Tuesday ordered ICE not to deport them. Only one of the three other children detained the same day has been allowed to come home, Granlund said.  

After Granlund publicly denounced the children’s detentions, she woke up to multiple vehicles parked outside her house, with men in tactical gear inside. She called the local police, who came and stayed — perhaps mindful that in June, not far away, a political extremist assassinated a lawmaker and her husband and nearly killed two others. “I don’t need to remind anybody in this room or watching this the fear that elected officials have related to unmarked vehicles outside your home with people wearing tactical gear,” she said. 

Though the Trump administration earlier this week signaled a willingness to , federal agents were visible in the Capitol area, and legal observers and throughout the metro area reported no slowdown in and . 

Indeed, Granlund said the hours before the press conference were as chaotic as they have been for weeks: “Today, people across Columbia Heights woke up to cars still running, doors open, empty, left in the street” — a common occurrence when agents pull someone from their vehicle and leave it, abandoned. 

Peg Nelson, a teacher in Granlund’s district for 33 years, said educators try to keep the school day as normal as possible. “But students and families look to their teachers for answers,” she said. “Children ask, ‘Can they take us?’ And we don’t know what to tell them…. We are doing everything we can. We will but we were not trained for this.”

Democratic State Sen. Steve Swazinski, who represents several western Minneapolis suburbs, taught American government for 33 years. “I don’t know how I would be teaching this right now,” he said. “I just don’t know how I would teach both sides to the story.”

Fridley’s Lewis said speaking out is particularly hard for educators, whose training and ethics are to empower students to take in a range of information and draw their own conclusions. “This is not abstract for me or for district leadership,” she said. “None of this is partisan. This is about children, predominantly children of color, being treated as less than human. And about the dehumanization of those who stand with them.”

Founding president of the National Parents Union, Keri Rodrigues traveled from Massachusetts to St. Paul to be present. “I’ve had so many conversations with people on the phone and on Zoom in the last few weeks who felt like they weren’t being heard, who felt like their experiences needed to get out there,” she told The 74. “Here’s a list of 10 things that are disrupted, and we can’t get anyone to pay attention.”   

She said her next stop is Washington, D.C., where she said she plans to recount the stories she heard to members of Congress.

Near the end of the press conference, a reporter asked about the paper bunny. Liam’s teachers stepped forward to answer. There is a Japanese tradition in which folding 1,000 origami cranes can grant a wish or speed recovery.

For Liam, the teachers have already started on 1,000 pink rabbits.

The Trump administration’s weeks-long immigration enforcement campaign in Minneapolis, which has shuttered schools and terrified students and parents, has left one group particularly vulnerable: children with disabilities. 

Their families, who already fear their kids shutting down, running away, harming themselves or acting out when confronted under normal circumstances, have seen their anxiety skyrocket as they contemplate worst-case scenarios with federal agents. 

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans gathered in sub-zero temperatures last week to demonstrate against the federal government’s ongoing presence, including and .

Idil Ahmed, who lives near the epicenter of the daily raids and protests, worries about her 6-year-old autistic daughter having a meltdown during an encounter with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“If they stop us, all hell will break loose with my child,” Ahmed said. “And there is no talking to these people.”

Parents tell The 74 they have no faith, after federal agents ripped a from her car and, according to school officials, used a this week to lure his mother from their home, that immigration officials would be patient with a child who can’t immediately respond to orders.

“When I saw that image of this young boy with his backpack, I thought, ‘That could be my son,’” said Najma Siyad, mother of a 5-year-old with autism. 

Both Ahmed and Siyad are members of Minneapolis’ Somali community, the largest in the United States and one that has for removal by President Donald Trump. 

They are among many Somali families whose children have autism; a neurodevelopmental condition that is .

They and other Somali-Americans say their children are doubly vulnerable by virtue of their race and disability: While the first is obvious, making them a potential mark for ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the second is not. 

They and other families with special needs kids have missed school, skipped doctor’s visits and, in many cases, are not getting the occupational, physical and speech therapy services that help their children manage their lives and progress academically.  

Ahmed said her daughter missed three consecutive weeks of occupational therapy because her therapist was too fearful to enter their neighborhood.

“OT for us is so important,” Ahmed said. “It regulates her emotions, helps with fine motor skills, simple things like dressing, eating, body movements, the teaching of how to be physically independent.”

And while multiple districts are offering remote learning to families afraid to leave their homes, online instruction isn’t a viable option for children who need a team of skilled school staff to access their education. 

“It’s not a solution for us,” said Anisa Hagi-Mohamed, founder of an autism advocacy group called Maangaar Voices. 

Regression, both educationally and socially, is a constant concern, these parents say. But stronger still is their worry about their child coming face-to-face with a federal agent who doesn’t know — and perhaps doesn’t care — why they won’t interact. 

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, said he was working on a response as to whether agents are trained to interact with autistic children and others with disabilities. Minnesota law for peace officers but this does not apply to ICE and CBP, Minneapolis advocates say.

Hagi-Mohamed has three kids, a 9-year-old son and two daughters, ages 5 and 8. All are “on the autism spectrum,” and each has their own unique vulnerability, she said.

Her middle child is nonverbal and frequently runs away to no particular destination. 

And her son looks far older than his age. He also has difficulty responding to anyone who commands him to act. 

“He would completely shut down, self harm and get hurt in the process,” Hagi-Mohamed said, imagining him in an ICE encounter. “I worry all the time.”

She’s advised him not to talk to any adults outside of school or home. 

She’s frightened, too, for her 5-year-old, who treats all grownups with the same deference as her parents. 

“The stranger danger thing is not so strong in her,” Hagi-Mohamed said. “She is one of those kids who if you tell her to do something, she will do it.”

These families say they have remained petrified ever since an ICE agent in Minneapolis killed unarmed motorist on Jan. 7 just after . Hours later, federal agents wreaked havoc at nearby Roosevelt High School. And on Jan. 24 in what may be a turning point to the strife in Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, setting off a fresh wave of terror and outrage.

Maren Christenson, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network, said she lives so close to where Good was shot that she’s worried tear gas will seep through the family’s windows from the ongoing protests. 

Christenson’s 14-year-old son, Simon Hofer, has autism and she can’t predict how he would respond to an ICE agent. 

The boy said he’s worried — not so much for himself, but for his friends. 

“I have been feeling angry, scared, sad,” he told The 74 on Thursday. “It feels kind of hopeless sometimes and overwhelming. Friends of mine and classmates are afraid to go to school and so they attend online.”

His mother has told the special education community that even if someone is Caucasian, is a citizen, has a disability and can articulate their challenges, they are not free from peril. 

Her advice? “Comply: do what they tell you to stay safe.” 

But she’s unsure whether that strategy would work for people with autism who can become unmoored by such an encounter. Stress might hamper their ability to communicate, she said.

“We have held a number of community conversations and brainstormed, asking, ‘What could we do? What are people doing?’” she said. “But the truth of the matter is we are in uncharted territory. There is no guidebook, no best practices for when your city is under siege.”

A mother of two boys with autism who lives in the southern suburbs of Minneapolis and who asked not to be named to protect her family’s safety, said her children, ages 8 and 5, are just now learning about the concept of police. 

They cannot at all understand the complexity of immigration enforcement — or the harsh tactics that have come with it — so she’s keeping them mostly at home.

“There is only so much I can do when I am not with them,” she said.

Hodan, the mother of an 18-year-old college student who has autism, said her son has always had high anxiety. But now, she said, it’s worse. She’s given him a list of a dozen phone numbers to call in an emergency that he keeps in his jeans and in his shoes. 

“He has his citizenship card in his pocket and when we drive, I make him put it on the center console,” said his mom, who asked that her last name not to be used to protect her family.

Along with school and therapy sessions, also gone from families’ routines are winter afternoons at indoor play spaces, trips to the gym for their teenagers and other kid-friendly destinations. 

Siyad, a mother of three who lives 18 miles south of Minneapolis, close to St. Paul, said they recently took the 26-minute drive to the Minnesota Children’s Museum and had to turn around when they were three minutes away after witnessing an ICE encounter on the road. 

“That fear is daily,” she said. “I am a naturalized citizen but I was not carrying my passport at the time. We had to turn around immediately.”

The painful irony, she said, is that her children, like all of the others in this story, their parents said, are U.S. citizens. 

“Our kids are as American as apple pie,” she said. “This is their home.”

That was one local district administrator’s swift reply when asked what she wants people to know about educating kids in the Twin Cities right now.   

Two weeks after federal agents killed Minneapolis mother Renee Good, virtually every aspect of schooling throughout the region is being shaken by the presence of some 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers. 

“We’re being impacted on a basis that well outpaces targeted immigration enforcement,” says Heather Anderson, a Minneapolis Public Schools parent who runs a nonprofit education-related program for students of color. “It’s pervasive. Everybody is being affected. Nobody can go to work. Nobody can use the school bus. …. I literally just dropped a load of groceries off to a family who can’t leave their house.” 

At one of Anderson’s neighborhood schools, an estimated two-thirds of students are enrolled in distance learning, she says, but many families lack wifi or hotspots. The number of students participating in her in-person program has dropped by half.    

“The kids who did come, several gave reports that ICE had been in their apartment complex, in their buildings, on their streetcorners,” she says. “We worked really hard at just creating a bubble of joy for them.”

Educator Kara Cisco lives a couple of blocks from where Good was killed. “My daughters are terrified even though they don’t fit a category that would fall under those that are targeted,” she says. “They’re both carrying their own passports. That’s scary.”

On the first day of distance learning, attendance in one of her daughter’s classes dropped from 25 students to nine, even though most are citizens. “It’s the general sense of fear,” says Cisco. “I’ve got one daughter that’s texting me pretty much every hour on the hour to notify me of the ICE presence around school.”

Federal agents outnumber the officers employed by the metropolitan area’s 10 largest police departments combined. They are roaming neighborhoods — often in convoys of unmarked SUVs — detaining U.S. citizens and legal residents along with people whose status is unknown. have reported ICE , in at least one instance at gunpoint.     

St. Paul Public Schools reported that two vans were stopped by ICE last week. Students and parents in urban and suburban school systems have been detained while waiting for school buses or public transit. A Hiawatha Collegiate High School senior was at a Minneapolis bus stop Jan. 15. A parent waiting with multiple Robbinsdale Area Public Schools students the day before.

The Department of Homeland Security claims to have detained 3,000 people so far. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the agents to stop using pepper spray and non-lethal munitions and detaining protesters and observers unless they obstruct the officers or there is reason to believe a crime has been committed. The U.S. Department of Justice this week appealed the order, even as residents continue to report observer detentions.     

Several labor unions — including educator unions in St. Paul and Minneapolis — have called for a general strike Jan. 23, and some students have said they plan to join what’s being described as an economic protest. St. Paul schools will be in session. In Minneapolis and many Twin Cities charter schools, the strike will coincide with a long-scheduled teacher record-keeping day. 

Asked at a what it feels like to attend classes now, a teen in a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of Roosevelt High School — where ICE agents pepper-sprayed and tackled parents, educators and students the day Good was killed — said it was hard seeing how many kids were not there. 

“When I came to school and I found lots of friends and classmates missing, it was scary,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine what they were going through.” 

The chaos has made it hard for schools to create and communicate contingency plans. The St. Paul district closed Jan. 20 and 21 to allow educators to organize distance learning options. Parents and teachers in other districts, however, are reporting school-by-school ad hoc arrangements.   

A parent at a high-poverty Minneapolis school in a neighborhood where an ICE agent last week says her child’s in-person classes are overstuffed as some teachers are temporarily reassigned to teach groups of kids online. Like many parents and educators, she asked not to be named for fear that her child’s school would be targeted. 

Adding to the strain, it’s unclear whether kids who are technically enrolled in remote instruction are actually online. Numerous students at her child’s school are simply no longer attending any classes because a parent or sibling has been detained, the parent says. 

“It’s happening at such breathtaking speed,” she says. “What are you even going to do?”   

forced the small, social-justice themed charter school attended by Good’s 6-year-old to move entirely online, according to Sahan Journal, a Minnesota news outlet focused on immigrants and people of color. Good had been appointed to the Southside Family Charter School’s board in August, according to the news site. 

Residents not at risk of deportation are waiting outside schools and at bus stops before and after classes, but parents and advocates say many families are still too fearful to leave their homes.  

“Parents don’t even want rides,” says one St. Paul education advocacy group leader who did not want their name used because they are at risk of detention. “They’re like, ‘I’m not going nowhere.’ … With COVID, we feared the disease itself, but it still wasn’t like if you walked outside your door there might be a masked man that jumps out at you.”

“This is no longer about immigration enforcement,” says Josh Crosson, executive director of the advocacy group EdAllies. “It feels like we’re all in a collective trauma.”

Twin Cities schools are still grappling with the impact of the pandemic and of unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he adds. “Students are witnessing their classmates and friends being abducted or removed from their school communities. The direct and indirect trauma is resulting in increased behavioral incidents with students, withdrawal and disengagement, difficulty concentrating.”  

Like many other parents and teachers, Anderson is frustrated that inequities in distance learning and community support persist even after COVID. “Schools with lots of resources are mobilizing quickly, and schools without resources have nothing,” she says. “We really aren’t in distance learning. We are really just not having kids in school if they’re poor.”  

Cisco echoed this, noting that a big difference from pandemic remote instruction is the lack of an official coordinated response.     

“A great deal of federal funding helped pay for things during COVID such as hotspots,” says Cisco. “It’s never been a foregone conclusion that every family has access to the internet — particularly those that are in sanctuary settings. … It’s absurd to expect a scholar to learn under these circumstances.”

Teachers, she adds, spend a lot of time building community and a sense of psychological safety, especially with students who are homeless or face other kinds of instability: “Creating the conditions for real learning to take place, that is completely lost when half your class is suddenly gone.”  

In a , Rochester Superintendent Kent Pekel said people of color and immigrants in his community — including citizens and district staff — are fearful of leaving their homes.

“I have no doubt that how each of us responds to this present moment will have a powerful impact on how our students see themselves and our society in the years ahead,” he said.

As horrific as the violence has been, Anderson says, she also is proud that young people are watching the community organize. “My kids have lived with this through many iterations,” she says. They know this is what their parents are going to do when their neighbors need us. 

“They have gotten to see us love with our feet and our hands.”  

While districts typically announce shifts to online learning — for severe weather, for example — as publicly as possible, outreach to families with safety concerns is largely being handled behind the scenes. School administrators are reaching out directly to parents to let them know they can keep their children home, according to district emails being circulated by parents and educators.   

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a former Minneapolis School Board member, joined other in demanding that the state. 

“I’m a public school mom of a seventh-grader. Renee Good was a mom from our community. And since she was killed, kids have had to run from chemical agents and bear witness to their teachers being tackled by masked federal agents,” Flanagan told The 74. “We have legal observers at parent drop-offs and pick-ups because kids and their parents are terrified of what these masked agents might show up and do. 

“Schools should be a place where kids feel safe, but with ICE running rampant and acting lawlessly across Minneapolis, it’s just not the case right now, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Minneapolis, St. Paul and the Monday, charging that the mass deployment of immigration agents violated states’ rights under the 10th Amendment of the Constitution.

Some 2,000 federal agents were present in the Twin Cities on Jan. 7, when a violent skirmish broke out in front of Minneapolis’ Roosevelt High School and Good, a 37-year-old mom who had just dropped her 6-year-old off at school, was shot dead in her vehicle. That’s more than twice as many police officers as are employed by the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined. 

On Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she had ordered “” agents to the state, referencing allegations of fraud in a COVID-era child food distribution program. Though the majority of those charged or convicted since 2022 are U.S. citizens — some of East African descent — President Donald Trump blamed the state’s 80,000 Somalis , calling them “garbage.”      

The acknowledgement that federal agents may be focusing on targets beyond undocumented immigrants came as no surprise to Twin Cities residents, who have spent recent days on the , including a number of on and near tribal lands within the city. 

Trump has repeatedly insisted that fraud is rampant within the state’s social service apparatus, including publicly subsidized child care. Claims of day care fraud are based in part on video shot in recent weeks by who visited several centers after hours and filmed himself being turned away from others.   

Parents and teachers have reported a at Minneapolis-area day cares — in particular, Spanish-language immersion programs. Residents in some neighborhoods have set up babysitting co-ops for families of preschoolers scared to use their regular centers or for parents who want to care for their own kids to enable immigrant care providers to stay home.    

Minneapolis Public Schools did not respond to requests from The 74 for details for this story, and posted on its website saying distance learning was an option. In emails to district staff shared with media outlets, administrators said students choosing to attend online would be taught by their usual teachers, in real time, with their in-school classmates, through Feb. 12. 

In St. Paul, the district has asked impacted families to contact their child’s principal in its existing online school. Several charter schools were communicating in closed forums with families and teachers. 

Speaking anonymously so as to not identify their community, an administrator in a suburban district with a heavy ICE presence explained that school systems are forgoing the blanket communications they use for snow days and other closure announcements because families are afraid they will draw attention to themselves or their neighbors by responding. By contrast, personal communication from a trusted teacher or principal seems more likely to reassure parents that their kids can safely learn online, the administrator said.  

On Monday morning, Minneapolis’ Anthony Middle School was locked down after receiving a bomb threat. Principal Mai Chang Vue told families in an email that several districts had been threatened.

Roseville Area Schools canceled field trips because “federal enforcement activity across the Twin Cities metro area has created unpredictable and rapidly changing conditions in several areas,” . 

The moves come in the wake of the violent altercation between federal agents, educators, parents and students on the grounds of Roosevelt High School the same day Good was killed in an encounter with ICE three miles away. Students were tear-gassed, and school staff reported a special education assistant was detained. 

On Monday, Roosevelt students who came to class in person walked out to protest ICE’s presence.

After the Jan. 7 shooting, schools were closed in Minneapolis and several suburban districts. A number of school systems, including St. Paul’s, also instituted transportation safety plans. Administrators in some districts reported 30% to 35% of students were absent last week. 

Students in most Minnesota districts have yet to return to pre-pandemic academic achievement levels, according to in the Minnesota Reformer. The news site reported that of the 155 districts enrolling at least 1,000 students in 2019, just six had returned to or surpassed their 2019 proficiency rates by the end of the 2024-25 school year.    

“Districts really want to serve these students in person — that’s generally the most effective,” said Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts. “But they also want to be there for their students, offering an option for them to not fall behind, to keep up with their instruction.”

In 2023, the association lobbied for a number of changes to state that have given schools the flexibility to allow students with safety concerns to attend school virtually this week. Before COVID-19, online schools — then often of shoddy quality — had to earn state approval to operate, and temporary school closures were governed by rules addressing severe winter weather.      

So-called snow days are still subject to “e-learning day” rules, which require districts to make up lost instructional time after closing for five or more days. But the 2023 law allows districts to offer remote instruction to their own students on a case-by-case basis, provided they address the needs of children with disabilities and English learners. They are not allowed to enroll pupils from other districts in their online classes.

“This will really be the first time [the new protocols] will be in widespread use by districts,” said Croonquist. 

On Jan. 8, Minnesota Education Commissioner Willie Jett reminded education leaders of the new flexibility, noting that districts were free to use “supplemental” online providers to serve students: “Minnesota law and from the Minnesota attorney general affirm that schools must remain safe spaces for all students, regardless of immigration status.” 

As horrifying as that scene was, it’s important to understand that the impacts ripple far beyond Minneapolis. Families across the country are watching and wondering: Could this happen at our school?

The answer, according to new research, is that the fear is already everywhere — even in schools where no enforcement actions have occurred.

In December, UCLA researchers John Rogers and Joseph Kahne released findings from a nationally representative of more than 600 high school principals. The results are staggering: 70% report that students from immigrant families are expressing fear about their safety and their families’ well-being. Nearly two-thirds report students missing school due to immigration policies and rhetoric. More than a third report bullying and harassment directed at immigrant-origin students. And 58% report immigrant families leaving their communities entirely.

These aren’t statistics from border states alone. Principals in Tennessee, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Minnesota describe the same patterns. One Wisconsin principal quoted in the survey recounted overhearing a student tell a classmate: “Just make sure you have your ID with you.”

Perhaps most troubling is what a Texas principal shared: Students who had known one another since third grade were suddenly telling immigrant-origin classmates to “go home.” These weren’t strangers. These were peers who had sat together in class for years — until the political climate gave them permission to see their classmates as not belonging.

Some schools are responding heroically. According to the UCLA study, 78% of principals have created emergency response plans for potential ICE visits. Nearly half have developed protocols for supporting students if parents are detained or deported. Educators are connecting families with legal services, setting up meal trains and creating safe spaces for difficult conversations.

This protective work is essential. But emergency protocols cannot prevent a student from absorbing anti-immigrant rhetoric and directing it at a classmate. Legal services cannot rebuild students’ sense of belonging after someone they trusted tells them they don’t belong. And no amount of planning can undo what students at Roosevelt witnessed yesterday — trusted educators who were supposed to protect them being handcuffed, reports of chemical agents in the air, chaos where there should have been an ordinary after-school dismissal.

America faces a fundamental question: What kind of civic infrastructure have we built in our schools?

For too long, support for immigrant students has been concentrated in specialized programs — English learner instruction, targeted interventions, crisis response — rather than embedded in how schools operate for everyone. When students transition out of those programs, when political winds shift, when armed agents show up at dismissal, these young people discover whether their community is a place where they genuinely belong or whether what felt like acceptance was simply provisional accommodation.

Real belonging means students know in their bones, not just from posters on the wall, that they matter, that their history is part of the school’s story, that adults and peers will stand with them when it counts.

Approximately 26% of school-age children in America come from immigrant-origin families. Many more have classmates, friends and teachers with these backgrounds. They must have the opportunity to attend schools where every student is known. Where diverse experiences are valued in curriculum and daily practice. Where students learn to navigate differences and build relationships across them. 

Educators across the country need to be free to do the — building professional cultures where all teachers sees belonging as their responsibility, weaving migration throughout classroom lessons so students understand it as central to American identity and human experience, creating student-led initiatives where young people become architects of inclusive school cultures.

This work requires consistency, trust, and time — none of which survive when the school day can be upended without warning. Minneapolis just demonstrated what happens when immigration policy collides with the school day: canceled classes, traumatized students and staff, a community in crisis.

Roosevelt High School will eventually reopen. Students will return. But what will they be returning to? What is America going to do to keep young people safe — and build schools into the communities of belonging that every student deserves?

Minneapolis Public Schools are shut down for the remainder of the week after armed Border Patrol agents clashed with students and staff at a local high school Wednesday, just hours after an immigration officer fatally shot a 37-year-old mother of three in her car.

The closure of an entire city school district is an unprecedented response to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration dragnet, one that has disrupted schools and sparked fear in students, families and educators across the country. The district announced to staff Thursday evening it will offer temporary online learning starting next week and continuing through Feb. 12.

Gov. Tim Walz, a former schoolteacher, said he thought Minneapolis Public Schools made “absolutely what was the right decision” to close and condemned federal agents’ presence at Roosevelt High School and other campuses. 

“I can’t say this strongly enough as a governor, as a parent, as a teacher, to our elected representatives, Democrats and Republicans, I beg you, I implore you to tell them to stay out of our schools,” Walz said at a press conference Thursday. “Tragedy will be magnified a hundredfold if this fight moves into the hallways of our public schools, amongst our youth. They are watching us, they are watching us now how we respond.” 

Josie Bures, 17 and a senior at Roosevelt, attended a protest at ICE headquarters for three hours early Thursday morning and planned to stop by another in the late evening. She’s not worried about herself, she said, but about the immigrants in her community.

“Those are our neighbors, our friends, my classmates and our teachers,” Bures said. “It’s just a very weird feeling to watch your teacher be tackled to the ground by ICE agents.”

The White House flooded Minneapolis this week , just days before Renee Nicole Good, 37, a writer who had just dropped off encountered a group of them on a snowy street and was shot in the head when she attempted to drive away.

The Department of Homeland Security and local witnesses and video have offered starkly different accounts of the actions preceding Good’s death and those at Roosevelt High School, where local news reports say students and staff .

A DHS spokesperson denied the use of tear gas and told The 74 on Thursday that agents were conducting immigration enforcement in the area when a U.S. citizen rammed his car into a government vehicle. While the man was being removed, DHS contended, “an individual who identified himself as a teacher proceeded to assault a border patrol agent.” 

A crowd gathered and “rioters” threw objects and paint at the officers and their vehicles, DHS said, adding, “agents would not have been near this location if not for the dangerous actions” of the driver. 

The district issued a statement Thursday saying, “Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is aware of an incident that happened after school yesterday outside of Roosevelt High School. This incident involved federal law enforcement agents and is currently under investigation. We are working with our partners including the City of Minneapolis and others to support the individuals directly impacted.”

The statement went on to note its commitment “to maintaining a safe and welcoming learning environment for all of our students.” Recent events have deeply undermined that effort, parents and students told The 74. 

Shawna Hedlund, whose son is a freshman at Roosevelt, said he left campus just before federal agents arrived, but was already “stricken by what he had heard about the shooting.”

That feeling worsened when her son and other students she spoke with learned that ICE then showed up at their school and chaos broke out.

“They went from dismayed to shocked,” she said.

Hedlund, who works in student health, said she understands the necessity for the school closure but laments that children will be by themselves.

“We learned during the pandemic that isolation is hard on our kids’ mental health,” she said. “I don’t like thinking about all of the kids who are feeling alone today. And at the same time, it was not safe.”

Bures, the Roosevelt senior, said she’s not sure if she’ll be ready to pay attention in class when school resumes Monday, but there is no alternative.

“No one knows how long this will last or how persistent ICE will be,” she said. “My friend’s mom works at a St. Paul school. ICE comes there every day in the morning and when school lets out in the afternoon. As soon as school starts up, will ICE be there again?”

Muslim faith leader Abdulahi Farah said parents were already afraid to drop off and pick up their children at school. 

“The parents of high schoolers are the most scared,” Farah said. “The seniors and juniors, they are tall: They look like grown people — and they are driving. I have had a lot of moms share with me how they took away their kids’ car keys. Young people want to go play basketball, but parents are trying to make sure these young boys and girls are safe.”

Parents of older kids, fear, too, they could unintentionally escalate interaction with federal agents, he said. 

“Young people don’t use the best judgment,” Farah said. “Teenagers might run away from ICE agents — and ICE agents might shoot them.” 

Good was killed while driving away from agents who had come up to her vehicle, including one who tried to yank her driver’s side door open, according from the scene. DHS maintains that Good tried to run down one of their agents, who defended himself.

Numerous Twin Cities district and charter schools told families Wednesday that they should consider keeping their children home, according to a suburban Minneapolis school board member who asked not to be identified because she has loved ones at risk of deportation.

She said more than a third of district students were absent Wednesday, and that large numbers are not expected to return — particularly in neighborhoods targeted by federal agents.    

Like Roosevelt High School, the schools where ICE and the Border Patrol have been spotted have dual-language programs, heavy concentrations of Latino students and immigrant staff. Many are communicating with families directly instead of posting logistics on social networks, parents and administrators said. 

Several charter schools catering to immigrant populations are also closed. Located about a mile from Good’s shooting, El Colegio High School said it will notify families when it reopens. The three-school Hiawatha Academies network is also shuttered. 

Area superintendents were meeting Thursday to discuss the complicated state laws that govern absences. Because Minnesota reimburses schools for daily attendance, it has a law requiring them to disenroll students who aren’t present for 15 or more days. Administrators are likely to ask for a temporary exception. 

In Minneapolis, most high schoolers use public transit at district expense. Before it closed, Hiawatha began providing dedicated yellow buses for any student afraid to ride the public buses because ICE agents might board them. 

St. Paul Public Schools remains open but has instructed students to stay on school buses if they feel unsafe getting off. Drivers have been told how to make alternate arrangements to drive students home, the district said.  

A multilingual learner teacher in a southern Minneapolis suburb said her school, which serves a large portion of Spanish-speaking students, was in session Thursday but the mood was somber. She asked not to be identified to avoid drawing ICE’s attention.

In addition to the violence that unfolded Wednesday, one student’s father was detained Tuesday, she said.

“I started my class with quiet meditation and affirmations such as, ‘I belong here. I’m strong even when things feel scary. My family’s story matters. I’m allowed to feel happy even during hard times. I can focus on what I can control,’” she said.  

Anxiety is high, too, for parents of very young children whose local day care centers have come under intense scrutiny in the wake of recent allegations of fraud. The Trump administration cited those charges among its reasons for sending federal agents into Minneapolis with such force. 

“We have grown men showing up there with cameras,” Farah said, referring to social media influencers attracted by . “So some of the parents are not taking the kids to day care.”

And, he said, bullying is on the rise in schools, especially against the Somali community, another target of the president. Many of its members fled their homeland to escape government brutality, he said. 

“They have seen things like this before. … Things you thought would never happen here are happening here.” he said. “It has been overwhelming.”

Earlier this week, organizing on private channels, parents arranged patrols during dismissal times outside schools with programs catering to immigrants. Individual school parent groups also dropped off groceries and other supplies at students’ homes and solicited donations for families where adults or teens have been unable to work.

Within a couple of hours of Good’s death, the education community swung into action. Mattie Weiss, a former policy advocate at Educators for Excellence, created a GoFundMe for Good’s loved ones that as of Thursday night had collected $1.2 million from 31,100 donors, far surpassing its $50,000 goal.

Adam Strom, co-founder and executive director of Re-Imagining Migration, said that what happened in Minneapolis this week is being felt nationwide. 

“This is the result of policies transforming schools into sites of fear,” he said. “As horrible as that scene was, the impact ripples far beyond Minneapolis. Families across the country, after witnessing this, are sure that this could happen here, too. The question we all must face is what we’re going to do to keep our students safe.” 

Colorado officials say money that helps 18,000 low-income families pay for child care could run out by Jan. 31 if federal officials don’t lift the freeze they’ve imposed on funding for several safety net programs in five Democrat-led states.

If that happens, some children could go without care and some parents would have to stay home from work. State lawmakers could cover such a funding gap temporarily, though Colorado is facing a significant budget crunch.

The Trump administration announced the freeze on $10 billion in child care and social services funding for Colorado, California, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York in a press release Monday.

In letters sent to the two Colorado agencies that run the affected programs, federal officials said they have “reason to believe that the State of Colorado is illicitly providing” benefits funded with federal dollars to “illegal aliens.”

The letters didn’t cite evidence for that claim and a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to questions from Chalkbeat about why federal officials are concerned about fraud in Colorado.

Spokespeople from both state departments said by email on Tuesday they’re not aware of any federal fraud investigations focused on the programs affected by the funding freeze.

The five-state funding freeze follows a federal crackdown in Minnesota after a right-wing YouTuber posted a video in late December alleging that Minneapolis child care centers run by Somali residents get federal funds but serve no children. It’s not clear why the other four states have gotten the same treatment as Minnesota, but all have Democratic governors who have clashed with President Donald Trump.

In a New Year’s Eve social media post, Trump called Colorado Gov. Jared Polis “the Scumbag Governor” and said Polis and another Colorado official should “rot in hell” for mistreating Tina Peters, a Trump supporter and former Mesa County clerk who’s serving a nine-year prison sentence for orchestrating a plot to breach election systems.

The federal freeze will affect three main funding streams in Colorado that together bring in about $317 million a year. They include $138 million for the Colorado Department of Early Childhood for child care subsidies for low-income families and a few other programs.

The subsidy program, known as the Colorado Child Care Assistance program, helps cover the cost of care for more than 27,000 children so parents can work or take classes. It’s mostly funded by the federal government with smaller contributions from states and counties.

The other two frozen funding streams go to the Colorado Department of Human Services and pay for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and other programs.

In the letter to the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, federal officials outlined new fiscal requirements the state will have to follow before the funding freeze is lifted. They include attendance documentation — without names or other personal identifiers — for children in the child care subsidy program.

A state fact sheet issued in response to the funding freeze said funding for the child care subsidy program would be depleted by Jan. 31. It also outlined several measures already in place to prevent fraud or waste, including state audits, monthly case reviews by county officials, and efforts to recover funds if improper payments are made.

The state said it is exploring “all options, including legal avenues” to keep the frozen funding flowing.

Six Democratic state lawmakers, most in leadership positions, released a statement Tuesday afternoon calling the funding freeze a callous move that will make life more expensive for working families.

“We stand ready to work with Governor Polis and partners in our federal delegation to resist this lawless effort to freeze funding, and we sincerely hope that our Republican colleagues will put politics aside, get serious about making life in Colorado more affordable, and put families first,” the statement said in part.

The statement was from Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie; Senate President James Coleman; House Majority Leader Monica Duran; Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez; Rep. Emily Sirota; and Sen. Judy Amabile.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Ann’s three young boys had been through a lot already. Her marriage to their father was marked by violence, and a divorce was followed by multiple violations of a protective order, she said. While their father sat in prison in North Dakota, she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

But while the move gave them distance, it didn’t solve their problems, said Ann, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her children’s privacy. Her sons, especially the two youngest, suffered mental health issues including , and anxiety. Her middle son was diagnosed with , characterized by angry and sometimes violent outbursts.

“I had 13 police calls within a nine-month period to my house,” Ann said. When a police officer handed her a domestic violence information card, she knew things had to change.

Ann’s middle son had been enrolled in public school in a suburb of St. Paul, but after being removed from his mainstream classroom due to his behaviors, he wasn’t receiving the support he needed academically or emotionally.

A social worker told her about , located in Minneapolis Public Schools’ Wilder Complex and offering intensive supports to children in grades K-8 struggling with mental illness. Despite her nerves, Ann scheduled a visit. In one of her first interactions, an intake person said, “‘Because you’re here looking for help, you’re more advanced than most adults,’” Ann recalled. “I knew at that moment we were in the right place.”

A trauma-informed approach for kids

Jessica Dreischmeier, Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment Program director, said that her program is a good match for children like Ann’s sons. Staff not only understand the impact that early childhood trauma can have on mental health, but the program’s approach helps them make progress with kids deemed unfixable by other schools.

“I would say a majority of the youth that come here for treatment have experienced some type of trauma,” Dreischmeier said. “We know that those symptoms can manifest themselves in a number of ways, including depression, aggression, anxiety, ADHD —��and we have deep experience working with those kinds of kids.”

With the right approach, she said, most kids can recover from mental illness.

“One day might be hard, but over time we get there with pretty much everybody —��which is awesome.”

A long and loyal legacy

Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment was founded in 1968 as an extension of , founded in 1869 as a residential shelter for orphans. The day treatment program was created to provide an alternative option for children at St. Joseph’s who needed extra mental health support.

St. Joseph’s Home closed in 2020, but the day treatment program continued. Enrollment is capped at 40 students who work with 17 full-time staff members. Students come from around the metro area but enroll in through a partnership with the district. Mental health services are billed through health insurance.

Many staff members have worked at the center for decades. Karen Johnson, a mental health practitioner who has been employed by the program for 24 years, said she feels a deep connection to the children in her care.

“I should have retired five years ago,” Johnson said. “Each time I have that thought, another kid comes through the door, and�� I’m like, ‘Now I have to stay until they finish the program.’ Then another kid comes.”

A focus on parent connection and long-term success for kids

According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, there are . Still, Dreischmeier said that Catholic Charities’ program remains in high demand.

“The need for mental health services for youth and children in Minnesota has been going up for a while,” she said, “but especially after Covid, it’s particularly evident.”

A typical day for students includes two three-hour blocks – one for academics and the other for mental health therapy and treatment.

Mental health support is delivered in individual and group settings with a focus on parent and guardian involvement, Dreischmeier said. Families are taught how to build strong connections with their child and to reinforce strategies they’re practicing at school.

The kids work on setting goals for their life beyond the program. While students’ individual goals look different, the overall aim is a return to home life and a less restrictive school setting. “We’re hoping our intervention helps kids stay in their home and with their family and not have an out-of-home placement,” Dreischmeier said.

‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind.’

For parents like Ann, the transition to day treatment often comes amid deep distrust of past educational settings. Families arrive feeling guarded, Dreischmeier said. They wonder: “‘Are you going to perceive my child as a problem?’ ‘Will you only see them for the behaviors they are having when they are having a hard time, or will you see my whole child?’”

The kids often wonder the same thing, Johnson said. “A lot of these kids come here with no hope. They think, ‘People say I’m bad so I’m never going to be nothing.’ I try to change that narrative.”

Dreischmeier said that her staff remains undaunted even by the students’ most challenging behaviors.

“If something is hard, we’re going to all come together and work on it and talk about it,” she said. We’re going to move forward all together. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”

Academically, the aim is not just to keep students on track, but to move them ahead. In traditional school settings with larger class sizes and fewer supports, children with serious mental health issues are often separated from their peers and fall behind.

Dreischmeier said things are run differently at Children’s Day Treatment, where the ratio of adults to students is much higher – often three adults to every six or seven students. “Students are really able to focus in and learn,” she said.

On average, students participate in the program for a year to a year and a half, Dreischmeier said. Most then move back to their local community school. Some are recommended for further services, including residential and outpatient mental health programs.

Surprised by hope

After two years at Children’s Day Treatment, Ann’s middle son graduated�� last year. Though he struggled in the beginning, she said, he eventually settled in and found success.

“His graduation was the most incredible thing,” Ann recalled. “Staff said he’d emerged as a leader. We did not know that about my son. To hear his peers get up and give their testimonies about him – there was not a dry eye in the room.”

Today, he’s enrolled at a school in her home district – something she never thought possible – where he continues to receive special education support. Ann’s youngest son enrolled at Children’s Day Treatment in the fall. She’s optimistic: “I’m just grateful for people like them who want to help children like mine.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

The resistance — born online through group chats and spreadsheets — has culminated in a highly coordinated effort to expose federal immigration agents and ensure vulnerable students safe passage to and from school, among other efforts. 

Marissa Bejarano, a middle and high school teacher in southeast Louisiana, is a part of this movement, attending word-of-mouth meetings — participants are asked not to post them on social media — to learn how best to protect those most impacted by Trump’s dragnet. 

The administration began its promised crackdown in New Orleans last Wednesday in operation “.” 

“For me, it feels like my nervous system is part of a collective,” Bejarano told The 74. “We are connected by fear, uncertainty and the grief of not being able to rely on the future. But going to a community meeting really pulled me out of my sadness. I walked in overwhelmed but left feeling supported by a group of strangers that want to protect our immigrant community. It’s so important that no one isolates.”

Bejarano, who is Mexican-American, said she spoke to a mother Thursday who had gone into hiding. The teacher was able to offer her and her children assistance and reassurance.

“She was so relieved to talk to me, to have someone listen,” she said. “We were able to get her groceries, discuss a plan for her kids and now she has a local contact that she can reach out to when necessary.”

Resistance efforts in other cities have included parents in Washington, D.C., forming “walking school buses” and teachers in spending their mornings scouring their community for immigration agents so they can send out a warning. In Chicago, where the confrontations have , started meal trains, ride-share programs and legal defense funds.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, denied DHS enforcement has endangered students and families, maintaining instead that organized opposition has imperiled law enforcement.

“Let me be extremely clear for all media: We are NOT targeting schools,” she said in an email Friday morning. “This assertion is an abject lie. The media is sadly attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement. These smears are contributing to our ICE law enforcement officers facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”

But many children and their families have been detained on or near school grounds since the department, through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection arms, began a mass deportation campaign in late spring.

Cristal Medina, 17 and who attends Charlotte’s East Mecklenburg High School, knows the risks better than anyone. Her father, Yasser Ricardo Gomez Flores, born in Nicaragua, was detained in October after delivering her to school. 

He now sits in a Georgia detention center awaiting possible deportation.

“He was detained on Oct. 21, right after dropping me off,” said Medina, who is in the 11th grade. “A group of cars surrounded him and stopped him as he was preparing to cross the bridge near East Meck. He left his van and my mom picked it up soon after.” 

Medina was one of hundreds of students who walked out of class Nov. 18, just a few days after immigration enforcement agents and clashing with demonstrators. 

“My father is not a criminal,” Medina told her classmates at an on-campus rally. “He is a responsible and hardworking man who has dedicated himself to his company, showing up every day and contributing to this country. He paid his taxes. He followed the rules. He built a life here with dignity and honesty. All he ever asked for was a chance — a chance to make his dream real: to see me walk across the graduation stage, and to watch me grow into the professional I aspire to become. That dream should not be denied.”

Amiin Harun, an immigration attorney who represents many Somalis in Minneapolis, said his phone has been ringing nonstop since Trump’s recent rants against his community, with the president calling its members

“It is emanating from the highest office in the land,” Harun told The 74. “The most powerful man in the world is attacking one of the smallest communities in this country. It’s insane.”  

Federal agents flooded the Twin Cities last week: following the administration’s order to target undocumented Somalis. 

One American-born woman of Somali descent was reportedly in the ongoing sweep.��

Harun notes local Somalis are asking members of the Hispanic community — until now, — how to defend themselves, strategizing inside mosques, churches, community centers, on Zoom, Whatsapp and other online forums.   

Harun, who also chairs the board of the has already advised staff on what to do if ICE seeks to enter its grounds: “Lock the door, and tell them no.”

In Charlotte, Juan Diego “J.D.” Mazuera Arias, a formerly undocumented resident himself, is now trained to spot and verify the presence of federal immigration agents before alerting others online.

He said that while the Customs and Border Patrol officers leading operation “” might have come to spark fear, they ignited something else.

“We made a web of our own,” Arias told The 74. “One that protected us and that was woven by love, unity, community and laughter. In spite of fear, despair, anxiety and confusion, we always find a way to show the world who we are.”

Anti-ICE efforts have extended well beyond the schoolhouse. Protesters raid in Chinatown in late November, hurling sidewalk planters into the street to block agents’ path. And Long Islanders gathered in bitter temperatures this past weekend to demand Suffolk County , which has been training agents at a gun range there for decades — and is now heavily patrolling its streets. 

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker new rules restricting immigration enforcement outside states courthouses and making it easier for residents to sue immigration agents for alleged civil rights violations. The Democratic governor said the measures would “

While pushback against the federal government’s mass deportation campaign has also sometimes , a steady undercurrent of dread is prompting many parents to keep their children at home and to avoid high-risk drop-off and pick-up times.

Student absences in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District after agents arrived. 

Senior Zara Taty started to organize her classmates on the same day the enforcement operation began, creating a Group Meet chat with 25 people that grew to nearly 300 in a matter of days. Students used the forum to support immigrant families any way they could, including through the walkout where they chanted, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”

“I know right now we are frustrated, mad, sad, worried, scared and confused,” Taty told rally attendees. “I think it is important to remember that during these difficult times the most important thing to do is to stick together, to respect one another, to show empathy and show love.”

Across the country in Los Angeles, school children are walking to campus in groups and hoping for strength in numbers. Los Angeles Unified School District families are also organizing food drives to feed their immigrant neighbors who can no longer work because of fear of deportation, an LAUSD teacher told The 74. The educator, who said ICE was outside her school in mid-October, asked not to be identified because of her own immigration status. 

She said teachers have been trained in helping parents create family preparedness plans in case they are detained or deported. She’s also pushing the district, which has pledged to block ICE enforcement action, to take an even more proactive role in keeping kids safe, perhaps by having schools go into lockdown when immigration agents are nearby.

Aggressive enforcement actions have caused students’ grades to plummet — and it’s not just immigrant kids, she said, but the entire student body.

“Students are exhausted,” she said. “Their hearts, their minds, their souls are exhausted. And our parents are scared that they’re not going to see their kids again. It’s honestly horrific, and it’s insane because it’s been happening for so long.”

Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, is director of the , a coalition of more than 150 educators, researchers and advocates from 35 states. 

She said she’s pleased to see how organized the resistance movement has become, including in California, where parents are, for example, driving half their kids’ soccer team to tournaments because others “don’t feel safe leaving their home and they don’t want their child not to have the opportunity to engage in extracurriculars.”

But no matter how much support communities show, she said, children are living through a harrowing era. 

“This is going to be a moment that many kids remember for their lifetimes,” she said.

As students across the country return to school, a mass school shooting in Minneapolis has again reignited debates about����in the U.S.,�� — and youth embrace of��

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz this week announced plans to convene a  in the wake of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting that took place while students attended an annual Mass to kick off the new academic year. Two children were killed and 21 people, 18 of them students, were injured.

Vice President JD��Vance and his wife went to the church Wednesday,����and visited one of the hospitalized young survivors. The injured girl’s father,��Harry Kaiser, questioned Vance on whether he would “earnestly support the study of what is wrong with our culture, that we are the country that has the worst mass shooter problem?”��

As has happened in shooting after shooting, attention quickly turned to the assailant’s online presence as people sought to understand what could motivate such a heinous act. On social media,  — from anti-Christian hate to the radicalization of transgender people — reached millions of eyeballs.

The 23-year-old perpetrator died by suicide after the rampage. Like other shooters, the Minneapolis attacker  indicating mental health struggles, suicidal ideation and, perhaps most importantly, a . 

The attacker “appeared to hate all of us,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a briefing. “More than anything, .”

In the news

A ‘catastrophic’ hack:��Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Wednesday against education technology giant PowerSchool, which fell victim to a massive cyberattack last year that compromised the sensitive data of some 60 million students and 10 million educators globally. The state alleges the breach, which affected some 880,000 Texas��teachers and students, occurred because PowerSchool “failed to implement even the most basic security features.” |��

• The move is the latest in a slew of lawsuits from parents, students and school districts adversely affected by the massive hack. |��The 74
• Matthew Lane, a 19-year-old from Massachusetts, is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court next week after pleading guilty to the extortion scheme over the summer. |��

As Texas and other Republican-controlled states seek to erode the separation of church and state by endorsing Protestant Christianity over other faiths, Paxton has urged students to use a new law allowing prayer time in public schools to practice the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.” | 

Victims speak out: Haley Robson, who was 16 when she was first sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein, recounted on Wednesday how she was forced to recruit young victims from her high school. | 

Florida’s surgeon general announced plans to end state vaccine mandates for children attending public schools, while officials in California, Oregon and Washington joined forces to preserve access to the life-saving shots. | 

The Los Angeles school district has settled a lawsuit filed by parents who allege the pandemic-era remote learning policies of the country’s second-largest K-12 public education system discriminated against students of color, English learners and those with disabilities. | 

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over alleged children’s privacy violations after the entertainment behemoth improperly uploaded kid-focused videos to YouTube and enabled targeted advertising. | 

• Meanwhile, the FTC announced a settlement with a Chinese robot toy manufacturer accused of illegally collecting U.S. children’s location data. |��

Stainless steel water bottles made by Stanley and Yeti are all the rage. But this New York district says they’re a no-go on campus — claiming they pose safety risks. | 

Trump vs. trans kids: As the administration seeks to clamp down on districts that don’t inform parents when their children identify as transgender at school, the Education Department revived an obscure 12-year-old privacy case to access district emails. | The 74

• Two Northern Virginia school districts have sued the Trump administration challenging the federal government’s assertion that policies allowing transgender students to use restrooms and locker facilities violate anti-discrimination laws. |��
  • The legal dispute has been fodder in the state’s gubernatorial race, in which Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has placed anti-trans bathroom policies among her top campaign issues. |��The 74

• In South Carolina, state officials filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after an appeals court blocked enforcement of a new law denying trans youth access to facilities that align with their gender identity. |��
• The Trump administration warned officials in 40 states they could lose federal funding unless they scrap lessons from sexual education materials that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. |����

An online group that calls itself Purgatory has claimed responsibility for a string of swatting calls that drew massive law enforcement responses to college campuses at the start of the new academic year. | 

In a middle-of-the-night operation, the Trump administration scooped up 76 unaccompanied minors as they slept at federal shelters, in a deportation bid that was then temporarily blocked by a federal judge. | 

A new Florida law will require educators to get parents’ permission before spanking students as a form of school discipline. | 

• Student activists lobbied for the law after an investigation by The 74 revealed that Florida educators most often used corporal punishment to address minor infractions like “excessive talking,” “insubordination” and “horseplay.” |��The 74��

ICYMI @The74

Confusion as Kids Head Back to School and RFK Jr. Calls the Shots on Vaccines

Kids Shouldn’t Access Social Media Until They’re Old Enough to Drive, Book Says

Emotional Support

Sinead ponders summer’s end while boating over Labor Day weekend.��: Kathy Moore

At that time, about 25% of special education students were literate, as measured by state reading assessments, even though 75% of children with learning differences are generally capable of performing at grade level. 

The report contained a number of recommendations and a warning: The needed changes “would typically take 1-3 years of careful planning, research, communication, coordination and roll-out, with a commitment from the leadership to provide focus and stability during the implementation process.”

The school board , and district leaders promised swift attention.

Fast forward not 1 to 3 years, but a decade. A new review from the Council of Great City Schools finds that Minneapolis schools still don’t provide adequate, equitable programming for children with disabilities. A copy of the report obtained by The 74 reveals that 11 years later, the number of children with disabilities who are literate has fallen to 21%.

A key reason: a continued lack of solid instruction — this time, in both math and reading.

Children who were kindergartners in 2014 are about to start 11th grade. 

The new report runs to 187 pages. In the intervening decade, literacy has risen among elementary special education students and fallen in grades 6 to 12. But overall, by 2024, the number of children with disabilities who could read at grade level had fallen to 21% and the number proficient in math stood at 18%.

District leaders have had the review since April, but have not released it publicly — something that has caused ripples on private social media accounts within the city’s disability community. It is now scheduled for public discussion at a special meeting of the board Aug. 12. 

Minneapolis Public Schools did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The new report flags many of the same problems as the 11-year-old review, finds math instruction and behavior interventions are haphazard and recommends an extensive reorganization of special ed staff and programs. Among the findings:

The district fails to provide grade-level lessons for many children with disabilities, segregates more students in special ed classrooms than similar school systems, has huge racial disparities in discipline — and little guidance for staff on constructive responses to behavior issues — and high rates of absenteeism. 

In addition, special education leaders lack clear lines of authority and accountability, educator training is inadequate and the district is likely losing money because no one person oversees Medicaid billing for in-school therapies. Students who need specialized transportation come and go on dozens of unexplained, alternative schedules, driving up costs and contributing to driver shortages. 

“It’s shocking, but not surprising to see it in black and white, how poor a job we are doing of serving students with disabilities,” says Maren Christenson, who sits on the board of the Minnesota-based Multicultural Autism Action Network. She is particularly disappointed that except for a couple of passing references, the report does not include the voices of special education students or their parents.

Parent literacy activist David Weingartner says the school system in fact is making strides toward getting better classroom materials and training teachers on their use. But the 2014 report’s one- to three-year timeline for improvement, he says, did not account for huge rates of leadership turnover.

“We create these reports and then we cycle through superintendents and district leaders and district staff to the point where there’s nobody to take accountability for the report,” he says. “We’re at the point now where we’re making progress. But every year of a delay, it really sets the whole district back.”

In the decade between audits, the district has had five superintendents — one of them the former director of special education — and a rotating cast of school board members. It has also lost some 20% of its students, meaning a decrease in state tuition dollars and an increase in underenrolled classrooms. This has precipitated a financial crisis that has snowballed. 

For the upcoming school year, district leaders dipped into reserves to close a in its approximately $750 million budget. Gaps of about $100 million and depleted reserves are anticipated over the next four years. 

Christenson and other advocates fear the tide of red ink that has swelled since 2014 will stymie efforts to address the issues raised in the new report. “I really wish I could be hopeful this would be a clarion call to do something differently, you know, lightning bolt or something that we should start rethinking how we’re doing things,” she says. “But I just don’t see how that’s possible given the financial circumstances that the district is in and given the environment that we’re in right now.”

A coalition of parents who have lobbied the district to change its reading instruction, the Minneapolis Academics Advocacy Group pushed the school board to use one-time federal COVID relief funds to invest in new reading curriculum and teacher training. Instead, the money was used to postpone painful decisions such as closing underenrolled schools.

The auditors several times noted that they could not open newsletters and other resources intended to help educators and community members on the district website because they were password-protected. 

The reviewers also called out a lack of transparency among staff. “Special education department leadership does not openly discuss challenges with district personnel,” the report notes, “limiting the potential for improvements.”

The reviewers focused much of their attention on the district’s piecemeal use of a framework called multi-tiered systems of support — a focused strategy that involves flagging individual students struggling with academics or behavior and attempting targeted interventions. Not a substitute for special education services, the strategies are intended for use with all students. 

The 2014 audit called for implementation of a similar strategy so that educators could pinpoint the reasons why individual children struggle with academics or behavior and plug those specific gaps. Both students with disabilities and their non-disdabled classmates would achieve more. Better overall outcomes can keep children who don’t need formal disability services out of special education, both reviews said.

Four days after an attack by a notorious ransomware gang disrupted the Minneapolis, Minnesota, school district’s computer network, accessing reams of students’ and educators’ sensitive information, officials contacted the FBI and laid out what happened. 

The district “immediately initiated an investigation” after its Feb. 17, 2023, discovery that school system files had been encrypted by ransomware, officials told the federal law enforcement agency. A day later, Minneapolis schools hired a third-party forensics investigation firm to negotiate the hacker’s demand for $4.5 million in bitcoin. 

Yet when school officials notified students and parents, they vaguely described what happened as an “encryption event” and offered a drastically different story than the one in their Feb. 21 report to the FBI. According to records obtained by The 74 through public records requests, the district told families in a Feb. 24 email that its investigation “has found no evidence that personal information was compromised.” 

The statement was sent after cybersecurity experts advised district communications staff that “sharing the least amount of information” as possible was “in the best interest” of district security. 

Threat actors with the ransomware gang Medusa — known for encrypting and stealing sensitive records from cyberattack victims and then threatening to publish them in what’s known as a “double-extortion” scheme — took credit for the attack. Medusa ultimately published a trove of sensitive school district files online. The leaked documents detail campus sexual misconduct cases, child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and suspension reports. 

Minneapolis school leaders didn’t acknowledge for nearly two weeks after the attack that sensitive records may have been compromised — and waited months to notify breach victims directly by letter. 

The district didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As Minneapolis recovered from the attack, records show, it turned first to its insurance provider and cybersecurity lawyers, who were paid as much as $370 an hour to negotiate with the hackers, investigate the breach and keep information about the incident outside of public view. 

An insurance company, which held a $1 million liability policy on the district with a $100,000 deductible, was the first point of contact in the event of a cyberattack, according to a school system incident response plan obtained by The 74.  The cyber insurance provider will “facilitate breach counsel and forensic investigation teams,” the plan notes, and deploy “experienced negotiators” to communicate directly with the hackers. The policy also states it would cover the district’s liability for bad press, fines and “regulatory proceedings” related to a cyberattack. 

“The insurer will typically have an approved panel vendor list for breach counsel, computer forensics and incident response teams,” the plan notes.  

Attorneys with the leading cybersecurity and data privacy law firm Mullen Coughlin were hired to carry out a “privileged investigation,” according to its report to the FBI, with the firm relaying that information about the attack should not be released publicly. 

“Per [Minneapolis Public Schools’] request, all questions, communications and requests in connection with this notification should be directed to Mullen Coughlin,” according to the notification to the FBI, which was signed by an associate attorney with the third-party law firm. Mullen Coughlin didn’t respond to The 74’s request for comment.

Forensic investigation work was conducted by the cybersecurity incident response company Tracepoint, a subsidiary of the government and military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, which Bloomberg News has dubbed “the world’s most profitable spy organization.” The researchers prepared “a report detailing the forensic analysis process and analysis” at Mullen Coughlin’s direction, records show. On March 14, 2023, the researchers held a meeting with district administrators where they went “through the list of what TA [the threat actor] might’ve accessed,” and answered questions. 

The data leak had a direct, detrimental impact on breach victims, records show. In an email to the district in March, one educator reported that someone withdrew more than $26,000 from their bank account. Another person got a direct Twitter message from the “Medusa contact team,” urging the person to respond to the threat actors immediately or else “we will ensure your popularity.” 

In March, Medusa ransomware actors posted the district’s stolen files online after the school system did not pay what the cybercriminals said on a leak site was a $1 million ransom — a markedly lower figure than the $4.5 million the district reported to the FBI. The breached files, according to an analysis by The 74, include confidential and highly sensitive records about individual students and teachers. 

It wasn’t until September 2023 — seven months after the attack — that 105,617 people were notified the “hacking” incident exposed their sensitive information, according to a data breach notice sent to the Maine attorney general’s office. The notice states that the process to identify that information had been completed in July — a month and a half before officials notified victims.

“Although it has been difficult to not share more information with you sooner,” the letter to victims notes, “the accuracy and the integrity of the review were essential.”

As of Dec. 1, 2024, all schools in Minnesota are now to the state but that information will be anonymous and not shared with the public.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Minneapolis Public Schools will use the last of its reserves and then some during next school year if it does not make substantial budget cuts or receive additional state or federal revenue. This is according to the district’s , a five year financial projection that the district prepares each year, which was presented to the school board’s finance committee on Tuesday evening.

The district is projecting an $84 million budget deficit in the 2025-26 school year, followed by deficits reaching $100 million in the next four years.

At the end of next school year, the pro forma predicts a general fund balance of -$14.9 million, which is -2.1% of the district’s operating expenses. This is just above the -2.5% that would signify “ and lead to mandated state intervention. If voters approve a $20 million increase in the operating capital levy in November, the -2.5% trigger would still be reached in the 2026-27 school year without additional changes.

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The dire outlook comes despite the district making more optimistic assumptions about its revenues and costs compared to previous years. The district assumes enrollment will decrease by one percentage point less each year than it forecasted in last year’s pro forma because of a one-time increase in kindergarten enrollment this year. John Clinton, Minneapolis Public Schools’ executive director of finance, told board members he did not know what the district’s current enrollment is, nor the size of the current kindergarten class, when asked.

The district has had a growing number of new to country students enrolling in the district the past two school years. The district does not track immigration status of students, but last year,����it had about 3,700 newcomer students enrolled in the district, most whose home language is Spanish.

The district’s funding is primarily based on enrollment, so higher enrollment projections mean higher revenue for the district.

Newcomer students whose home language is not English receive substantial support from the district to learn English. The state requires the district to provide these services but ��to the district. This year, the district expects to�� on support for English Learners than it receives in state aid for the services.

In the pro forma, the district assumes that overall its costs will increase at 2% per year, slower than the 4% rate it assumed in last year’s pro forma. The district also assumes that as enrollment declines, the number of licensed teachers it employs will decline, according to Clinton.

The district assumes that it will have an annual 2.5% increase in labor costs, the same assumption it made in its previous pro forma. The most recent contracts with teachers and education support professionals, the district’s two largest employee groups, included annualized cost increases of approximately 12% over the two years of the contracts, a much bigger cost than the projected 2.5%.

The district anticipates ending the current school year with $69 million in its general fund balance. This assumes that it ended last fiscal year with $154 million in its general fund balance, an amount nearly $13 million more than what the district had expected. In monthly financial statements presented to the school board in September, the district showed its general fund balance at the end of last year was about $90 million. Clinton told the board that the fluctuating estimate of the general fund balance is because of how the district is funded.

The school board reaffirmed its policy governing the district’s reserves last spring. This policy requires the district to maintain 8% of its operating expenses in its reserves. Based on its current expenses, this policy means the district must hold about $57 million in its unassigned general fund balance.

To meet its projected fund balance for the end of this fiscal year will require the district to limit its use of reserves to $55 million this year, and have a 4.75% vacancy rate to realize nearly $24 million in vacancy savings. Vacancy savings are funds the district budgets for, but believes it will not spend because it is unable to hire staff to fill the positions. At the school level, the majority of the����are for staff who serve special education students and students who attend Northside schools. The district’s����is 4%.

How the district and school board will balance the budget next school year remains unknown. The pro forma is a financial projection but does not include budget recommendations. The projection sets a baseline for the district administration and board as they develop the budget for the upcoming school year.

This story was originally published on .

The first night of the Democratic National Convention, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s lieutenant governor strode onto the stage to help kick things off. To Minnesotans, Peggy Flanagan has been a constant presence during Walz’s two terms as governor. But to many delegates in attendance — and people watching the event from around the world — hers was a new face.��

“My name in the Ojibwe language is Gizhiiwewidamoonkwe, or in English, Speaks with a Clear and Loud Voice Woman,” . “I’m a member of the White Earth Nation and my family is the Wolf Clan. And the role of our clan is to ensure that we never leave anyone behind.”

If Kamala Harris is elected president in November, Flanagan will assume Walz’s office, making her the first Indigenous woman governor in U.S. history. Since her DNC appearance, headlines in national news outlets have dubbed her Walz’s “understudy,” a rising party star “waiting in the wings” for her turn. 

The actual story is much more interesting. In a rise marked by serendipity, two pivotal moments stand out. The first took place in 2002, when, as a new University of Minnesota graduate, Flanagan was walking past Sen. Paul Wellstone’s campaign headquarters and decided to stop in. She was 22 and eager to help him win a third term. 

It didn’t happen. The senator was killed in a plane crash 12 days shy of what seemed certain re-election — a tragedy that served as prelude to the second defining moment. Wellstone’s death galvanized a generation of progressive political activists who created an organization, Wellstone Action, dedicated to teaching ordinary people the fundamentals of running a grassroots campaign. 

Flanagan — who had used the Wellstone formula to become the youngest person ever elected to the Minneapolis School Board — was working for the candidate incubator in 2005 when a small-town high school teacher and football coach named Tim Walz turned up at one of its boot camps. He was considering a run for Congress as a Democrat in a deep-red southern Minnesota district. . They as each rose through the political ranks. 

As lieutenant governor, Flanagan has been a driving force behind many of the policies now being showcased as the middle-class wins Walz brings to the presidential ticket. Advocacy for kids, vulnerable families and early childhood education have topped her agenda at each stage of her political career. 

The universal free school lunches, child tax credit and paid family and sick leave that Harris and Walz are campaigning on? Good retail politics, certainly — and also an outgrowth of Flanagan’s childhood experience knowing that her friends were watching as she handed the lunch ladies the issued to kids who got free food. 

“Universal school meals is one of the most important things that I’ve ever worked on in my entire career — removing that shame and that stigma is a powerful tool to make sure that kids are eating right,” Flanagan says. “Anecdotally, we have heard attendance is up. … And instead of asking if kids have enough money in their account, we are asking, ‘Do you want chicken and rice or do you want pizza?’ ”

A literal political pedigree

Flanagan grew up at political strategy meetings. Her grandmother, mother and aunts were Irish social-justice Catholics who worked alongside the late Hubert Humphrey in Democratic politics for decades. When Humphrey ran for president in 1968, Flanagan’s mother, Patricia, moved to Washington, D.C., to work on his campaign.

“I grew up in a family where women just did the work,” Flanagan says. “I didn’t know anything different, right? My grandmother was absolutely the matriarch and was involved in party politics before it was, you know, polite for women to do that work.”

She did not realize that organizing was an activity with a name until she was older and doing it herself, Flanagan continues. “It was just like, well, you see a need, and then you bring people together and try to work together to solve the problem.”

Pat Flanagan was a single parent, getting by thanks to Medicaid, a Section 8 housing voucher, food stamps, state child care assistance, free- and reduced-price school lunches and the Minnesota Family Investment Program — the household subsidy that replaced welfare. She used the benefits to move herself and her daughter to a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, that had good schools and stable neighborhoods. 

Eventually, Pat became a phlebotomist, but struggle shaped Peggy Flanagan’s views. She has also referred to herself on several occasions, without elaborating, as a “ of domestic violence.” She speaks passionately about her mother’s insistence that when food was scarce. Somehow, she says frequently, Pat Flanagan always found enough resources to meet her daughter’s needs.  

If the women in Flanagan’s life taught her to build coalitions, her father nurtured her sense of resolve. Marvin Manypenny spent to recoup lands swindled from , one of the homes of Minnesota’s largest indigenous group, the Anishinaabe, who were dubbed Ojibwe by colonists. In 1986, Manypenny sued the U.S. government in a case that chronicled more than a century of betrayed promises by federal officials to respect Native lands. In 1991, an appeals court , ruling that it did not have jurisdiction to decide the claims. 

Manypenny was a frequent fixture at protests and active in tribal politics, but not a consistent voter himself until his daughter’s name appeared on a statewide ticket as the candidate for lieutenant governor in 2018. 

“My dad oftentimes would say, ‘My girl, I want to burn down the system, and you want to get into the system and change it from the inside out,’ ” Flanagan when he died in 2020. “That’s a pretty good summary of how my dad operated and how I operate.”

When Flanagan walked into Wellstone’s campaign office, it was with her maternal lineage’s coalition-building skills and her father’s spine. Wellstone’s organizers put her to work mobilizing the urban Native American community. 

A political science professor at Carleton College, located an hour south of the Twin Cities, Wellstone ran a then-unorthodox, bare-bones campaign for U.S. Senate in 1990, ousting two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz, the owner of a chain of lumber stores. 

Accompanied by an army of door-knockers — many of them his students — Wellstone rode an old green school bus around the state, giving stump speeches from a platform on the back. He could afford to air only one TV ad one time, but his grainy, low-budget “Looking for Rudy” — in which he went seeking his rival to set up a debate — became a news story itself. 

Flanagan was an early linchpin of Wellstone Action’s grassroots training efforts. A campaign policy aide and longtime friend of the senator’s, Pam Costain traveled the country with Flanagan for several years, teaching people about what they called the Wellstone triangle. Even in her 20s, Costain says, Flanagan had experience with all three legs.

“You cannot do electoral politics without an appreciation for what it takes to build grassroots involvement,” she explains. “And you can’t do [community organizing] work if you’re not willing to contend for power — because then you’re just always going to be the agitator and not the decision-maker.”

Out of college, Flanagan was employed by the Division of Indian Work, a Twin Cities nonprofit service provider, helping to build relationships between the school system and Native families. She had been encouraged by a longtime Minneapolis School Board member to run for a seat in the 2004 election, but begged off.����������

“I was like, you know, I’m 23. I don’t have any kids in the district,” Flanagan recalls. “I don’t think I’m the one. But I will help you find somebody.”

Not long after that conversation, at a meeting where American Indian Movement founder Clyde Bellecourt was speaking, she raised her hand and told the crowd that if anyone wanted to run for school board, she would help. “Folks in the room were like, my girl, why don’t you do it?”������

As she drove home from the meeting, Flanagan passed Wellstone’s former campaign office, where she had stopped to volunteer. She pulled over and decided to run.��

“I didn’t think we’re going to win,” she recalls. “But at the very least, the issues that are happening in the urban Native community … will be brought forward. It turned out that a number of people in Minneapolis shared those concerns.”��

‘It wasn’t a small thing’��

Flanagan was not the first Native person to serve on the board, but her presence made the district’s ongoing failure to serve its Indigenous students harder to ignore. In the 1970s, Indigenous dropout rates in Minneapolis schools hovered around 80%, fueled by decades of official indifference to the continued legacy of American Indian boarding schools that stripped Native children of their languages and cultures. Mistrust of government-operated schools is still high.��

Bullying and a near-total lack of Native teachers or curriculum fueled truancy rates, sometimes leading to court-ordered removals of Native children from their families. Before its closure in 2008, a free, private alternative school operated by the American Indian Movement graduated more Indigenous students than Minneapolis Public Schools combined.

Flanagan had graduated from high school in St. Louis Park, a suburb located just west of Minneapolis, but she understood what it was like not to see herself represented in the classroom.������

“When I got to the University of Minnesota, I had for the very first time a teacher who looked like me … in my intro to American Indian Studies class,” she says. “It changed everything. Learning accurate history, knowing that there is a teacher who will absolutely understand who you are and where you come from.”��

On the school board — where she served alongside Costain, who had also sought and won a seat — Flanagan was instrumental in the negotiation of , long in coming, between urban tribal leaders and the district. The first of its kind in the country, it required the school system to create specialized programs aimed at engaging mistrustful families, preserving Native languages and strengthening cultural identity.��

Now the head of the Minneapolis Foundation, R.T. Rybak was in the first of three terms as mayor of Minneapolis when the pact was signed. “It wasn’t a small thing to negotiate an agreement between a public school system and Native leaders, because it starts with an extraordinary amount of historical inequity,” he says. “That was a very significant achievement.”

American Indian students were guaranteed placement at three schools designated “best practices” sites. Educators would be required to interview for positions — a departure from the strict seniority-based placement system then required by the teachers union contract — and would have to agree to undertake ongoing, specialized training and observation. To ensure continuity, they were also supposed to be protected from being bumped from their positions during layoff.

At the time, 38% of Minneapolis Public Schools Native students graduated, more than two-thirds of them from alternative schools not operated by the district. The number of Indigenous students graduating from district schools has ticked up slightly in the intervening two decades, but partly because of a change in the way state officials define American Indian. In 2023, 42% graduated, with 14% dropping out and the fate of another 20% unknown.��

Almost half of Minneapolis’s Native graduates enroll in some postsecondary education within 16 months. But in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, none had earned one year’s worth of credits within two years. Since 2021, the percentage of Minneapolis Indigenous students reading at grade level has fallen from 22% to 19%, while math proficiency has hovered between 10% and 13%.����

The agreement between the district and Native leaders , but there is no evidence the staffing exceptions were codified in the teacher contract. Last May, the district’s American Indian Parent Advisory Committee notified the school board that it considers the schools out of compliance with regarding its obligations to Native students.��

Flanagan’s elected term on the board ended in 2009, but the following year she was appointed to replace Costain, who had resigned to take over the district’s nonprofit education partner. At , the board heard on the district’s racial and ethnic achievement gaps, complete with an estimate that at the incremental pace of change taking place, it would take decades for Minneapolis students to to their peers statewide.

Flanagan had an emotional reaction to the lack of meaningful progress. “We know what works for kids. And we’ve just got to be courageous enough to do it, to ask for it, to demand it,” she said. “If white kids were failing in this district … at the rate that children of color and Native students are failing, people would be on fire. They would be storming the Capitol, they would be burning that place down.”

In 2013, Marian Wright Edelman, then president of the Children’s Defense Fund, tapped Flanagan to head its Minnesota branch. During her time with the organization, she spearheaded a successful effort to get lawmakers to raise the state’s minimum wage — then $6.15, more than a dollar an hour less than the federal minimum — and index it to inflation. For large employers, it is now $10.85.

A few months later, Minneapolis’s new mayor-elect, Betsy Hodges, asked Flanagan to head her “Cradle to K Cabinet,” an effort to in the city.��

“Peggy understood very clearly that one of the challenges of working with prenatal to 3-year-olds is you cannot help and support them without helping and supporting their parents,” says Hodges. “And lots of people love to support young people but do not love to support young people’s parents. When they’re in school, it’s a little easier to heed that reality. But when it’s prenatal to 3, it’s not. So what are the supports parents need to be really effective?”

Flanagan made it clear up front that families’ opportunities to shape the cabinet’s strategies needed to be meaningful. “We wanted to have enough parents as part of the group that they didn’t feel like they were being tokenized,” Hodges recalls. “We made sure to arrange meetings for times that they would be able to be there. We made sure to have child care. We did our best to set it up in a way where we could get their feedback in a way that didn’t feel dismissive or condescending.”

The pull of public office��

But electoral politics still tugged. In 2015, Flanagan won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, serving a handful of suburbs on Minneapolis’s western boundary, including the one where she grew up. She served until 2019, authoring bills in support of early childhood education and a range of benefits for families. She sponsored just one K-12 education measure, to fund diversity, equity and inclusion training for educators in her home district.��

In 2017, Walz called Flanagan and asked her to run for lieutenant governor. (In Minnesota, the governor and the No. 2 are elected as a ticket.) For many of her predecessors, the job has been a one-way trip to obscurity, but since their inaugurations, Walz and Flanagan have typically been seen together.��

“Every major decision she is there from the beginning and helps me see about them differently and think about them differently,” . “You have a 55-year-old rural white guy who was in the Army [National Guard] and coached football, and you have a 39-year-old Indigenous woman who lived in St. Louis Park. That brings a wealth of [ways] to approach these issues.”

Flanagan has an office in the same Capitol suite as the governor. The White Earth flag hangs in the hall alongside the Stars and Stripes and a new state flag adopted last spring, replacing one that was offensive to Native Minnesotans.����

Privately, some Republicans have groused that they believe Flanagan pushed Walz to the left politically. Whether that is true is debatable, but her policy priorities have been front and center in the six years since they took office.

One of her first accomplishments as the state’s second-highest executive was securing the first increase in decades to the Minnesota Family Investment Program, the cash assistance program for low-income families her mother depended on when she was a child. In 2019, lawmakers increased the payments by $100 a month.��

Flanagan also played a key role in ensuring Native history and culture are included in new state social studies standards. Topics differ by grade level and include Indigenous people’s relationships to land and water, the current state of treaties and American Indian perspectives on the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

A Flanagan administration’s priorities��

This year’s appearance was not Flanagan’s first DNC speech. In 2016, she took to the stage to read a letter to her daughter Siobhan, then 3. She was still in the state House, and only the second Native woman to address the convention.��

The following year, she told the Minneapolis Native newspaper The Circle that she would run for the House of Representatives seat occupied by Keith Ellison if he did not stand for re-election. She ended up on Walz’s ticket instead.��

Many of the political wins the governor and lieutenant governor have enjoyed in recent years were possible because Democrats controlled both branches of the state legislature and the executive branch —��by a very slim margin. That could change if Republicans gain control of either the Minnesota House or Senate.

If Flanagan becomes governor, state Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson would like to see more emphasis on closing achievement gaps.��

“While Walz and Flanagan both have experience in the education system, their priorities too often focused on satisfying political interests instead of ensuring kids were getting the education they deserved,” he says. “Once a leader in education, Minnesota now lags Mississippi in some areas despite years of historic funding increases.”

Flanagan says her priorities will remain the same if Harris and Walz are elected and she becomes governor. High on her list is addressing chronic absenteeism: “Attendance matters, especially in the post-pandemic world that we live in.”

She also hopes to promote career and technical education, invest more state aid in kindergarten readiness and continue diversifying the state’s teacher corps, which has historically been more than 90% white.������

Flanagan says her daughter attends the same school system she did but is having a wholly different experience. “There are over 40 Native kids in her school,” and Ojibwe language is taught to fourth- and fifth-graders, she says. “She can fully show up as her Indigenous self in the classroom and know that she will be valued for who she is, that there will be a curiosity about her identity and culture that is demonstrated in a supportive way.”��

The change, she adds, benefits all kids. “I am hopeful that we are in a place, not only in talking about the history of Native people and ensuring we have Indigenous education for all, but also acknowledging Native people are contemporary people who still exist and who live all across the state,” she says. “Everybody benefits from learning the full, rich history of our state.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the number of students with disabilities who are chronically absent from Minneapolis Public Schools has doubled or nearly doubled in more than a third of schools. More than 1,600 do not attend classes on a regular basis.

In four schools, the number has tripled, and in two there has been more than a four-fold increase. Attendance has improved in just six of the 55 traditional schools for which the district recently released five years of school-level attendance data. 

The district did not post data regarding 14 specialized schools that serve students with profound needs, including self-contained special education programs. At some of those programs, attendance is not reported at all. According to separate state data, less than 4% of students enrolled in Minneapolis’s high school for students with the most intensive behavioral issues attend on a regular basis.

The numbers illuminate a largely unexamined facet of a national crisis coming out of the pandemic’s school disruptions. Historically, students with disabilities are the demographic group most likely to suffer from high rates of absenteeism. And they are so vulnerable to the resulting harms that federal civil rights laws require educators to take special care to make sure they get to school — and that they get help catching up once they are there. 

Indeed, within weeks of the first COVID school closures in 2020, the U.S. Department of Education warned that shifts to remote learning did not absolve education leaders of their responsibilities to this population. Minnesota was quick to requiring school systems to identify special education students who needed extra help making up academic and developmental losses, and offering to help defray the cost. It’s unclear how many received these recovery services. 

Overall, according to by the Minneapolis district, the number of students with disabilities who are chronically absent rose from 29% in the academic year that ended in 2019 to a peak of 53% in 2022 and then 46% in 2023. However, those averages conceal huge variations among individual schools, ranging from 21% to 80% in 2023.

The state and the district use different calculations to determine whether a student is chronically absent. Under the state’s definition — students who miss 10% or more of school days for which they were enrolled  — Minneapolis’s 2022 special education absenteeism rate was 61%, versus 39% statewide. The district counts only students who are enrolled for 95 or more days.

Students who qualify as chronically absent under the state rule have missed more than three weeks of the school year. 

Absenteeism is a predictor of poor student outcomes as early as kindergarten. Elementary pupils who are chronically absent risk not being able to read by third grade. Students who reach that watershed mark illiterate are four times more likely to drop out of high school. Students who miss 10% or more of any year between eighth and 12^th grades are seven times more likely to drop out. 

In 2023, some 5,000 district students received special education services, state statistics show, and in 2022, just 37% of them attended school consistently. Of those, 16% and 19%, respectively, met grade-level standards for math and reading. In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, about half graduated. In 2021, 87 went on to post-secondary education. One-fourth of those who did earned a year’s college credits within two years. 

Minneapolis officials declined The 74’s request for an interview for this story or for comment on our data analysis. In a statement, special education officials said attendance is a topic of quarterly discussions district leaders have with school administrators about student learning outcomes in general. They also suggested that families are keeping children with disabilities home over health concerns.  

The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, the law that guarantees disabled children’s rights, requires districts to identify children who need supports — a mandate that extends to tracking down missing pupils and investigating whether their disability factors into why they are not in school. If it does — common reasons include an environment that is hostile or overwhelms a child with sensory issues — the school must make appropriate accommodations. 

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an appeals court decision finding that a school system adjacent to Minneapolis violated the rights of a student who, year after year, was absent for weeks. The district should have , the court ruled. Instead, she was repeatedly disenrolled.

Often, the students school leaders don’t go in search of are disengaged because they are not getting the help they need to succeed, says Andrea Jepsen, a Twin Cities special education attorney who was one of the lawyers who brought the case.

“Districts love to make much of the absences of a child on an [Individualized Education Program] because they think it gets them off the hook to show progress,” she says. “But generally, the kid is not absent enough to justify the abject failure to produce meaningful progress on ambitious goals and objectives in the kids that I see. 

“And again, those absences should prompt further inquiry, not total resignation.”

Indeed, that while children with disabilities quickly lose academic ground when classes are interrupted, they also are more likely than other students to post strong growth during the school year. 

Minneapolis has struggled to provide basic services to students with disabilities. The district has had a number of unstaffed special education classrooms over the last four years.  

In 2022, the district abruptly canceled in-person summer learning for hundreds of children who had been promised help bouncing back. Officials cited staffing problems, something disability advocates were quick to point out is neither a justification allowed by law nor an issue that plagued summer programming for general education students. Neighboring districts had no similar staffing problems.

The number of unfilled special education teacher and paraprofessional jobs increased in Minneapolis between fall 2022 and the start of the current school year, with vacancies concentrated in the highest-poverty schools. The exact extent of the staffing shortage has been the subject of a tussle between school board members who have repeatedly asked for data and administrators who depict hiring as ongoing. 

The local news site Minneapolis Schools Voices both years, finding 46 vacant special educator positions at the start of the 2022-23 academic year and 58 this year, as well as more than 100 unfilled classroom aide jobs. 

One reason for the increase: In early 2023, district leaders announced the creation of 400 academic intervention positions to help struggling students recover from pandemic setbacks. Some of the new jobs were filled by special educators. At least 14 teachers who had taken interventionist jobs were asked to return to the classroom, according to presentations to the board. 

In November, district leaders that three schools had no intervention staff. Special education chronic absenteeism at those schools ranges from 59% to 70%.

Parents of students receiving disability services at the city’s highest-poverty schools say that six months into the school year there are still special education classrooms without a dedicated teacher. Because some of the same schools — which tend to enroll students with disabilities at much higher rates — lack the new intervention staff, advocates fear that many of the educators needed to support disabled children have ended up at wealthier and better-staffed schools enrolling fewer, lower-needs special education students. 

has found that students with disabilities are 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be chronically absent than their general education classmates, for reasons ranging from chronic health problems to anxiety caused by bullying and harassment, trauma and housing insecurity. 

A 2017 study found that students with emotional disturbances were more than 13 percentage points more likely to be chronically absent than general education pupils in the same classrooms. Children with learning disabilities were 8 percentage points more likely to be missing than their classmates. 

The same research found that it mattered whether a disabled student was assigned to a regular classroom or one populated mostly with special education students. Students in segregated settings were 17 points more likely to be absent, and 24 points more likely if they are in a self-contained classroom and have an emotional disturbance. Children served mostly in general education settings were only 5 points more likely to be chronically absent. 

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Michael Gottfried is one of the authors of the 2017 paper. To him, the findings reveal a cycle of disengagement. 

“What we think is actually happening is school belonging,” he says. “In inclusive, traditional rooms, [students] feel connected to the adults. And they don’t feel that way when they’re in segregated rooms.” 

It’s likely that absenteeism among students served in the most restrictive settings has an impact on educator engagement, too, he adds, feeding a vicious cycle. 

IDEA, the law that holds schools responsible for students with disabilities, says they must be educated in the “least restrictive setting” — alongside their non-disabled peers as often as possible. That means it’s incumbent on schools to ensure the environment is hospitable to all children, including those with sensory challenges, anxiety and other traits that can make remaining in class traumatic enough that a student refuses to go to school, says Maren Christenson, executive director of Minneapolis’s Multicultural Autism Action Network. 

“There’s a difference between mainstreaming and inclusion,” she says. “This is about creating environments where all students can succeed. Sometimes that means asking, ‘How crowded are the hallways? Does the bell system make you want to jump out of your skin?’ ”

To this, add the months of pandemic-driven turmoil during which many children with disabilities were left without workable remote instruction, says Gottfried: “Expectations are broken and family trust is broken. The message keeps changing. That creates anxiety about school. There’s probably a sense of disappointment that services used to be offered for [a] child and now they’re not.”

Minnesota schools receive state funding according to how many students show up each day. Because of this, the attendance policy school leaders are most accustomed to worrying about is a law requiring them to disenroll any student who is absent for 15 or more consecutive days. Tracking how many children miss 17 or more days a year is a newer requirement — and one that in many places is the responsibility of district leaders, not educators or principals. 

State lawmakers are considering that would require schools to report much more detailed information on chronically absent students, including how many miss more than 10%, 30% and 50% of the year, and to calculate the numbers for each demographic group. 

“Even a return to pre-pandemic numbers isn’t good enough,” says Matt Shaver, policy director of EdAllies, which is lobbying for the new reporting requirements. “The deleterious effects of missing that much school — they compound. You can look at those numbers and predict who’s probably not going to graduate from high school.”

Correction: Andrea Jepsen is a Twin Cities special education attorney. An earlier version of this story misspelled her last name.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provided funding for the research referenced by University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education Professor Michael Gottfried and  financial support to The 74.

Nearly 44% of public K-12 schools were staffed with school resource officers at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year, by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and June 2022, ended their school resource officer programs or cut their budgets following widespread Black Lives Matter protests and concerns that campus policing has detrimental effects on students — and Black youth in particular. 

The data reflect an 11% decrease in school policing from the 2019-20 school year, when more than 49% of schools had a regular police presence, according to the nationally representative federal survey. That year, schools underwent an increase in campus policing after the 2018 mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted a surge in new security funding and mandates, a pattern that could repeat itself when future federal numbers capture the nation’s reaction to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with The 74 and crunched the federal survey data against that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students. 

“It’s not seismic, but I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s the reversal of a trend in a fairly dramatic way,” said Bushway, a University at Albany in New York professor. “It’s been going up quite a bit and now it’s dropped.”

The new federal data were published the same week as Thursday’s release of a damning U.S. Department of Justice report that cited “critical failures” by police during the May 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. During the shooting, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old shooter, a botched reaction that disregarded established police protocols and, investigators said, cost lives.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Uvalde.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said. 

Chris Chapman, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday that the survey data didn’t make clear a definitive reason for the decline in school-based officers. Experts said that several other factors, including campus closures during the pandemic, budget constraints and a national police officer shortage, may have also contributed. 

Either way, the downward trend may be short-lived. 

Multiple districts that cut their school resource officer programs after Floyd’s murder, including those in Denver, Colorado, and Arlington, Virginia, reversed course after educators reported an uptick in classroom disorder after COVID-era remote learning. Mass school shootings have long driven efforts to bolster campus policing, a reality that has played out in the last several years as the nation experienced an unprecedented number of such attacks. 

Despite officers’ grievously mishandled response in Uvalde, the shooting led to renewed efforts in Texas and elsewhere to strengthen police presence in schools. A similar situation played out after the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal data show national growth in campus policing even after the school resource officer assigned to the Broward County campus failed to confront the gunman, who killed 17 people. 

The now-former officer, Scot Peterson, was acquitted of criminal negligence and perjury charges but faces a new trial in a civil lawsuit by shooting victims’ families, who allege his failure to intervene during the six-minute attack displayed a “wanton and willful disregard” for students’ and teachers’ safety. Qualified immunity generally protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job. 

After Parkland, a new Florida law required an armed security presence on every K-12 campus. The Uvalde shooting led to similar . In both states, a police officer labor shortage, which experts said may have contributed to the 2021-22 decline in schools, has hindered officials’ efforts to comply. In Kentucky, more than 40% of schools lack school resource officers, a reality that school officials have blamed on a lack of funding and a depleted applicant pool. 

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, when that data comes back out, we see that spike go back up,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers a training program for campus cops. “It’s not the way I want to gain business, but some of the busiest years we’ve had training wise are 18 months after a school massacre. I can tell you that 2019 was the biggest year in our association’s history by far — and that’s coming right off the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.”

Advocates for police-free schools recognize the headwinds they face. Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director of the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn initiative, said that while advocates “are proud of the victories that were won” after George Floyd’s murder, educators who removed police from schools “are fighting really hard to hold onto those gains,” some of which face in districts that don’t want them. 

“We’re not really rushing to a conclusion that this represents an overall reduction in police in schools, especially because for many of our partners on the ground this is not their day-to-day experience,” he said. “They’re having to fight back — especially at the state level — against efforts to increase the number of police in their schools.” 

Safety threats on the decline

In the 1970s, just 1% of schools were staffed by police. Decades of efforts since then to swell their ranks have coincided with a marked improvement in campus safety. 

During the 2021-22 school year, 67% of schools reported at least one violent crime on campus, totaling some 857,500 violent incidents. Federal data show the nation’s schools experienced a violent crime rate of 18 incidents per 1,000 students in 2021-22. That’s a steep decline from 1999-00, when schools recorded a violent crime rate of 32 incidents per 1,000, and 2009-10, when the violent crime rate was 25 per 1,000. 

Police officers’ contributions to making schools safer over the past two decades, however, remain the subject of ongoing research and heated debate. In a study last year, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Bushway and his colleagues found that placing . And although researchers were unable to analyze officers’ effects on mass school shootings because such tragedies are statistically rare, they were associated with an uptick in reported firearm offenses — suggesting an increased detection of guns. The officers were also associated with a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, including suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students and those with disabilities. 

“There’s a cost-benefit here and everybody’s calculus on how you weigh these different things is going to be different,” Bushway said. “There’s no pure answer to that question, different people are going to answer that question differently.”

Previous research suggests that suspensions or improve school safety, but have detrimental effects on punished students’ academic performance, attendance and behavior. Their effects on non-misbehaving students remain unclear. 

Other researchers have reached a much more critical conclusion about the effects of school-based police on students. In in November on the existing literature into school officers’ efficacy, researchers failed to identify evidence that school-based law enforcement promoted safety in schools but reinforced concerns that their presence “criminalizes students and schools.” 

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The 74. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.” 

The federal survey, which was conducted between Feb. 15 and July 19, 2022, also found large geographical differences in the types of tools that school-based police use on the job. Across the board, officers in urban areas were less likely than their rural and suburban counterparts to carry guns and pepper spray or to be equipped with body-worn cameras. 

Beyond data on campus policing, the new federal survey offers a comprehensive look at the state of campus safety and security, reflecting school leaders’ responses to the pandemic and record numbers of mass school shootings. Other findings include: 

• In 2021-22, about 49% of schools provided diagnostic mental health assessments to evaluate students for mental health disorders. This is a decline from 2019-20, when 55% conducted assessments. Meanwhile, 38% provided students with treatments for mental health disorders in 2021-22, down from 42% in 2019-20. 

• Restorative justice, a conflict resolution technique, was used in 59% of schools in 2021-22, which was similar to 2019-20 but an increase from the 42% that used the approach in 2017-18. 

• The latest data indicate a decline in campus drug and alcohol incidents. In 2021-22, 71% of schools reported at least one incident involving the distribution, possession or use of illegal drugs, down from 77% in 2019-20. Meanwhile, 34% reported at least one alcohol-related incident in 2021-22, down from 41% in 2019-20. 

Plaintiffs had sought the Supreme Court decision to short-circuit the standard trial court process, asking the justices to rule that the existence of racially imbalanced Twin Cities schools by itself proved their case.

If the families who brought the 2015 suit, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman vs. State of Minnesota, move forward, they will not have to prove that the state intended to create segregated schools. They will need to show only that schools in each community ended up with racial imbalances.

They will, however, have to demonstrate that those enrollment patterns deprive some groups of students of the “adequate” education they are guaranteed under the state constitution. Over the last quarter-century, Minnesota has required traditional school districts to make good-faith efforts toward integration, resulting in a tangle of ineffective “voluntary” rules.

In trying to craft rules that conform to the law, officials have not been able to prove that racial isolation per se results in poor academic outcomes. Nonetheless, the task forces and policymakers have repeatedly concluded that a large bipartisan majority of people value diverse schools for moral and cultural reasons. 

The decision overturns a ruling from a state appellate court, which held that only “intentional segregation of the type described by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education” would violate the state constitution.

The lawsuit asks the court to find that Minnesota laws allowing students to attend schools outside their home districts and in public charter schools contribute to segregation. Charter schools are specifically exempted from the state’s integration rules, which require districts to make good-faith efforts to foster diversity. The plaintiffs asked the court to overturn the relevant portion of the charter school law. 

In response, a number of charter schools were allowed to join the case. While students apply for seats in blind lotteries, a number of Minnesota charters now enroll students almost entirely of a single race or culture. Several of the schools that joined the suit dramatically outperform their traditional district counterparts, complicating the plaintiffs’ argument that racial imbalances alone deny students their right to an adequate education.

If the plaintiffs prevail, attorneys for the charter schools have argued, the high-performing schools would be hard-pressed to continue with their culturally affirming models — which serve the families who sought them out — while responding to pressure to enroll a racial and ethnic cross-section of students. 

In the main opinion, the justices made a distinction between state and district policies that exclude particular groups of students — intentionally isolating or segregating children — and the existence of racial imbalances. 

Newly installed Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, the first Black woman to hold the post, issued a blistering dissent, arguing that “de facto segregation” in Twin Cities schools by definition violates the state’s constitution. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have not yet said whether they plan to proceed to trial.

Yet even before the first class started, the 133,000-student district in Prince George’s County, Maryland, faced an assault on its security — one carried out completely online. 

Rather than barge through the front entrance of a school, threat actors appeared to break in through a backdoor in the district’s computer network. The mid-August intrusion meant the high-performing school system — among the nation’s 20 largest — joined a growing list of school district ransomware victims, another proof point that the education sector is now a primary target of cyber gangs. 

“Schools have this delicious trove of data and do not have the same protections” as banks and other for-profit businesses, said Jake Chanenson, lead author of a recent University of Chicago report on school district cyber risks. 

In the case of Prince George’s County Public Schools, the attack appeared to enter its final stage on Tuesday when the Rhysida gang posted to its leak site a collection of data it purportedly stole nearly a month ago. A cursory review of the files suggest they date back two decades. 

The back-to-school season, already a particularly busy period for school technology leaders, has become a prime time for district ransomware attacks, according to cybersecurity experts. In August alone, ransomware gangs claimed new attacks on 11 K-12 school systems, according to an analysis by The 74 of the cyber group’s dark web leak sites. Among them are three New Jersey districts, two in Washington state, a Denver charter school network and a district in remote Alaska. Several additional districts have disclosed cyberattacks since the start of the new year, including news of a breach last week against Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools, the seventh-largest district in the U.S. 

In Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, district officials said for three days in just the second week of the academic year. 

At the Lower Yukon School District in Alaska, technology director Joshua Walton said a hack and subsequent data breach by the burgeoning ransomware gang NoEscape was first initiated in late July, before the fall semester began. 

“Your confidential documents, personal data and sensitive info has been downloaded,” the group wrote in a ransom note obtained by The 74. “Published information will be seen by your colleagues, competitors, lawyers, media and the whole world.” 

Ultimately, the district refused to pay the group’s $300,000 ransom demand, leading to a small data breach that doesn’t appear to include sensitive information about educators or students. Rather, an analysis of the leak suggests stolen files center primarily on campus maintenance work. 

Previous data breaches following district ransomware attacks, such as the ones in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, have led to widespread disclosure of sensitive information, including student psychological evaluations, reports of campus rape cases, student discipline records, closely guarded files on campus security, employees’ financial records and copies of government-issued identification cards. 

Though Walton was confident that similarly sensitive records had not been stored on the breached computer server, he told The 74 the Lower Yukon hack could have been far more disruptive had it been carried out just a few weeks later. Instead, they had a few remaining weeks of summer to restore their systems before their returned. 

“It was an inconvenience for sure, but I’ve seen a lot of data breaches over the years and ours is nothing comparable,” Walton said. “I couldn’t imagine that happening when school starts because we’re all rushing to get all of the support tickets taken care of and making sure that school is starting off on the right foot. If it would have happened then, it would have been a whole different ball game.” 

This year, the return-to-school season kicked off with a warning from federal law enforcement about the growing threat that cyberattacks pose for school districts. During a cybersecurity summit at the White House in early August, federal officials warned the coming months could be particularly volatile. Harm isn’t limited to victim districts but rather encompasses their employees, students and families whose sensitive records, including financial information, are vulnerable to data breaches. 

WIth “Social Security numbers and medical records stolen and shared online,” such attacks have left “classroom technology paralyzed and lessons ended,” First Lady Jill Biden said. “So if we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data.”

There isn’t any hard data on the frequency that ransomware groups exploit back-to-school season compared to other times, said Doug Levin, the national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. He said it’s also difficult to identify when attacks first begin, with threat actors sometimes infiltrating district servers months before the ransomware attack is initiated. That said, the existing evidence suggests about a quarter of cyber incidents affecting school districts appear to occur during those first few weeks and months of school. He said the chaos of getting technology into students’ hands and setting them up with new online accounts creates an ideal opportunity for criminals to catch district tech officials off guard. 

“With all of these new devices being deployed with all sorts of new tools and applications coming online, I certainly have heard reports of upticks in against school districts already,” Levin said. “It’s definitely a time where you know people are more likely to make mistakes.”

Similar concerns were included in by the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell, where officials warned that cybercriminals routinely exploit holiday breaks to target schools. 

“Threat actors take advantage of this pastime when staff is away or just prior to busy seasons, such as the beginning of the school year, long weekends or before the end of a marking period when final grades are due,” the warning notes. “Within the last few weeks, publicly announced ransomware attacks sharply increased.”

‘Exclusive, unique and impressive’

Following a common ransomware playbook in Prince George’s County, the Rhysida gang claimed the theft of sensitive documents, posting screenshots online showing birth certificates, passports and other records purportedly stolen from the district. Unless the district agreed to pay the group 15 bitcoin worth some $375,000, Rhysida threatened to publish the “exclusive, unique and impressive” data on its leak site. 

Such negotiations appeared to expire by Tuesday morning: A trove of files purportedly stolen from the district were published to the cyber group’s leak site, suggesting education leaders had refused to pay the ransom. The development comes after a ticker on the gang’s leak site, meant to signify the district’s approaching ransom payment deadline, was paused or delayed on several occasions. 

A day after the district detected the breach on Aug. 14, it said in a statement that some 4,500 user accounts out of 180,000 were affected, forcing district employees to reset their passwords. Impacted individuals, the district said, “will be contacted in the coming days.” 

The school system is “offering free credit monitoring and identity protections to all staff,” district spokesperson Meghan Gebreselassie said in an email Tuesday morning but declined to comment further. In a Sept. 1 update, the district said staff, students and their families would receive a year of free credit monitoring and identity protection services, acknowledging the attack “may result in unauthorized disclosure of personal information.” 

“We are working diligently to confirm the extent of information that was impacted by this incident, and we will move quickly to provide direct notice to those who are impacted once this determination is made,” the statement says.

Yet special education advocate Ronnetta Stanley said the Prince George’s district hasn’t done enough to keep the community in the loop about the attack and its potential effects on students and parents. The types of information that may have been breached, she told The 74, “has not been clearly communicated.” Special education records, which have been exposed in previous attacks like the one against the Los Angeles Unified School District near the start of the 2022-23 school year, could be at risk in Prince George’s County, she fears.

“There have not been any specific details about exactly what was breached, who may have been affected by it and, then what is the remedy for what should be happening with compromising information?” said Stanley, founder of the special education advocacy group “Not knowing what was leaked and who was affected, it’s difficult to say what the ramifications will be.” 

The by the University of Chicago researchers found that district leaders are frequently unaware of the peril that cyber gangs pose, often implement education technology tools without considering privacy implications and routinely endorse digital tools that present potential privacy issues. While banks and large corporations have become harder targets as they bolster their cybersecurity defenses, schools have fallen behind, said lead author Chanenson, a doctoral student studying computer science. 

“This is only going to get worse,” he said, “until we give schools the resources they need to up their defensive game.” 

Ransomware’s long tail

Among the school districts listed on ransomware gang leak sites in August is the one in Edmonds, Washington — a development that for locals may feel like déjà vu. The Akira group named Edmonds as being among its latest victims on Aug. 24, just six months after district officials announced that a “data event” was to blame for a two-week internet blackout in late January. 

Data stolen in the winter 2023 breach, the district warned in February, could include names, Social Security numbers, student records, financial information and medical documents. The district is still analyzing the extent of the attack and plans to notify affected individuals once their review is finalized, district spokesperson Harmony Weinberg said in a Sept. 8 email to The 74. 

It’s unclear, however, whether the district was victimized a second time this summer, a development officials deny. Cybercriminals routinely target victims on multiple occasions — especially those that pay ransoms to retrieve stolen files. In Edmonds, the district recently became “aware of a public allegation by the group believed to be responsible for our winter 2023 data security incident,” Weinberg said. 

“We reviewed the district’s network systems in relation to this data security incident, and found no evidence that any systems were infected with ransomware,” Weinberg continued. “Further, we are not aware of any malicious activity occurring within our network systems since the winter 2023 event.” 

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles and Minneapolis school districts continue to grapple with the fallout from cyberattacks that crippled their systems last school year and led to the widespread data breaches of sensitive records about students and educators. After the Los Angeles district was targeted in a back-to-school ransomware attack over Labor Day weekend last year, the nation’s second-largest school system kicked off this school year by announcing to bolster its cybersecurity defenses. 

Seven months after Minneapolis Public Schools fell target to a cyberattack that it euphemistically called an “encryption event,” tens of thousands of individual victims are just beginning to learn their sensitive records were compromised as community members blast education officials for leaving them in the dark about key details. 

On numerous occasions over the last several months, educators have complained to district officials that they were being targeted by fraudsters, obtained by The Daily Dot. “I had my bank account drained last week and had $3 to my name,” one person wrote in an email to Minneapolis schools. Another individual reported getting hit with a fraudulent $2,500 charge on a credit card, while parents reported receiving emails from unverified senders related to their children’s college financial aid. 

In a Sept. 1 update on the Minneapolis district website, said school officials undertook a “time-intensive” review to determine what information had been stolen, which included names, Social Security numbers, financial information and medical records. 

“Although it has been difficult to not share more information with you sooner, the accuracy and the integrity of the review were essential,” the district notice notes. Meanwhile, by the law firm Mullen Coughlin stated that the district had provided written notices to more than 105,000 people whose personal information had gotten caught up in the attack. 

The documents were Minneapolis Public Schools’s first public comments on the attack since April 11.  

Such disclosures often fall short in providing victims enough information to keep themselves safe, said Marshini Chetty, a University of Chicago associate professor focused on privacy and cybersecurity. 

“Disclosure is not enough because people may not fully realize what could actually happen and how their data can be misused,” Chetty said. While victim districts routinely offer credit monitoring and other tools to mitigate financial crimes and fraud, she said it’s more challenging to remedy situations where sensitive information, like medical records or student disciplinary records, are disclosed. 

“A lot of times schools are reactive rather than proactive,” she said.  If district leaders aren’t doing enough to protect the data from being stolen in the first place, “then it’s almost too late.”