Sarah Lahm wrote in The Progressive about a community battle in St. Paul, Minnesota, over the fate of a historic church building.
The church in question is St. Andrew’s. Built in 1927 in the Romanesque Revival style, the brown brick church boasts an impressive, multicolored terra-cotta tile roof and a handsome bell tower. From the street, it looks alive and well kept, although Mass hasn’t been celebrated there since 2011.
Back then, the shrinking parish was merged with another one nearby while the building sat in limbo for two years. In 2013, the Twin Cities German Immersion School, a growing charter school in search of a permanent home, began leasing the church building and its accompanying school site by taking on $8 million in construction and real-estate debt.
The local community didn’t mind that the charter school moved in. It does object, however, to plans to tear it down. The St. Paul NAACP joined the opposition to the charter’s plan to grow.
But money isn’t the reason the St. Paul NAACP opposed the proposed expansion of the Twin Cities German Immersion School. Instead, it is segregation. The group, in a statement issued on December 19, 2018, cited the national NAACP’s 2016 call for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools and argued that allowing the Twin Cities German Immersion School to grow further would “exacerbate the racial and economic segregation in the St. Paul schools.”
The Twin Cities German Immersion School is almost 90 percent white, the NAACP statement noted, while just 7 percent of its students live in poverty, as defined by federal guidelines. That represents a sharp difference from the student population at Como Park Elementary, a neighborhood school in the St. Paul system that sits just one mile away from the Twin Cities German Immersion School.
At Como Park Elementary, only 10 percent of its nearly 500 students are white and the majority live in poverty.
Opponents of the plan to tear down the church appealed to the City Council to designate the building a historic landmark. The council turned them down, 5-0.
The fight is far from over. On Monday, the group Save Historic St. Andrew’s filed a lawsuit under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act to prevent demolition. Goldstein said the suit was in anticipation of the council voting against historic designation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
L.A. Preservationists had a similar battle over St. Vibiana’s, a church that was over 200 years old, which they won.
“German Immersion” is simply code for black and brown kids need not apply.
Of course.
Minnesota is proud of its segregated charter schools.
There is one for Somali refugees.
One for Hmong children.
One for Hispanics.
Etc.
You’re right, Diane. A family of in-laws lives in MN … I know what you mean. I am the “brown” outsider.
I am reminded of an argument made on a newshow where a suburban White mother whose kids attended a traditional and long standing high school was pushing her district to make more charter schools for “those kids.”
The charter school will undoubtedly close after a couple years of fraud immersion.
YUP.
Where is Joe Nathan. I’m sure he can put a positive spin on the pro-charter side(snark alert). After reading the article, it is hard to imagine how.
Joe Nathan and Ted Kolderie were the authors of the Minnesota charter law. They made a point of abandoning Al Shanker’s view that only districts should authorize charters.
They opened the door to entrepreneurs, segregated charters, non-union charters, and the many grifters now running nonprofit charters “for profit.”
“It’s my job to provide the best education to these kids as I can,” Anderson said. “Our priority can’t be historic preservation.”
Put all of these kids back into the public school and then they’ll get the best education possible. What a knuckle-head.
In a NJ town near me there’s a huge German club where kids have been learning German Saturday mornings for decades. Paid for by club member dues plus a modest class fee. And loads of other stuff for adults, festivals twice a year etc. Members are middle & working class – this is affordable. In my town there’s a big Greek Orthodox parish complex that pulls members in from all around that does the same. Kids around here have been going to “Saturday school” to learn Korean and Mandarin likewise for decades – not expensive immersion schools: community centers w/modest membership fees and volunteer teachers. Same underway for the last decade through Hindu temples.
Obviously this kind of thing proliferates only in big densely populated areas w/immigrant tradition – but wouldn’t Minneapolis/ St Paul qualify?
“Only in America” (as the song goes) would public funds be tapped to replace benign part-time community activities with ballooning profit centers geared to keep ethnic groups separated from each other every day all day.
Then what would you say about language immersion PUBLIC schools?
Should all foreign language instruction not be part of public education and left as ‘benign part-time community activities?”
Consider that Milwaukee Public Schools offers full immersion programs in German, French, Spanish, Chinese (I assume Mandarin, but the school is named the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language so we’ll go with “Chinese”) and Italian. These aren’t charters, they are real public schools. There are probably more Italians in the Italian program than in the French program. At what point would you draw the line and say that immersion programs are inherently bad for the community?
Wouldn’t the issue with the St. Paul church be the same if the school were any random charter? Or if it was a Burger King that wanted to replace the building? And isn’t the issue with Twin Cities German Immersion whether any magnet school by its nature builds the community or tears it apart?
Full disclosure: I am biased toward language immersion. My kids attended Milwaukee German Immersion. They are fluent in German in a way that I, with my public high school German classes and adult evening classes, will never be.
So great to get a response from a fellow early-language-learning enthusiast. That, like, never happens, so excuse my self-indulgent lengthy reply.
My listing of community offerings refers to heritage FLs that are not widely-spoken enough in my region’s pubsch districts [or—in a few cases—too widely-spoken in district students’ homes] to justify major coverage in their WL programs. As a for-lang teacher (free-lance to central-NJ priv PreK/K’s), the last thing I want to see is pubsch for-lang-lrng eliminated. Based on early-FLL results data pouring in from EU since 1990, by now it should have been expanded nationally to K-12 in L2 (most frequently-encountered/ useful FL in that region – typically, Spanish), plus 6-12 in at least 2 other FLs. In fact, I find it bizarre that Minn-StPaul needs a giant German immersion charter, when 2/3 of their immigrant stock is German: I would expect to see the need obviated by a thriving pubsch 6-12 (if not K12) program in place.
What I’ve seen instead since 1990—here & in most parts of country: hisch dipl reqt whittled to 1 year of FL— elimination of longtime standard midsch/hisch offerings [German, Italian]—and simultaneously, a schizoid and brief attempt to initiate FLL in primary grades [rolled back to 6th-gr even before state budgets started shrinking in 2007, retained in only the wealthiest communities].
As to immersion FL on the public dime—maybe a pilot program here & there to study results [again, something we had in NJ until late-‘90’s]. For wider pubsch offering, maybe, depending on long-term goals.Much as I’d love to put FLL above all, immersion programs affect every subject area taught, so require innovative, focused curriculum planning– as well as teacher qualifications that are relatively rare. Meaning this will never be a mainstream program.
I am all for including specialty programs under the pubsch umbrella, in the spirit of holistic, well-rounded offerings. But specialty pubsch spinoffs in separate bldgs worry me. I think it can be done, carefully, with
(a) universal open enrollment, which in many areas requires involvement of several, not just one district. Lots of inter/ intra-district planning, collaboration, cooperation required. I read this is being done with some success in MA/NH border area.
(b) all-magnet-school district. This was done successfully for decades in Montclair NJ– initially solely as a way to integrate the schools, but ended up being all-round popular. (Sadly the Christie ed-reform crowd butted in & ruined it).
However, willy-nilly expansion of pubsch dist specialty schools could lead to exactly the same problems seen in areas where charters have proliferated willy-nilly. And I keep reading on this blog that that’s what’s happened in Milwaukee.
p.s. agree that the issue with the St Andrew church bldg is not primarily a charter-school issue.
another P.S. Both (a) & (b) must be accomplished without any sort of admissions reqts beyond those addressing pragmatic nuts & bolts stuff. The minute you start screening for abilities/ aptitude, you begin siphoning off best students from poorer schools & consigning them to become even worse than they were.
and a P.P.S… I gather SF has been doing a twist on the open-enrollment idea– not to allow for specialties/ choice, but rather geared to establish a healthy mix of ethnics/ SES at every school, by simply mandating family school-assnts via algorithm or something (& providing transportation). I have 2 nephews just entering that system, will be watching w/ [shudder] interest.
For more perspective on the ugly machinations that have accompanied this effort at tear downs, please visit the website of Save Historic St. Andrew’s and our Facebook page. We fully support immersion programs. But this dispute is about how, as Diane noted, the lack of having the school district be the authorizer for charter schools, which has allowed poorly-led entities like the German Immersion School to carelessly use public resources to demolish an historic building that will last 500 years in the favor of a symmetrical modern building so that, among other things, the school can have a regulation-sized basketball court and two cafeterias. Although test scores are high–why wouldn’t they be with a 90% white, affluent student body with access to pre-school and other benefits?–teacher turnover is reportedly near 40% this year and half of the kids commute to the school by car from outside of the district. And, lurking behind the scenes, is the ubiquitous TenSquare “consulting” firm, a powerful partner in turning New Orleans into an all-charter school district and the plethora of charters in Washington, D.C.
Thanks for the report. These are the details that we never hear if we rely on just the mainstream media.