Hopkins 270 Blog

I sought out the 2018 Settlement Collaboration Agreement to examine and better understand the representations made over its contents by MDHR, certain members of the Hopkins School Board, and members of the Hopkins 270 district administration. As a parent with two kids in the District starting with ECFE, I had not seen any evidence of discriminatory racism — or racism in any form — in fact, quite the opposite. All I’ve ever witnessed is welcoming and supportive faculty and building staff across the board. So if MDHR had found such evidence in 2017-18, I wanted to understand what I was missing and write about it.

Allegations vs. Evidence

The unwavering, controlling prospective presented to the School Board and the public was that Hopkins 270 was actively part of a larger problem: racial disparities in exclusionary discipline that were alleged to conclusively demonstrate explicit or implicit bias of professional educators, resulting in unlawful discriminatory actions wrongfully impacting students of color.

The text of the actual Collaboration Agreement demonstrated a very different truth: MDHR’s 2017-18 investigation found NO EVIDENCE that Hopkins 270 was participating in discriminatory practices or programs that were systemically resulting in intended harm or disparate impacts to students of color.

I am happy that Hopkins voluntarily agreed to work with MDHR for a three year period between 2018 and 2021 to examine how we all might reduce disparities in discipline and support the ultimate goal of student learning. But this was fundamentally different than the picture presented by MDHR and District leadership.

The Unresolved (and Unresolvable?) Problem of Disciplinary Disparities

I 100% applaud the desire and effort to eliminate racial disparities in application of both non-exclusionary and exclusionary discipline, with the objective goal achieving the specified mission of public education in Minnesota for all students.

So what is Hopkins 270 — and the State of Minnesota — doing to actually identify the root cause of these disparities? IDK. I can’t help but think that maybe they have, and the answer is a politically inconvenient truth that no one wants to discuss in public, as doing so can be ugly and unproductive, particularly without any current tenable solution.

False Basis for Reinventing Education in Hopkins 270

Hopkins 270 parents have been told for years that the District needs to reinvent itself to solve racial discriminatory practices in our schools when the Minnesota Department of Human Resources looked deep into the evidence and still could not find any actual discrimination or systematic flaws resulting in a disparate impact to students of color.

Since Collaboration Agreement was entered in 2018, this district has implemented Vision 2031, Restorative Culture/Practices, Social Emotional Learning, Inherent Bias Training, Inquiry-Based Learning, along with so many other programs and directives to our outstanding faculty.

The District Administration, supported by the School District, continues down this pathway of reinvention of our schools without critical examination and predicated on the deception surrounding the 2018 MDHR-Hopkins Settlement Collaboration Agreement.

Meanwhile, genderism continues to fester, there are continued acts of violence in our schools, students feel unsafe and unsupported, parents are increasingly frustrated and pulling kids out of our district (we know SO MANY), and our Superintendent and School Board are playing their violins and telling us to not worry about the increasingly listing ship.

Conclusion

If Hopkins 270, and the Minnesota Department of Human Resources and Department of Education want to resolve the issues of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline, they need to focus on finding the actual causal relationships resulting in these truly undesirable outcomes. We can then, and only then, dedicate the necessary societal resources required to disrupt the harmful pathways and resolve the problem.

District leadership needs to step back and take a serious, critical examination of the significant changes that we have been making in our school district in the name of remedying racial discrimination in the Hopkins Public Schools at the expense of all else.