Joyner Emerick focuses on the future for Minnesota’s disabled students

In celebration of Disability Pride Month, throughout July MPR News is featuring stories about Minnesotans with disabilities who are making an impact. See more at mprnews.org/changemakers.

Young people bring Joyner Emerick hope for the future, which is why they serve on the Minneapolis Board of Education. When they were elected in 2023, Emerick became the city’s first openly transgender and openly autistic school board member and has used that platform to advocate for disabled students at both the local and state levels.

Emerick has been a community organizer since they were a teen. Since then, the 42-year-old has learned from diverse disabled thought leaders and aims to hold space for those coming from different backgrounds.

As an autistic person, Emerick believes they bring unique strengths to the school board by paying attention to details and data.

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“That really detail and data-driven process tends to have created more expertise in our work, and so our solutions are often both more innovative and more durable. It’s just that most people won’t wait for us to get there,” Emerick said.

Emerick talked with MPR News early education reporter Kyra Miles from their home in Minneapolis.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You are the first openly autistic and openly transgender school board director for the city of Minneapolis, and one of only a handful in the whole country. What made you want to run for school board?

I ran for school board because I have a child who received special education services in the Minneapolis Public School District and has been since he was 2 years old. He has complex educational support needs and as the years went by and I continued to be a parent advocate for him, I found the older he got, the harder it was to get him the services he’s legally entitled to.

So at that point, being a low-income family who can’t afford just to get a lawyer, and knowing how intensive those legal processes can get in special education due process. I thought it might actually be easier to run for school board, and I might be able to have a broader impact beyond just educational outcomes for my own child.

What is your mission as a Minneapolis school board member?

My mission is really, really clear and it is to elevate conversation around the fact that we segregate disabled students in our education system. We disproportionately do that to Black and brown students, and that is a significant contributor to the school-to-prison pipeline, and then to interrupt that process. So that is everything that I do, I always come back to that purpose.

For you, is there a difference between your disability activism and trans liberation activism?

There’s not for me as it exists in my body, right? My body can’t be one or the other. I’m also fat, so that’s actually another identity that overlaps with disability and with being trans. I think what it distills down to, for me, is that we live in a system that values some bodies and some minds more than others.

I don’t believe that ableism is discrimination experienced by disabled people. I think that ableism is the system of oppression utilized to decide whose bodies and whose minds have value and which ones don’t.

What are your short-term hopes for change?

I’ve been really lucky to be a part of some state level work, recently. I just wrapped up a year of service on Minnesota Department of Education’s inclusion advisory group, which was the first state level work group formed to really look at increasing inclusion for students with disabilities in our public education system in Minnesota.

So that’s really, really hopeful and I hope that the state will take those recommendations to heart, because I think it was some pretty good work.

You once said that disability is a culture and autism is a culture. What parts of that culture are you most excited about?

I think the coolest thing is, when autistic people get together, we communicate completely differently. And it is powerful. And I love being sort of like the autistic representative in educational leadership in Minneapolis Public Schools. But man, if there were a couple of us it would really change the game, because we create something different when we’re together.