New hopes, endless possibilities as school starts across most of Minnesota
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Students in new clothes, fresh haircuts and backpacks arrived early in the morning Tuesday at Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary school. Staff members and volunteers waited outside the front doors to greet students and welcome them back to class with drum music and high-fives.
Starting her first year at the school, fifth grader Aniyah Brown admitted she wasn’t quite sure what to expect on this first day.
“I’m kind of nervous,” she said, a feeling likely shared by tens of thousands of kids walking through school doors Tuesday, the day most Minnesotans returned to school. “I hope that they’re going to be kind because I’m shy, very shy, to people I don’t know. So, hopefully I meet new and kind people.”
They were kind. The adults at Nellie Stone Johnson were ready for her and everyone else who showed Tuesday. While many challenges lie ahead for the state and its public education system in the new school year, it’s hard to beat the promise of the first day of school.
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In Sydney Clipper’s first grade classroom, students finished eating their breakfasts then found seats on the classroom carpet. Clipper pumped the kids up — “What grade are you in now? First grade!” Are you in kindergarten anymore? No!” — before launching the day’s plan.
“My goal is just to have fun. We are doing an activity where we’re getting rid of the first day jitters, so we’re making jitter bracelets and drinking jitter juice,” said Clipper, who’s been teaching at the school for years now. “I just want them to love school and to have a great first day, and want to come back tomorrow.”
Like many schools in Minnesota, Nellie Stone Johnson struggled to keep up attendance and enrollment since the start of the pandemic. Clipper, though, said she’s watched those numbers increase steadily, especially for the youngest preschool learners in the district’s so-called “high five” program.
In the pandemic years, she said she’d have seven or eight kids in her classroom who struggled to show up regularly. Last year, though, the school had to hire another kindergarten teacher “because our kindergarten enrollment was so high. I can only assume the same thing will happen this year in kindergarten and first grade, with our numbers being so high.”
Slipping attendance rates and falling enrollments have been problems across the Minneapolis Public Schools the past few years. Only about 42 percent of students at NSJ attended classes consistently, according to district data. That’s better than in 2022, but worse than in 2019, before COVID, when two-thirds of kids were consistently attending.
The school worked hard to address the problem, said Principal Kelly Wright.
“We really did a campaign on attendance,” she said. “I started giving out incentives. I started doing assemblies, giving out certificates for students who have 100 percent or 90 percent and above attendance. Then at the end of the month, they would get to have a special attendance luncheon with me.”
Ninety percent is the threshold for consistent attendance. For kids who were under 80 percent “we created a spreadsheet and we assigned them a navigator, and it was to help them navigate anything that was causing them to not be able to come to school,” Wright said.
She said her team — through everything from purchasing alarm clocks for kids, to showing up with friendly greetings on family doorsteps — was able to get consistent attendance up to somewhere closer to 70 or 80 percent by the end of the year. She said she plans to focus on attendance right away this year.
Other challenges await. There’s a budget crisis hanging over the district, triggered by the years of falling enrollment. District leaders are planning to ask voters to approve a $20 million levy. Even if that succeeds, leaders still anticipate needing to make cuts, including possible school closures.
Wright said she doesn’t know if Nellie Stone Johnson will be on a school closure list. On Tuesday, it didn’t matter. The doors were open. Kids were there and she focused on starting the school year out right.
“There’s just such brilliance and resilience over here,” she said as the kids walked in anxious and excited. “They come to us every day, bright eyed, looking at us, you know, to make sure that they learn.”
