📚 MPS eyeing vacant Cooper School for new home of Anishinabe Academy
A task force recommended the site as the permanent home for the academy, which has shared a building with Sullivan STEAM School since 2009.
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The oft-speculated future of the vacant Cooper School just got a new front runner: The future home of Anishinabe Academy.
This summer, Minneapolis Public Schools created a task force to find a permanent home for the Native American magnet school, which has been stationed inside the Anne Sullivan School since 2009.
On Tuesday the task force presented its recommendation: Relocate the academy to the long-vacant Cooper School site, ideally in a newly-built building, though possibly in a renovated version of the existing schoolhouse.
Background
The district opened a school called Four Winds in 1991 near Franklin and Chicago, meant to address the persistent achievement gap between Native American students and other groups in Minneapolis schools. The K-8 school taught a standard district curriculum but incorporated indigenous culture and values, including language classes in Dakota and Ojibwe.
Four Winds was closed after a turbulent 10 years plagued by enrollment, neighborhood safety, and academic issues. It was replaced by a new magnet school called “Anishinabe” — the name for a group of Great Lakes-area tribes that includes the Ojibwe, and sometimes used as a term for all indigenous people — at Lake and Hiawatha. In 2009, during a period of consolidation, the school moved into a wing of Anne Sullivan School (now known as Sullivan STEAM School) near Brackett Park.
School leaders say the arrangement was always meant to be temporary, and have long advocated for finding a dedicated home for the academy. Those calls have increased since the school was reduced from pre-K-through-8th grade to PK-5 in 2018. Last spring, a group of parents and school officials, led by the district’s American Indian Parent Advisory Committee, made a renewed push for the idea, citing a lack of space and a series of incidents on shared bus routes with Sullivan students.
In June the Board unanimously supported the idea and created a task force of parents, leaders from the school and community, and district officials to examine the District’s portfolio of available buildings and recommend a new home for the academy.
Moving to Cooper
Committee members say they reviewed 73 MPS properties, plus other real estate available to lease or buy on the open market, and only found three that would fit their needs. They said they chose Cooper due to its proximity to Native students and organizations; the green space on the property plus its proximity to the river; and its location in an area they consider safe and stable.
MPS closed Cooper School in 2005 and has teased reopening it through the years, though it has been used only as a storage facility in that time. Last year, the district boarded up the school’s first-floor windows and doors to deter the increasingly frequent intruders, who have caused extensive damage to the interior.
Should the academy move to the property, the most pressing question would be whether to repurpose the 102-year-old schoolhouse, or demolish it to build a new facility. That decision would be influenced by another pressing question: Does the school remain a PK-5 school, or return to PK-8?
The task force recommended the latter in both cases, touting the benefits of keeping students in the building through middle school, and arguing the “existing building is functionally too small for reuse as a school and is in poor condition.”
The report estimates it would cost as much as $100 million to build a new PK-8 school on the site, compared with up to $85 million for renovation and an addition. (Remaining PK-5 would be significantly cheaper: Up to $36 million to build new and $23 million to renovate.) Committee member Louise Matson, executive director of the Division of Indian Work, told the Board, “If we’re going to spend a couple years on a renovation, why don’t we spend a couple years building the beautiful, perfect school that we need?”
The group hopes to have the academy moved in by the 2027-2028 school year. The recommendation is the first of many steps that would be required to bring the idea to fruition, likely including fundraising from sources outside of the cash-strapped school district. In a letter to neighborhood officials, MPS Senior Operations Officer Tom Parent, who was part of the task force, wrote that “at this stage of the game there is nothing actionable, as we don't have definitive timelines for how the Board will engage with this recommendation, much less what the multi-year implementation of it could look like.”
Though there was no vote, all seven board members who commented expressed support for the plan, including Longfellow’s representative Lori Norvell, who told the task force, “I’m with you 100 percent. I am so excited about this building.”
You can read the report here and watch the board presentation here.
Playground renovation moving forward
Speaking of save-it-or-scrap-it decisions at Cooper School: There is forward progress on the fate of the school's playground, the de facto neighborhood park which almost met the wrecking ball last year when some of its features were deemed unsafe.
The resident group working to save the playground announced that it has reached an agreement with MPS to upgrade the playground sometime this year. That will involve replacing the ground surface and using a $100,000 grant from Hennepin County to replace the few faulty pieces of equipment, while retaining the rest of the existing features. They’re hosting a final community meeting on the topic on March 18 to solicit ideas for the upgrades.
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