Minneapolis school district will lay off white teachers before minorities, under new union agreement

An agreement, which will be effective from Spring 2023, has been reached between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers union and the school district that white teachers will be given redundancies ahead of minority teachers; this was a result of a 2-week strike in spring. The job status of the white teachers will not be taken into consideration.

The agreement states that “if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.”

Excessing teachers is the process of removing teachers from a school due to a decrease in funding, enrolment being down or other mitigating factors. The agreement states that under-represented teachers will be prioritized jobs, and in some cases will be immune to redundancy.

“The District shall prioritize the recall of a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the district,” the agreement reads. It goes on to say that teachers of color “may be exempted from district-wide layoff outside of seniority order.”

The agreement also states that its goal is to right the wrongs of “past discrimination” by the district, which according to the agreement “disproportionately impacted the hiring of underrepresented teachers in the District, as compared to the relevant labor market and the community, and resulted in a lack of diversity of teachers.”

Teachers’ unions have said that this agreement will be an important step to move the district “closer to safe and stable schools.”

“Students need educators who look like them and who they can relate to,” the document says. “This language gives us the ability to identify and address issues that contribute to disproportionately high turnover of educators of color.”

Music teacher Edward Barlow said the agreement can be used as a “national model” to find ways of retaining teachers of color.

A spokesperson for Minneapolis Public Schools said a statement to Fox News: “To remedy the continuing effects of past discrimination, Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) mutually agreed to contract language that aims to support the recruitment and retention of teachers from underrepresented groups as compared to the labor market and to the community served by the school district.”