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Monday December 4, 2023 he students at the new East
African Magnet Elementary in St. Paul are all ears when their principal,
Abdisalam Adam, starts telling stories about herding goats and sheep in
Somalia.
Lions
would cleverly approach a herd from upwind, he told fifth-graders when I
visited the school recently. "Did you kill them?" one boy asked.
"I
was not old enough to kill a lion," Adam said. The lions didn't come
around often, he said, but when they did, he and his friends scared them
by making a lot of noise and commotion.
"Weren't you afraid of dying?" another boy asked.
"We were not afraid," the principal said.
In
addition to all the regular lessons of elementary school, East African
Magnet opened this fall as the first school in St. Paul specifically
designed to teach the cultural heritage of Somali, Amhara, Oromo, Tigray
and other East African ethnic groups.
Adam,
who has been a teacher and administrator in the St. Paul district for
27 years, pulled together the faculty in just a handful of months.
He hired north Minneapolis
basketball legend and former NBA player Khalid El-Amin to teach physical
education , one of the district's long-time librarians to run a media
center equipped by donations from Target and a recent U grad who was
teaching in Brooklyn Center for fifth grade.
That
fifth-grade teacher, Emily Patzer, told me she's learning as much as
the kids. "I'm always saying, 'Everyone you've ever met knows something
you don't know," she said. "Here, it really shows that."
Abdisalam Adam, principal at East African Magnet Elementary School
in St. Paul, points to some pictures in his office of the rural area in
Somalia where he grew up. Adam, a 27-year educator in the St. Paul
schools, hired the staff for the school in just weeks.
The school enrolled about 200 students this fall and has added more every week. It's one reason the St. Paul district didn't lose as many students as leaders had forecast. In business terms, the district held on to more market share than expected.
Earlier
this fall, I heard St. Paul Superintendent Joe Gothard use the term
"market share" in a TV interview about the creation of East African
Magnet. I asked to meet him to get a deeper sense of the "business" of
schools, and I told him I've upset teachers by comparing schools to
businesses.
"Anytime
we start thinking of business model, we've got to keep service at the
heart of it," Gothard said. "We don't sell. We serve."
State funds flow to schools
based on enrollment. The creation of charter schools three decades ago
forced school districts, chiefly in cities, into competition more
intense than they ever faced from parochial and private schools.
When
my father grew up in St. Paul 90 years ago, he attended an elementary
school a block from his home, the same one his older brothers did. The
people who live in that house today have 24 elementary schools to choose
from, according to the district's "school finder" website. They could also choose a charter or private school.
To help parents sort through this smorgasbord, the district will hold its annual School Choice Fair next Saturday. Principals and teachers will answer questions and appeal for enrollment.
The
district decided in February to create East African Magnet school after a
recommendation from an advisory panel of East African parents, who had
been tossing the idea around since the pandemic.
The
move came after the district in 2021 and 2022 closed or merged other
schools amid declining enrollment. One of the schools that closed then,
Jackson Elementary, is now East African Magnet.
Adam credits the district's
facilities team and teachers for making such a good impression on
parents in the first few months of East African Magnet. "Overall, it's
working well," he said.
Gothard said, "I knew that with him as the leader that this school would be successful.