During a school board meeting on November 1st, of this year, the St. Paul Public School’s (SPPS) administration presented a plan to change the school start times of most secondary schools in the SPPS district. The current start times for most of the secondary schools in Saint Paul is 7:30 am. The proposed plan would change all secondary schools, who start at 7:30, to 8:30, an hour later. This would also result in the changing of end times at secondary schools from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm.

The board is scheduled to vote on the motion to change times on November 15th. This motion would take full effect in the 2018-19 school year. The change would have a large impact on students, teachers, and parents in the SPPS system.

This new system could have a few benefits. One advantage is that it could increase productivity, due to the fact that it would supposedly allow for more sleep for students. Studies show that when students get less than 8 hours of sleep, they have a much higher chance of developing depression, anxiety, and fatigue. Also, when students sleep for longer each night, they are much less likely to be involved in criminal behavior, or take part in the use of drugs. In theory, if the start time is moved back, students would have higher grades, they would have better mental and physical health, and would be more likely to make more logical decisions throughout the day.

As this motion proposes later start times for secondary schools, primary education would in fact see earlier start times. According to the SPPS website, most elementary schools are getting a reduction of start times by about an average amount of 45 min. Schools such as Horace Mann, Hamline Elementary, and Highland Park Elementary would have a school day from 7:45 am till 2:15 pm under this proposal. An issue that is presented by doing this would be family routines. With younger children getting out earlier than their older siblings from school, there might not be anyone to watch them if both parents work. While after school child care is available like EDL or Discovery Club in some schools, lots of families won’t be able to afford these necessities.

Another consequence of the start times changing is the end times changing too. With a lot of students who do after school activities that usually take about 2 hours, they would get home at 5:00 pm which is fairly late in the day. Getting home this late gives students less time to do their school work, which results in them staying up later. By changing these times, students truly get the same amount of sleep as they did before, but will feel more stress to finish their homework late at night.  

This change in start times at HSPH has it’s advantages, but it also has many disadvantages as well. We will have to wait till November 15th when the board votes on the motion.

The new media trend these days is…clowns.  Some people have decided to dress up as clowns and have reportedly lured people into forests and woods and threatened to stab them.

On October 5, 2016 many schools across the state of Minnesota, including school in the St. Paul Public School district, were threatened by clowns reportedly trespassing and terrorizing students and faculty members. These schools were threatened again in another Facebook post by another clown saying, “Friday all Minnesota School beware.”  In response to these threats, SPPS released a statement on the clowns on their Facebook Page.  The statement read:

“We have received reports of several threatening ‘creepy clown’ messages on social media, as well as sightings of clowns in Saint Paul.  Though these situations are believed to be hoaxes, please notify police if you see any unsafe or unusual activity.

School districts across the country are dealing with similar reports.

Additionally, our Department of Security and Emergency Management is monitoring reports and will work closely with Saint Paul Police to ensure safety of our students.

Around 60 St. Paul students walked out of class Monday, April 25 to support a teacher known to be an advocate for students of color, who is losing her job for “ineffective” instruction.

Open World Learning Community students carried signs and chanted “equality and justice for all” as they started  off on a two-mile march to Rice Park soon after 10 a.m. Monday, April 15.  Their aim was to reverse their principal’s decision to dismiss the social studies teacher Sarah Dickhausen, or at least to bring attention to the school’s poor way of treating minorities. “The entire time I’ve been here, there has not been a teacher who’s stood up for me like Sarah,” said eighth-grader Ed Diatta, who is African American.

Dickhausen told students Friday that her contract was being terminated for ineffective instruction. Dozens of students soon went to meet with Principal David Gundale, but were left unsatisfied with his explanation as of why her contract was terminated.

With the students preparing to protest, Gundale emailed families Saturday to say he couldn’t discuss the teacher’s employment because of privacy laws. Students would not be disciplined for protesting, he said, but they would receive an unexcused absence, and would not be allowed to return to school Monday or to ride school buses back home.

In the email Dickhausen wrote to families Sunday, in the letter, Dickhausen  brought up concerns about racial tensions at the school to Gundale in December but received no response. Then she found out she had received a inadequate rating on her performance evaluation. “It was clear to me that I had touched on a subject that was off-limits or that was not ready to be dealt with,” she said.

She was first hired in 2013, by SPPS, to teach adults at St. Paul Public Schools’ Hubbs Center. She also taught at Harding for a year but due to financial cuts she was cut from her position and she elected to transfer to OWL.

In the letter she wrote she said, “I blame myself for not being able to find the balance in teaching to my students and being supportive to my students. I am one person and I was taking on more than I could handle, and I see now that it has contributed to the loss of my career in SPPS and the loss of a beloved teacher to many of my students.”

Several students and parents complained Monday of low expectations for OWL’s students of color. Lanaya DeRungs, a mother who has a daughter at the school said, “Blacks feel alone in this school.”

Before the walkout Monday, a school district leader, and facilitators of OWL’s racial equity student group, also met with students to discuss Dickhausen’s dismissal and the environment at the school, a district representative said. Those conversations will continue in the coming weeks, she added.

Hamdi Ali Osman is a women who lost the last six years of her freedom and four of them were spent in prison. Now, she has filed a lawsuit alleging that a St. Paul police officer’s lies put her in prison. Osman, 26, is asking for 2 million dollars for each year she spent in custody, including the 2 years she was in pretrial detention, for a total of 12 million dollars in damages.

Osman was only one of 30 other people charged in a major federal sex-trafficking case that allegedly involved juvenile victims and stretched from the Twin Cities to Nashville, Tenn. Last month, a federal appeals court reviewed the handling of the case by police, and then prosecutors dismissed charges against Osman and the others that were arrested.

What the appeals court found was that St. Paul police Sgt. Heather Weyker, “exaggerated or fabricated important aspects” of an alleged victim’s story, and that she lied to a grand jury and later during a detention hearing, according to the finding filed on March 2nd.

Osman, said that in jail she and other inmates spent 23 hours a day locked in their cells. She’d been there for four years and on home arrest for two years.

Osman is from Somalia. She moved to the United States when she was 2 and is a permanent resident like most of the others that were arrested.

Osman grew up in South Minneapolis and, after high school, headed to Nashville in 2008 to live with friends. During this time, she received a call from a juvenile she knew from the Somali community in Minneapolis. This girl said she was coming to stay with Osman in Nashville. Osman told her she couldn’t stay with her, but she would let her stay until her mother came to get her. The girl’s mother went to get her the next day, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit claims that “Weyker (the officer) knowingly and intentionally manipulated, defrauded, threatened, and pressured” the girl “into fabricating evidence and testimony that her visit to Nashville was solicited by Osman for the purpose of commercial sex. This was demonstrably false, and Weyker knew it.”

The lawsuit continued, stating, “Weyker also attempted to manipulate, threaten, pressure, defraud two other young females who knew Osman, to frame Osman as a ‘Madam,’ but these young women ultimately resisted … and told Weyker the truth: … that they were not … sex-trafficked, that Osman was in no way involved in any commercial sex-trafficking of minors. Weyker ignored this and other exculpatory evidence, and instead continued with her scheme.”

In 2010, Osman said she was working at Jennie-O in Willmar, Minnesota, when a large number of federal agents showed up and told her they had a warrant for her arrest in Tennessee.

“I thought it was a traffic ticket,” said Osman, speaking Thursday in St. Paul with her attorneys by her side — Irlbeck, Jeff Storms and Paul Applebaum. Little did she know it was the beginning of a six year ordeal. St. Paul police began an internal  investigation into Weyker on March 3rd, the day after the court’s finding was filed, and they placed her on paid administrative leave. On March 9th, Weyker returned to work and the department put the internal investigation on hold. The suit continued: “By the end of 2012, at the very latest, St. Paul, its police department, and Weyker’s supervisors were all aware of the of Weyker’s fabricated evidence in a case that made news headline after news headline.”

“Ms. Osman always knew the accusations against her were a lie but … she kept faith in way the criminal justice system functions,” Irlbeck said. “Of course, when you realize that one cop can tell a lie that takes six years of your life away, it starts to make you wonder whether that system really works for you. It took six years, but the system did work for her. And now this is the second half of the system working for her, the civil case.”

Ms. Osman has now returned to Minnesota and is currently living with her family in St.Paul. She’s been getting a custom to having freedom and is now looking for a job.

For more information about this story see: http://www.twincities.com/2016/04/07/st-paul-cop-sued-12-million-sex-trafficking-aquittal/