Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  One thing you never, ever hear in St. Louis Park is someone running for city council proposing to cut the school band or art classes to avoid raising taxes for the schools, he added. “We just say [to voters] this is our brand and it is a winning brand and help us keep it going. We all see our part in it.” It helps that Minneapolis has had a pretty consistently strong economy to provide the economic substructure for this.

  That attitude has carried over into a lot of leeway for the schools’ academic leaders. “Not only is it expected that we take risks and innovate, but if it fails we will regroup and go again—finger pointing is not part of the culture,” added Kari Schwietering, the assistant principal at St. Louis Park High School. “The community has your back. We had one of the first Spanish immersion programs in the state. The community expects you to be the first—not wait to see what everyone else is doing. That would not be St. Louis Park. We may get it wrong, but we are expected by the community to be first.”

  Like the city, Metz and the high school principal, Scott Meyers, believe in hyperrepresentation. The high school has a student council that is predominantly white, but it also has a black male leadership group, a female leadership group, a Latino one, and an African–Middle Eastern one. “These groups meet every other week and talk about their responsibility to the school,” said Meyers. “They elect captains and if they have a grievance they come and see me.” In the wake of the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, students staged a walkout and created a group called Students Organizing Against Racism, or SOAR. “If kids have a voice, with mentoring from teachers, it can make a huge difference,” said Meyer. “They cannot be coming to a school and feeling like they are visiting someone else’s school.”

  Metz remarked that when he was the high school principal he got to “talk to a lot of seniors when they go out the door and almost always their biggest regret is that they didn’t mix with more kids. They have a sense that they got to go to this school where you have all these different racial and religious groups and they might not have another [experience like that]—and they kind of get that when they are leaving. They say, ‘I wish I would have branched out more.’” Every year the graduating seniors at Park High leave a message for the incoming freshmen. “A common theme,” said Meyers, is “‘Get out and talk to your classmates, because I waited too long.’”

  One afternoon Metz and Meyers gathered St. Louis Park High School’s student leadership together for a dialogue with me. For someone such as myself, who had only one African American in his graduating class of 1971, the rainbow of faces and colored head scarves was almost blinding. Benetton ads have nothing on this group. What was more remarkable, though, was the honesty with which they talked in front of one another about their school, their differences, and what they knew was a pretty unusual place. I typed their words as fast as I could. Below is a kind of “phrase cloud” from the conversation.

  African American girl student: “I’m queer,” she began, explaining that in a science class her teacher invited her one day to talk about her sexuality. “I was impressed at how kids showed me respect … It made me be proud to be at Park.” Somali girl student: “I am Somali. There are still cliques here. I don’t notice a lot of tension, but there is definitely a separation if you look at the lunchroom. There are a lot of tables full of Somali students and others full of Caucasians and some groups don’t interact, but even if you are not constantly interacting, I feel comfortable talking to anyone here.” White girl student: “My least diverse classes are the upper-level ones. We have a large achievement gap and have a ways to go, but if we are talking about socially, there are divisions, but it does not have a large race correlation. It is more who you have classes with. We have all, like, grown up together. I have known her (pointing to an African girl) since second grade. She came from Ethiopia. We grew up with each other and we are not going to change our views just because the outside world is telling us to do so. I feel there is work in progress [here] and that we are doing it and we are coming along.” White girl: “Being in the diverse school that has so many clubs and groups and talking about social justice issues makes you really aware of ‘white privilege.’ I nannied for a twelve-year-old girl, and her friend said to me when she heard that I went to St. Louis Park, ‘Oh, pretty sketchy over there.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not Minnetonka’”—another predominantly white town nearby—“and I was so grateful I grew up in the district I did.” Latino girl: “I grew up in Nevada and came to Minnesota. I grew up with a lot of Hispanic people around and I came to St. Louis Park and it was a whole different atmosphere, and at first I was scared and tried really hard to fit in. When I was a freshman there were few Hispanic people, but after a few weeks being here you could just feel that everyone knew each other. It was really different in a good way. It was really diverse.”

  That is the sound of pluralism being built—the hard way, one encounter at a time. In an America becoming a minority-majority country, it’s the only way we’re going to live, and thrive, together. But every day is still a learning process for all parties. Les Bork, the principal of the St. Louis Park Middle School, where I was a student in the 1960s when it was virtually all white, remarked: “In 1985 we had five black students and now forty percent are students of color, and it was a rough transition. I had families of color who came in who were very accusatory that their kids were not achieving because we were racist. Now it is easier; now there is no dominant culture. The dominant culture is inclusion.”

  Again, it is all about chasing, grasping, losing, and rebuilding that elusive thing called trust. “Almost all my complaints come from e-mail and I never respond by e-mail,” added Bork. “I always call and then we meet face-to-face and I give them my cell phone. [Parents] are shocked at that, [because] they so want to talk to a person,” but it so rarely happens. When he actually calls them back, said Bork, “they are almost always taken aback. I am extending trust to them before they extend it to me.”

  Caribou Coffee

  I am sitting at Caribou Coffee in St. Louis Park, asking a question that I never dreamt I would ask. I am asking Sagal Abdirahman, eighteen, a Somali girl who covers and who graduated from Park High in 2015, if she has ever been to a bar or bat mitzvah.

  “I got invited to one bat mitzvah party,” she answered without hesitation. “Honestly, I thought it was fun—and l liked the dancing.”

  Welcome to St. Louis Park—the 2016 version. Sagal and her older sister, Zamzam—a twenty-one-year-old Park High grad now studying biology at the University of Minnesota, while Sagal is in her first year at Augsburg College—went almost entirely through the St. Louis Park school system after their mother moved there and found a job as a driver for an insurance company over a decade ago. Both girls won college scholarships from the St. Louis Park Rotary Club and from the Page Education Foundation, named for Alan Page, the former Minnesota Vikings football player who went on to serve on the state supreme court.

  I asked Sagal what her biggest impression was, growing up in St. Louis Park schools. “It makes all these opportunities very clear. If you want to do something you can do it—you just have to ask.”

  Both girls attended the Park High School prom. “My best friend’s dad is a pastor,” said Sagal, who, like her sister, prays in a mosque in South Minneapolis.

  They are very welcoming. I have known her since second grade and she helped me learn English. I have been to his church in Edina. I would like my kids to grow up in St. Louis Park. It is welcoming and it is not uncomfortable to grow up here. I feel like it is safe, you can still have fun here. The schools are good. It is just a good community as a whole. I feel like Edina is a little too white. I would not be comfortable there. I would feel I would be looked at differently and it would be awkward. I would feel I have to explain myself in a way I don’t in St. Louis Park.

  Added Zamzam: “I really like St. Louis Park. My mom was [once] thinking of moving to Minneapolis. I said, ‘That is not going to happen at all.’ I really like where
we live in this quiet little neighborhood. It feels very inclusive. We know everyone. Minneapolis feels too much city-like to me.”

  Do they have a hard time finding halal food? I ask.

  There are some stores that carry it, said Zamzam, “or we just grab kosher if we are in a hurry.”

  Did they face much discrimination? I ask.

  “When we were younger maybe a little bit,” said Sagal.

  There were not that many Somalis here then. But people were people. For the most part it was welcoming. There was a little bit of division between the general colored people and then the white people and the Jewish people and the Somali people. We were African only and not African American … It was complicated and there are those people you get along with. But obviously in English or history classes topics come up that you have to discuss, and they can get uncomfortable and sometimes people have their opinions. We all went to school in a civil manner but every once in a while there would be butting of heads.

  I met the two sisters through Karen Atkinson, who runs Children First, a community-wide effort to raise healthy kids, founded by a couple of St. Louis Park businessmen. On every visit back to St. Louis Park, I discovered a new social organization started by someone in the community to help someone less fortunate in the community. That is the definition of a community.

  Children First was launched in 1992, when the then school superintendent, Carl Holmstrom, spoke to the Rotary Club of St. Louis Park and shared the challenges facing young people and their families in the community. Two elderly entrepreneurs and Rotarians—Wayne Packard, who owned Culligan Water Conditioning and was in his eighties, and Gil Braun, who owned Braun’s women’s clothing stores, where my mom always shopped, and was in his seventies—put up the initial funds to create a partnership between the business, city, faith, health, and education communities to support St. Louis Park youth. They teamed up with the Search Institute and began using their “40 Developmental Assets for Adolescents” scorecard, an itemization of relationships, experiences, skills, and expectations that help young people thrive. The scorecard includes things such as: “Family life provides high levels of love and support … Young person receives support from three or more nonparent adults … Young person experiences caring neighbors … School provides a caring, encouraging environment … Parent(s) are actively involved in helping the child succeed in school … Young people are given useful roles in the community … Young person serves in the community one hour or more per week.”

  Those who have lots of assets do better in school, volunteer in the community, and live a healthier lifestyle. They also are less likely to be involved in risky behaviors. Those with fewer assets tend to fall behind or into trouble. The initiative is dedicated to raising scores for all youth.

  “The name Children First is a bit deceiving because it’s really about changing the behavior of adults,” explained Atkinson. “The initiative unleashes the community’s capacity to support our young people, asking individuals and organizations to use the forty assets as a guide. More than two hundred fifty volunteers have been trained, including neighbors, pastors, bank tellers, and firefighters. They each determine their own unique and intentional way to connect with kids.” These range from a free clinic for kids that was established by a partnership of the school district and Park Nicollet Health Services to an elderly couple inviting neighborhood children to use the basketball hoop in their driveway!

  Not surprisingly, there is a lot more poverty in St. Louis Park today than in the past—it is especially pronounced among recent African immigrants—and some kids cannot afford school supplies. But sure enough, some social organization popped up to try to help. Every year now, explained Superintendent Metz, before school starts, a group of elderly St. Louis Park residents get together and create bags of supplies—450 bags of school supplies in 2015—that they distribute at a local church, St. George’s Episcopal, for needy kids. The program was organized by a retired teacher and her husband, who was a retired principal. It is part of a local nonprofit called STEP—St. Louis Park Emergency Program, formed in 1975 to help local residents in need of food or clothing or advocacy.

  It’s those little things that create trust between the newcomer and the longtime resident—the kind of trust you can draw on in a crisis when you need it most. In 2013, a field trip by students at Peter Hobart Elementary School in St. Louis Park ended in tragedy. The students were visiting a fossil site in St. Paul, on a Mississippi River bluff, when the earth gave way, burying two of the St. Louis Park schoolchildren alive in a mudslide. The steep slope had been saturated by rain earlier in the week. Both of the kids killed were of Somali descent. On March 22, 2014, the school held a memorial for the two boys. The local TV station KARE picked up the story: “Two elementary school students killed in a field trip landslide were remembered Thursday on the one-year anniversary of the tragedy … Students and staff of the school formed a ring around the school building, dressed in the school district colors of orange and black. Inside the ring, the families of the two boys, Mohamed Fofana, ten, and Haysem Sani, nine, released a few white balloons after district superintendent Rob Metz asked for a moment of silence. The families of the boys received settlements from the City of Saint Paul and the School District because of the incident at a popular site for fossil hunting under a slope. Some of that money is being used to build a school and an orphanage in East Africa.”

  Innovation Comes in Small Packages

  Time and again I saw proof just in little St. Louis Park of Gidi Grinstein’s dictum that social innovation is happening all over the country today at the local level. Nothing new has to be invented—all that exists just needs to be scaled, or as my colleague David Brooks observed in his June 21, 2016, New York Times column: “The social fabric is tearing across this country, but everywhere it seems healers are rising up to repair their small piece of it. They are going into hollow places and creating community, building intimate relationships that change lives one by one.”

  People in the St. Louis Park community feel so strongly about their public schools that they created a foundation to provide teachers with supplemental support for special projects. My English teacher Mim Kagol retired from Park High in 2002 and doesn’t even live in St. Louis Park any longer, but in a nearby suburb. Yet she still volunteers to work with the St. Louis Park Public Schools Foundation. “I ask myself why,” Kagol said to me. “Every year we raise forty or fifty thousand dollars for the public schools in St. Louis Park. These people are so tied to their schools and the community. Some people my age (I am seventy), retired teachers, are generous donors to the Schools Foundation because the pension system treated them so well.”

  No small community, even St. Louis Park, is going to integrate Somali war refugees, Latinos from Nevada, or African Americans from the inner city overnight; the cultural and religious gaps are way too wide. There are still many people living parallel lives there. But I saw enough applied hope at work, enough social entrepreneurship seeking to fill the gap between the single family and the federal government, to want to live long enough to come back in twenty years and see how this story ends. Until then, I will give the last word to Jeff Liss—a professional photographer who graduated from St. Louis Park High in 1968 and still lives in the town:

  When I grew up here there was a huge middle class and we all sat at the same tables in the lunchroom and the socioeconomic differences did not seem to matter. My two daughters now go to the high school. They say that even with all the diversity, the school still runs really smoothly, just like it did when we were there. Other communities around here are not as accepting, but these values never left our community. They were unconsciously passed on. I never sat down with my daughters and said, “Be this way or that way.” There is not an undercurrent, but an overcurrent, of acceptance that everyone has the right to pursue their goals and dreams. I am not sure if it is unique to St. Louis Park but it is definitely prevalent. I was at my daughter’s soccer game in Hopkins the othe
r day, and to listen to them talk back and forth with their teammates—and there are a lot of Somali kids—I thought: “We have a good thing going here and it has not changed that much.”

  The Itasca Project

  St. Louis Park, as I said, does not exist in a vacuum. Many people there work in Minneapolis, so what happens in the Twin Cities economy matters a lot; an expanding economic pie is not sufficient to produce a more inclusive society, but it sure helps. So I can’t end this chapter without a few words about the most innovative, and today maybe the most important, community/economy building project minted in the Twin Cities. It’s called the Itasca Project—a loose coalition of local business leaders, Fortune 500 executives, educators, local officials, and philanthropists who came together in 2003, during a bad patch in Minnesota politics (following the governorship of the former wrestler Jesse Ventura, from 1999 to 2003), to get the community back on track.

  The collaborative spirit in the state had “fallen off,” explained Mary Brainerd, president of HealthPartners, who chaired Itasca from 2003 to 2008. Minnesota was starting to imitate Washington, D.C., in the toxicity of its politics, which was a departure from the native political culture. “The two parties could not solve problems you needed to solve. Everyone was just focused on the short term—two years ahead and the next election—and people said, ‘We cannot thrive in this environment,’” recalled Brainerd. “We needed evidence-based decision making.”

  Itasca’s first goal was to drive the growth of the local economy—more recently, it’s also sought to reduce the area’s racial divides. Essentially, Itasca set out to do what American business elites at their best used to do locally and nationally—hold politicians’ feet to the fire and make them compromise on the biggest issues, such as infrastructure, education, transportation, and investment—and then, later, hold themselves responsible for opening up their workforces to more minorities. With more African Americans, Laotian Hmong, and Somalis having moved to Minnesota in the previous two decades, the state’s racial disparities, which used to be easily ignored, could no longer be—not morally and not economically. Itasca is not a political party, but if it were it would be a Mother Nature party—nonpartisan, agile, heterodox, hybrid, adaptive, and focused on owning best practices.