I think the 1313 SE 5th Street building has done well with serendipitous space sharing. Originally it was opened primarily to start-up entrepreneurs and artists. Open U went in there. University Library Videos department rented space there. Friends of the Boundary Waters was there. The Wilderness Inquiry explorers group got in along with AFSCME offices and plenty more. Cross pollination in workspaces is healthy!
Would the first step be to inventory how much office space Minneapolis is still renting? Then see what we've got open in buildings that we own? Then see what we can put together in the same owned buildings?
For example, there was a special school at Franklin and Nicollet for a while in some sort of an office building. The kids attended class together but were given credit for being South High students. Does this sort of situation still exist there or elsewhere? If so, it might be worth just walking away from the leases to cut facilities expenses--pay the rent and ask the owners to look for new tenants. Then we'd be free to find another place for the school in a building already owned by the city. Back to St. Anthony Main, perhaps? One of my son's friends attended school (7th grade and on) in the St. Anthony Main building.
The kids' elementary school was Marcy, but Marcy met back then in the Tuttle School building, temporarily known as Tuttle-Marcy. It is very possible (and has some surprising benefits) to have two organizations under the same roof, be they in the same "industry" or not. THe 7th (and up) graders did fine in the St. Anthony Main building too, if Candace was reporting correctly.
Second item about change: please do a cost benefits analysis as requested by Don Frasier for the Pratt closing (in his S'Trib opinion piece) before embarking on grand and sweeping changes. Publish that in the paper too, please. I know there are plenty of people in both MPS and city government who understand cost structure, but as MPS showed at the Pratt closings meeting, the people who understand Economics 101 don't seem to get the answers to the people who are making impact decisions. No one has reported that Don Frasier got the numbers he was asking for, have they. (Can't think why not.)
Third: If the School Board is going to cut soap from the budget as they've already cut Kleenex and art supplies, please list the cuts in the paper so everyone knows about it and not just parents of students at a school. I bought a dozen boxes of Kleenex to my children's schools every year while they were pupils in MPS. I am still saving miscellaneous art supplies, but if I know the schools are still short of Kleenex (or green soap or toilet paper or whatever) I can go back to buying that also. I can guess at it, but I'd rather have a shopping list in hand.
Fourth: It would be nice if we tried making the same cuts from the municipal budget that the schools have to cut. If there is no kleenex/hand soap/copier paper in the schools, let's cut it from the city budget, also. This is probably an "in my dreams" item; I realize that. We can't have the CMs or mayors schlepping in Kleenex and toilet paper can we. Or, maybe we should expect exactly that since teachers and parents have to do it.
(For now, I'll continue to purchase or beg for the elementary schools: Yarn from the church rummage sale bag day--check. Magazines to cut up for art supplies--check. Oatmeal boxes--check. Spice jars with the little sprinkler tops--got 'em. Kleenex, soap (?) yadda.)
I will go back to pestering my favorite "tax and spend" politician, now.
Emilie Quast<<<<
SE Como
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