School leaders seek to calm tensions in St. Cloud

Officials with the St. Cloud school district say they have a plan to address allegations of racial discrimination made by Somali students.

Last week a few dozen mostly Somali students walked out of a St. Cloud high school in protest of what they called harassment by non-Somali students. District officials say they are in the beginning stages of calming tensions.

As a first step, Superintendent Willie Jett said, administrators, staff and students are talking. He said that even though discussions about race and culture are complex, the district is committed to making sure they take place.

"So we started some of those kind of conversations last week — started some of it this week," he said. "And the biggest thing for us is how to schedule that in the future and make it part of our practice."

Jett and Dennis Whipple, school board chair, also opened a dialogue with a group of Somali community leaders earlier this week. Jett called the discussion productive and said the leaders expressed several main concerns — including the need for more teachers of color, addressing bullying, establishing better lines of communication between school officials and the community and concerns that Somali students are being unfairly singled out for harsher discipline.

"When you look at suspension data, it naturally points to students of color — Somali students — being disproportionate in terms of suspension rates," he said. "And so they were looking at, OK, can we analyze that? Can we look at that? Can we look at what our practices are as it relates to suspensions?"

Jett said school officials will take a look at what parents and students recommend and possibly turn their recommendations into policy changes down the road.

Hassan Yussuf, the chair of the task force that met with school district officials this week, said the top priority for the task force is a more diverse school staff and better training to help staff relate to Somali students.

"Mostly we are looking for the training," he said. "The people who are working there are not bad people, they are very competent actually. But it is cultural misunderstanding."

Senior Nasteho Dini said she organized last week's walkout because the district didn't immediately respond to a Snapchat photo taken by a classmate and captioned to suggest that a Somali student was a member of the terrorist group ISIS. Dini said that was just one instance of harassment that school officials seemed reluctant to address.

"They said that they already know that we're not being treated equally. I mean, if you already know, can you please do something about it?" she said. "Because we're being harassed every single day."