High school seniors in Minnesota could be automatically enrolled into public colleges and universities if Gov. Tim Walz’s office proposed direct-admissions program passes before lawmakers this legislative session.

The program is a partnership between the Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE), select institutions and K-12 schools. It aims to increase access to higher education across the state by combating racial equity gaps in education and lack of understanding of the college enrollment process among immigrant and first-generation students.

“It’s so much harder to opt into something than it is to opt out,” said Thomas Sanford, assistant director of operations at OHE. “What we are doing … is proactively reaching out to [students] on the front end and try to remove as many of those barriers as possible and expand opportunities that they may have without even knowing it.”

The seniors would still have to meet “approved benchmarks,” such as grade point average, to be automatically accepted to the select institutions and they would still go through the application process. However, the students would have a spot reserved for them at the institutions they qualified for while they went through the process.

The University of Minnesota is not yet involved in the governor’s proposal, but it is likely they will be part of the further conversations should the program pass.

The University has also set forth a goal to increase the percentage of Minnesota high school graduates entering University campuses as first-year students as part of the MPact 2025 systemwide strategic plan.

Several states have adopted similar programs at their colleges and universities, many that share goals with the OHE proposal.

The Idaho State Board of Education started a direct admissions program in 2015 where students received acceptance letters automatically based on grade point average and college entrance exam scores.

Overall, Idaho saw an 11% increase in enrollment statewide in the program’s first three years.

The board also found that three years after the program’s implementation, “nonwhite students who received the letter admitting them to all eight of Idaho’s postsecondary institutions actually enrolled in college at higher rates than white students who received a similar letter.”

Additionally, 45% of those students whose parents did not graduate from high school said the letter had a positive impact on their decision to enroll.

Gaps caused by historical inequalities such as racial oppression and immigrant oppression especially factor into why this program is so important for Black, Indigenous and high school students of color and their families, according to Sanford and Nekey Oliver, the grants and government relations manager at OHE.

“There are percentage point gaps … not to say that white is the benchmark, but there’s that [race] gap and there’s similar gaps,” Oliver said. “There’s already so much in the way for students to be successful. So if we can take one of those hurdles away, we want to do that.”

The governor’s proposed program will likely be voted on by the end of the legislative session in May 2021.

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small thing we can do to change processes and things that have been happening that have been considered roadblocks for the students,” Oliver said. “It’s important to make these pathways as easy as possible for students to navigate.”

High school seniors in Minnesota could be automatically enrolled into public colleges and universities if Gov. Tim Walz’s office proposed direct-admissions program passes before lawmakers this legislative session.

The program is a partnership between the Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE), select institutions and K-12 schools. It aims to increase access to higher education across the state by combating racial equity gaps in education and lack of understanding of the college enrollment process among immigrant and first-generation students.

“It’s so much harder to opt into something than it is to opt out,” said Thomas Sanford, assistant director of operations at OHE. “What we are doing … is proactively reaching out to [students] on the front end and try to remove as many of those barriers as possible and expand opportunities that they may have without even knowing it.”

The seniors would still have to meet “approved benchmarks,” such as grade point average, to be automatically accepted to the select institutions and they would still go through the application process. However, the students would have a spot reserved for them at the institutions they qualified for while they went through the process.

The University of Minnesota is not yet involved in the governor’s proposal, but it is likely they will be part of the further conversations should the program pass.

The University has also set forth a goal to increase the percentage of Minnesota high school graduates entering University campuses as first-year students as part of the MPact 2025 systemwide strategic plan.

Several states have adopted similar programs at their colleges and universities, many that share goals with the OHE proposal.

The Idaho State Board of Education started a direct admissions program in 2015 where students received acceptance letters automatically based on grade point average and college entrance exam scores.

Overall, Idaho saw an 11% increase in enrollment statewide in the program’s first three years.

The board also found that three years after the program’s implementation, “nonwhite students who received the letter admitting them to all eight of Idaho’s postsecondary institutions actually enrolled in college at higher rates than white students who received a similar letter.”

Additionally, 45% of those students whose parents did not graduate from high school said the letter had a positive impact on their decision to enroll.

Gaps caused by historical inequalities such as racial oppression and immigrant oppression especially factor into why this program is so important for Black, Indigenous and high school students of color and their families, according to Sanford and Nekey Oliver, the grants and government relations manager at OHE.

“There are percentage point gaps … not to say that white is the benchmark, but there’s that [race] gap and there’s similar gaps,” Oliver said. “There’s already so much in the way for students to be successful. So if we can take one of those hurdles away, we want to do that.”

The governor’s proposed program will likely be voted on by the end of the legislative session in May 2021.

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small thing we can do to change processes and things that have been happening that have been considered roadblocks for the students,” Oliver said. “It’s important to make these pathways as easy as possible for students to navigate.”

High school seniors in Minnesota could be automatically enrolled into public colleges and universities if Gov. Tim Walz’s office proposed direct-admissions program passes before lawmakers this legislative session.

The program is a partnership between the Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE), select institutions and K-12 schools. It aims to increase access to higher education across the state by combating racial equity gaps in education and lack of understanding of the college enrollment process among immigrant and first-generation students.

“It’s so much harder to opt into something than it is to opt out,” said Thomas Sanford, assistant director of operations at OHE. “What we are doing … is proactively reaching out to [students] on the front end and try to remove as many of those barriers as possible and expand opportunities that they may have without even knowing it.”

The seniors would still have to meet “approved benchmarks,” such as grade point average, to be automatically accepted to the select institutions and they would still go through the application process. However, the students would have a spot reserved for them at the institutions they qualified for while they went through the process.

The University of Minnesota is not yet involved in the governor’s proposal, but it is likely they will be part of the further conversations should the program pass.

The University has also set forth a goal to increase the percentage of Minnesota high school graduates entering University campuses as first-year students as part of the MPact 2025 systemwide strategic plan.

Several states have adopted similar programs at their colleges and universities, many that share goals with the OHE proposal.

The Idaho State Board of Education started a direct admissions program in 2015 where students received acceptance letters automatically based on grade point average and college entrance exam scores.

Overall, Idaho saw an 11% increase in enrollment statewide in the program’s first three years.

The board also found that three years after the program’s implementation, “nonwhite students who received the letter admitting them to all eight of Idaho’s postsecondary institutions actually enrolled in college at higher rates than white students who received a similar letter.”

Additionally, 45% of those students whose parents did not graduate from high school said the letter had a positive impact on their decision to enroll.

Gaps caused by historical inequalities such as racial oppression and immigrant oppression especially factor into why this program is so important for Black, Indigenous and high school students of color and their families, according to Sanford and Nekey Oliver, the grants and government relations manager at OHE.

“There are percentage point gaps … not to say that white is the benchmark, but there’s that [race] gap and there’s similar gaps,” Oliver said. “There’s already so much in the way for students to be successful. So if we can take one of those hurdles away, we want to do that.”

The governor’s proposed program will likely be voted on by the end of the legislative session in May 2021.

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small thing we can do to change processes and things that have been happening that have been considered roadblocks for the students,” Oliver said. “It’s important to make these pathways as easy as possible for students to navigate.”

Higher education took on big financial losses during the pandemic, but relief programs proposed by Gov. Tim Walz’s office are aiming to remedy that if passed in the upcoming budget decisions.

Walz’s COVID-19 recovery budget includes direct emergency funding for state and tribal colleges and $35 million for a workforce stabilization program that would send students into “high-demand” programs at no cost to them.

Both of these programs, while focusing on economic recovery, also center on increasing equity for groups disproportionately affected by COVID-19, such as Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and essential workers.

“We want all of our citizens, all of our residents, … everybody who lives here, to participate in equal opportunities,” said Thomas Sanford, assistant commissioner for operations at the Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE).

The University of Minnesota will likely be involved in conversations should the proposals pass, said an OHE spokesperson. The emergency funding is an ongoing pool of money for students in need, which the University applied for in 2018 but has not since then.

The University’s Board of Regents recently passed its own free-tuition program for families making less than $50,000.

Emergency funding

The emergency funding, which normally amounts to $175,000 per year from the state since 2017, is awarded to public and tribal colleges that apply and are found to have “significant need.” Walz’s office is asking for $1.3 million this year in order to combat the higher education losses from the pandemic.

Each selected school is typically awarded $40,000 dollars from the fund, which usually goes to things like food pantries for students, student housing needs, scholarships and other programs that help students who are at risk of dropping out.

Due to the high need, some colleges run out of the funds in as little as two weeks, according to Lain DeSalvo, competitive grants manager at OHE. However, with the possibility of increased funding, DeSalvo said OHE hopes to award even more money to in-need institutions.

“We know that $40,000 [for a college] is not enough,” DeSalvo said. “Students are food insecure; some have experienced homelessness. … We know we can’t end poverty with $1,000 grants for students, but what we hope to improve on is … their ability to access resources.”

Workforce stabilization

Some students could be going to college for free under certain conditions, if lawmakers pass Walz’s proposed $35 million workforce stabilization grant.

The grant focuses on workers and students displaced by COVID-19, whose families make less than $50,000 per year, and would pay for their tuition if they enter into a college program that is “high-demand” or “high-vacancy” in the interest of teaching them a new skill set to enter into the post-pandemic world.

Sanford said that could include nurses, software developers and childcare workers.

The University’s free-tuition program would not require students to move into those high-demand programs.

Should the governor’s proposal pass, a task force made up of multiple state departments and higher education institutions will work to determine what those high-demand or high-vacancy programs are.

“COVID just exacerbated the need to get people trained into these fields,” said Nekey Oliver, OHE’s grants and government relations manager. “That’s what this program is trying to do.”

Lawmakers are currently debating the COVID-19 higher education recovery budget. The regular session of the Legislature ends in May, but last year’s session extended into November.

Two charter amendment proposals for structural change in the Minneapolis Police Department are vying for the city ballot come November — one led by the Minneapolis City Council and one led by community members.

Both amendments are proposing that MPD no longer have a required minimum number of officers and that MPD be absorbed into a city department centered around public safety. However, despite council efforts to involve the community, the multi-organization group Yes4Minneapolis is pushing forward a proposal they said will more accurately reflect the people of Minneapolis’ agenda for police reform.

The two amendments differ from each other slightly, and both could end up on the city’s ballot come November.

Campaign manager for Yes4Minneapolis Corenia Smith said the two amendments are not in conflict, but that the community-led amendment will “contain language” that speaks better for the people of the city, and that the group will continue to work alongside city council members. The difference seems to lie in whether or not law enforcement is its own division within a new public safety department.

Amendments can be proposed to the charter in three ways: by the Charter Commission, the City Council or citizen petition. The citizen petition path requires signatures from at least 5% of Minneapolis residents who voted in the last election.

While Yes4Minneapolis doesn’t yet have the nearly 12,000 necessary signatures, the group is actively campaigning for them this weekend and in the coming months.

The City Council-led amendment

Ward 3 City Council member Steve Fletcher, alongside Council members Phillipe Cunningham of Ward 4 and Jeremy Schroeder of Ward 11, introduced the amendment to the City Council Jan. 29.

“[The amendment] is a way for people to move in the direction of creating some structural change … that changes oversight, and that changes transparency for how we do public safety,” Fletcher said.

The “Transforming Public Safety Charter Amendment” would establish a “division of law enforcement” within a proposed Department of Public Safety “made up of sworn peace officers responsible for the core functions of law enforcement,” according to a press release from the city.

“[The Department of Public Safety] would have a variety of approaches to public safety so that might be where an Office of Violence Prevention would go, or some of the other non-police public safety work that we do in the city,” Fletcher said.

The amendment is a revision of a similar charter amendment that was introduced — and eventually blocked by the Charter Commission — last summer after then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd.

Cunningham said the new amendment was informed by more community input than last summer. He emphasized that the city will maintain “traditional law enforcement.”

“What we’re doing here is not some radical utopia. It’s a governmental restructuring in order to be able to meet the demands of our city of this present moment and the future,” Cunningham said. “We need to integrate various approaches to public safety, which includes but also goes beyond policing.”

The community-led amendment

Yes4Minneapolis — a coalition that includes Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block, who helped draft the city-led amendment — is introducing its own amendment on behalf of community members.

Instead of a subdivision for law enforcement under a Department of Public Safety, this amendment aims to create “a single department that employs employees of multiple skill sets including law enforcement,” Smith said in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

In order to push that change of language, Yes4Minneapolis is launching its own grassroots effort this coming weekend.

“There was a lot of pushback this summer about the process that was led by the Council not including enough community voice in the formation,” said Sheila Nezhad, a policy organizer for Reclaim the Block and Minneapolis mayoral candidate.

Smith said because the council is limited by a tighter timeline for charter amendments, she hopes city officials will support the community-driven process and the work that comes out of it. Smith also said that the two amendments are not in conflict, and the group plans to continue collaboration with the City Council.

Nezhad said that it is ideal that there only be one of the two proposed amendments on the ballot. The group hopes it will be the citizen petition, as it does more than just consult with the community.

“What that really does is make sure that it’s the community leading to put this on the ballot,” Nezhad said. “It’s not just the City Council or the Charter Commission. It’s really for and by the people.”

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down university campuses nationwide, limiting services and programs across the system, advocacy for the University of Minnesota skyrocketed in 2020.

Compared to 2019, correspondence with lawmakers from UMN Advocates — a group composed of students, faculty, alums and others — nearly doubled. The number of new members increased by 137% and more than a third of advocates returned to lobby on behalf of the University for state funding.

These advocates support the University by asking, and sometimes testifying at the State Capitol, for financial investment from the state Legislature, said Mike Miller, University Legislative Advocacy Coordinator.

The process is not new, but Miller said this year’s approach was.

“You can present all the facts and figures. But if it doesn’t tug at their heart, they’re not gonna do anything,” Miller said. So instead of data, Miller and his team made sure to tell stories of “actual students experiencing actual consequences” of lack of University funding. This included sharing the impacts of issues like weak infrastructure, food insecurity and COVID-19.

Last October, the Legislature passed a $1.87 billion bonding bill, and $75 million of that bill went to the University of Minnesota — undercutting the school’s request by approximately $240 million. With pandemic-related shortfalls, the University’s state budget request this year is the lowest it has been in at least two decades.

While strategy and other advocates had their part to play, it is the current students that really helped drive up the numbers. “They answered the call completely,” Miller said.

Bri Sislo-Schutta, government and legislative affairs director for the Minnesota Student Association, said that MSA knew once the pandemic hit, any best-laid plans for student advocacy would no longer work.

Students, Sislo-Schutta said, needed more from the University, and therefore needed more from the Legislature.

“COVID-19 exacerbated a lot of already-existing needs on campus,” Sislo-Schutta said. “It’s created this increased engagement because we are having to really utilize a lot of services that our institutions provide for us. I think students have an even deeper reason now to kind of be engaged in that work.”

Even though they did not experience the pandemic as students, alums still remained passionate about advocacy in 2020, said Alumni Advocacy Director Adam Yust.

“Alumni are building long-term relationships with their legislators on behalf of the University to be great advocates,” he said. “They deeply care about the University, and they want their degree to mean something.”

Though he graduated from the University last spring, alum Jude Goossens, who is now working as a medical technologist, still keeps close ties to his student advocacy roots in MSA and more, and plans to do so no matter where life takes him.

“I have fond memories of the University, and will always speak highly of it and the need for its role in the state,” Goosens said. “Whether in a coffee shop in California, or the state Capitol in Minnesota … I will definitely be supportive of the University.”

At the end of the day, Sislo-Schutta said the advocacy work is not so much about a campus or a system, but about the students themselves.

“I’m an advocate for the University, but from a student’s perspective,” Sislo-Schutta said. “I will always put student interests above everything else.”

As the legislative session starts gaining steam, the Regent Candidate Advisory Council (RCAC) is narrowing the playing field for the upcoming University of Minnesota regent elections.

The RCAC recommended 12 candidates to the Minnesota Legislature as lawmakers consider who will become the next regents of the University. But some also criticize RCAC’s lack of candidate diversity and role in the election process.

Four regent seats are up for election this year from the 1st, 4th, 6th and 7th Congressional Districts. Incumbent regents Michael Hsu and Randy Simonson are up for reelection, while regents Richard Beeson and Thomas Anderson have not reapplied to their seats.

Dan Wolter, chair of the RCAC, said the regent election process is one of the only times that both the state’s House of Representatives and Senate come together as a single body to vote.

“[The University of Minnesota] has a pretty central role in the state,” Wolter said. “It shows you how important it is to the state of Minnesota.”

The RCAC received 20 applications, and interviewed 19 total after one applicant dropped out.

RCAC continues to focus on diversity as lawmakers and others have pushed for a more representative Board of Regents. This year, the council recommended four women and eight men. Four of the men are people of color, including Brandon Alkire, who could become the first Native American regent in the University’s 200 year history.

“[Native Americans] are one of the biggest landholders in our state,” said Alkire, director of Justice for Families, a program within the Hennepin County court system. “To be a land holder … with 11 different jurisdictions and 11 different governments, to not have a voice on the Board of Regents is a real miscarriage of justice.”

Alkire graduated last year as a nontraditional student from the Mitchell Hamline School of Law after receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University. While his law school graduation was “anticlimactic,” he stressed the importance of bringing the perspective of a student during the pandemic, much like his rival fourth-district candidate, James Farnsworth.

When Farnsworth is not fulfilling his role as director of the Highland Business Association, running for St. Paul School Board or involved in one of many campus groups, he studies human resource development on the University’s Twin Cities campus.

He said that it is vital to have a student perspective, especially on things like tuition and education quality during COVID-19.

“So much has changed about what it means to be a student right now,” Farnsworth said. “It’s a really key time to have the perspective of a student on the receiving end of that education.”

Kodi Verhalen, a lawyer and engineer from the sixth congressional district, said she is excited for the Board of Regents possibly having equal numbers of male and female regents.

But, she said there could always be more women.

“I would love to see more women putting themselves forward for this [position]. I know a lot of really amazing women in Minnesota who bring unique perspectives to positions like this,” Verhalen said. “I hope that they see this as an opportunity to start.”

Besides the historic lack of diversity, lawmakers and current regents have made their critiques for the RCAC well-known.

Currently, the Legislature can pick candidates that are not recommended by RCAC. Sen. Greg Clausen, DFL-Apple Valley, is urging the RCAC to remove this option.

“The RCAC goes through great lengths in recruiting, interviewing and recommending candidates,” Clausen said. “In many ways, it may discourage people from applying. How would you like to apply, go through the process of interviewing, and all of a sudden someone that you’ve never heard of gets nominated from the floor and elected?”

Current Regent Darrin Rosha has long been a staunch critic of the RCAC process. He called the council an “insider’s club,” and said that it has strayed from its original purpose.

“It was, in theory, established to provide good honest attempts at recruiting and recommending regents to the Legislature,” Rosha said. “Now, the authority or the power of RCAC is not recommending candidates, but in excluding candidates that the insiders don’t feel are their preferred candidates.”

Wolter, chair of RCAC, does not disagree with Rosha’s critiques, and said that the “insider’s club” attitude and issues of preference made it difficult in years past to present diverse candidates to the legislature.

However, he said he is confident that this year is not a reflection of that past.

“We’ve worked hard to correct that, by recommending a fuller, more diverse slate of candidates rather than just a short list of those popular with U of M insiders,” Wolter said. “The change is both notable and good for the entire process.”

The Minneapolis City Council had the eyes of the nation on their Wednesday night meeting when they voted to adopt the finalized 2021 city budget. While police reform was the hottest topic of the night, a variety of budget amendments will have a significant impact on University of Minnesota neighborhoods.

Mental health response teams and neighborhood funding were important items in the budget for the University area leading up to the contentious budget adoption. Council members representing University neighborhoods also spearheaded several significant amendments, including funding for renter’s associations and an opioid crisis clinic.

In an interview with the Minnesota Daily, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that despite clashes with the city council over issues of police reform, he plans to sign off on the budget on Monday morning.

Mental Health Response Team

A proposal for a pilot program of a mental health response team was a keystone amendment brought forth to the city by several Council members, including Steve Fletcher of Ward 3, as part of the “Safety for All” budget plan.

Nearly $8 million was cut from the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) budget to help fund the program’s pilot, on top of the $14 million in cuts to the MPD budget that Frey initially proposed.

Minneapolis will now join a growing list of cities opting for mental health professionals, instead of police officers, to respond to nonviolent mental health crisis calls.

“It’s really exciting because that feels like one of the things that we’re ready to implement this year that can actually produce a better and safer outcome for our residents,” Fletcher said.

Mohamed Ibrahim, deputy executive director of the Minnesota chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said this was one of the most important items to the communities CAIR serves.

“You’re creating capacity for police officers to do other things that they need to be doing,” Ibrahim said. “They have no business when it comes to responding to the health crisis calls. We need to create more accountability.”

Other amendments passed by Council members

Ward 6 Council member Jamal Osman pushed several amendments that passed in the 2021 budget, which include more funding for renter’s rights advocacy, homeownership training, opioid addiction crisis resources and employment opportunities for those in Ward 6 neighborhoods, including Cedar-Riverside.

“Our community needs a very different, specific strategy to make sure that programs work for the community,” Osman said. “There’s a lot of barriers for immigrant communities.”

Thanks to a budget amendment led by Osman, the Opioid Peer Recovery project, piloted by the city, will now operate out of Firehouse 7 on Franklin Avenue East in the Seward neighborhood to better serve the immigrant communities most affected by the opioid crisis in that area.

Another amendment allocated $50,000 for the Cedar-Riverside Opportunity Center to help with employment resources for those in the Cedar-Riverside community, plus $95,000 to support East African homeownership and education.

Weighing equity and cuts for neighborhoods

Neighborhood associations saw significant funding changes with the 2021 budget and the Neighborhoods 2020 initiative, and some neighborhood programs were cut out from the budget altogether.

Ward 2 Council member Cam Gordon helped push an amendment that increased the base funding for neighborhood organizations in 2021 to $25,000.

Alongside the base funding, equitable engagement funds will be awarded to organizations in an effort to support historically underrepresented communities.

The allocations are based on multiple factors within that neighborhood — including poverty levels and gentrification — based on an analysis by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban & Regional Affairs.

However, despite the base funding, neighborhood organizations anticipate significant change as a result of the cuts. Jessica Focht-Perlberg, executive director of Southeast Como Improvement Association, said it’s still unclear how the funds will be distributed or how they can be used.

“On one hand, there seems to be positive momentum forward in terms of people in the neighborhood understanding the critical importance of the equity work … and new folks involved in the conversation, and that’s great,” Focht-Perlberg said. “But then we also are just looking at the reality of [less] resources … ”

The fate of other programs throughout the city is also unclear, including Cedar Riverside’s Youth Program, a part of the city’s Youth Coordinating Board. The program in Cedar-Riverside aims to provide East African mentors for a mostly East African population to help combat things like youth crime, homelesnness and the opioid crisis by providing mentors that can relate to the youth of the community.

City funds will no longer keep the youth program running after July 2021, which leaves organizers like LaToya Balogun to find new ways to support it. This could come in the form of grants and donations, which Balogun said is typically thanks to community support.

“We’ve had the community speak up [for us,]” Balogun said. “Community has really been able to coalesce around the work of the outreach team and speak up and push on policies for our community.”

Use of facial recognition technology is on the rise in the United States, and so are attempts to ban it. Ward 3 Council member Steve Fletcher, who represents Marcy-Holmes and other neighborhoods, wants to stop that use in Minneapolis before it can begin.

While the ordinance to ban this technology is still in its drafting stages, Fletcher is working alongside the city council, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Minnesota, the Minneapolis city attorney and technology experts. Cities like Portland, Boston and New York City already banned facial recognition technology in recent months after increased use to identify protesters during social justice demonstrations.

Studies have shown the technology to be largely inaccurate and racially biased.

“There are good reasons to think twice about how much information we give out for free about ourselves,” Fletcher said. “Privacy is going to be a very interesting conversation over the next several decades, as technology creates the ability for us to collapse privacy entirely, and let corporations and governments know everything about you.”

The ordinance likely will not be passed until January, though Fletcher is currently going through a second round of community engagement with the ordinance while drafting it.

According to a report by Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading California-based data privacy nonprofit, facial recognition technology is meant to do three things: identify an unknown person, verify the identity of a known person and find specific people in public places who are already wanted by law enforcement.

However, this technology has come under significant fire for its inaccuracy over the years, especially when it comes to identifying people of color, women and children.

Emun Solomon, a University of Minnesota alum who works as a data scientist and product manager at Snapchat, attended a virtual town hall last month alongside Fletcher, community members and the national ACLU, where the groups discussed the damage this kind of technology has on a community.

“The technology is racist on two levels,” Solomon said. “It’s about an algorithm, an automated math problem, made by a skewed group of engineers.” And it is that first problem, Solomon said, that contributes to the second — technology does not represent or account accurately for the actual population.

A 2018 study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft found that darker-skinned BIPOC women are nearly 35% more likely to be misidentified by facial recognition technology than lighter-skinned white men.

Munira Mohamed, a policy associate at the ACLU Minnesota, said one of the key issues with the technology is that it appears to only benefit one part of the population.

“It begins with the people making this technology … which is disproportionately white men. So they’ve made a technology that works for them,” Mohamed said. “And disregards communities of color.”

According to Solomon, many of these facial recognition softwares are trained with mugshots of homeless individuals who are paid to participate in trainings, which could increase the technology’s error rate and feed stereotypes.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department is still authorized to use facial recognition technology, a fact made public by local journalist and data privacy advocate Tony Webster in 2016.

Fletcher also introduced data privacy principles before the city council in February and sees this ban as an extension of that. While Fletcher added that facial recognition technology is all around us, like in our smartphones and other security systems, this ordinance would ban city government from its use — including the Minneapolis Police Department.

His next step is to extend the ban to things like security cameras in stadiums and other large public spaces.

“This has a lot of potential to really get really invasive in people’s lives and track too much data that we’re not consenting to,” Fletcher said.

Famous for its early snows and freezing winters, the University of Minnesota’s Duluth campus would not cancel classes due to classrooms being uncomfortably hot — or so one might think.

But for A.B. Anderson Hall, it is a regular occurrence thanks to outdated air control systems. The building is one of the many projects the University system hopes to fix with more than $75 million in state funding.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the bonding bill was pushed past the regular legislative session. After seven months and five special sessions, the University received $75 million from a $1.87 billion bonding bill passed by lawmakers on Oct. 15.

The funds will go to various projects across University campuses, including $38.5 million for asset repair and maintenance across the University system, $29.2 million to replace the Child Development Building, $3.3 million to renovate the Chemistry Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory on the Twin Cities campus and $4.4 million to renovate A.B. Anderson Hall on the Duluth campus.

“We’re very excited and very thankful,” said University of Minnesota Duluth spokesperson Lynne Williams after the Duluth campus received the full amount of funding to renovate A.B. Anderson Hall. It is a project that has been on the books for several years.

The bonding bill does not include funding for a clinical research facility, which was a part of the original $317.2 million request. However, the legislation gave permission for the University to refinance current debt to help fund this project.

University President Joan Gabel, alongside students from the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses, testified for the capital request in her first legislative session back in February of this year, stating that “Our University is committed to serving the state of Minnesota at top-notch levels. But to do so, we need top-notch facilities that match the ambitions of the University and those of our students … ”

Sen. Kari Dziedzic, DFL-Minneapolis, pointed out that allocations in the bill for things like rapid transit and low-income housing will benefit students at the University.

“I don’t think that in the past, the U has gotten their fair share,” Dziedzic said, though she added that this year’s bill was much more fair to the University’s ask.

In 2019 and 2016, the state denied the University system any funding. This past February, some legislative members expressed concerns about lack of transparency from past University administration regarding state funds.

For Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, that concern of transparency still remains. “Those things [like transparency] are still important to us,” he said. “They will matter again when COVID settles down, but right now, everything is all COVID all the time.”

Following the bill’s recent approval, Gabel emphasized the importance of job creation in a University press release, stating that the University is a vital part of Minnesota’s COVID-19 prevention and economic revival — something the provided funds will help spearhead.

Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, agrees and said that funds for the chemistry lab and the child development buildings are all part of the University contributing to the state: “That science and research is really important to our physical health and our economic health.”