Lake of the Woods has a well-deserved reputation for producing big pike through the ice as winter gives way to spring, but after nearly three hours of tip-up fishing without a flag, Alan Peterson could have been excused for wondering if this was going to be one of those days.

Instead, he drilled more holes in 5 to 10 feet of water, hoping the small moves eventually would put the bait in front of a fish and serve up the opportunity to yell “Flag!” — the tell-tale cry that a toothy critter had found the bait to its liking.

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of late-winter tip-up fishing, which is as much a social occasion as an exercise in trying to catch a fish. And on this perfect Sunday morning that teased of approaching spring — complete with the first swan sighting of the season — catching a pike or two would be a bonus.

There’d be time for coffee, venison sticks and conversation as we waited.

“I would consider good tip-up fishing to be 15 legitimate flags,” said Peterson, of Warroad. “I commit to five hours, so if I go for five hours and I get between 12 and 15 flags, I consider that to be pretty good.

“If you get more than that, it’s a treat. And if you get a 40-inch pike, that’s what you came out for.”

About the tip-up

Alan Peterson of Warroad, Minn., unwinds a hand-tied northern pike rig Sunday, March 9, 2025, while setting up for a few hours of tip-up fishing on Lake of the Woods. (Brad Dokken / Grand Forks Herald)

tip-up, for the uninitiated, is a fishing device with a flag that “tips up” to signal a strike. Old-school tip-ups usually consist of a submerged spool that attaches to a frame that is set over the hole in the ice, with a flag that clips on the spool to keep the bait at a set depth.

When a fish hits and pulls on the line, the spool turns and triggers the flag to “tip up,” signaling a strike; the angler then fights the fish using a hand-over-hand technique. Newer tip-ups integrate rods and reels into the design, allowing anglers more flexibility in playing the fish.

Peterson uses some of each tip-up style. Either way, every time a flag flies, the fish at the end of the line could be something special.

No wonder, then, that Peterson is on Lake of the Woods chasing pike at every opportunity once March rolls around.

“That’s one of the beautiful things about tip-up fishing,” he said. “You can go five hours (without a flag), and then your last hour, it can be so good. You can have 10 flags, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘we can’t leave right now.’ ”

Home to the outdoors

A 2013 graduate of Warroad High School, Peterson, 30, has an office job at Marvin, the window and door manufacturer in Warroad. After spending five years working at the Marvin facility in Fargo and attending Minnesota State University Moorhead, he had an opportunity to come home about a year and a half ago.

Peterson, his girlfriend Mandy, and their black Lab Gracie, have a house on 15 acres just a hop and a skip from Lake of the Woods. Before living in Fargo, he spent four years at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The original plan was to become a chiropractor, Peterson says, but it didn’t work out “so I gave it up for an opportunity in Alaska.”

He worked as a fishing guide in southeast Alaska for the 2018 guide season.

The opportunity to move home to Warroad wasn’t something he expected, Peterson says, but living back in northern Minnesota has been a perfect fit with his outdoors lifestyle.

“I’m spoiled,” he said. “I’m spoiled living up here. If I want to go catch walleyes after work, I just throw my kicker boat in and I go.”

Peterson didn’t do much ice fishing for walleyes and saugers growing up, but he caught the pike fishing bug at an early age.

“I love pike fishing,” he said. “I would just look forward to spring so I could tip-up fish late in the year, and then when the water would open, I’d fish pike right in front of the Warroad River for three weeks.

“I’ve always been bit by pike fishing; it’s one of my favorite things to do.”

New YouTube channel

Earlier this year, Peterson launched a YouTube channel he dubbed “North of Highway 2,” in which he shares stories and snapshots of life in northern Minnesota. Fishing content factors into the mix, of course, but the channel also includes thrift store trips, cooking, skiing and other outdoor recreation and three- to four-minute “Walk and Talk Wednesday” segments, in which Peterson and his black Lab, Gracie, stroll down the driveway while he talks about various aspects of northern life.

Gardening will be among the video segments on tap for this summer, Peterson says. To date, the channel has about 170 subscribers, and clips have drawn anywhere from about 100 views to more than 9,000 views for a video in which Peterson documents whiteout conditions on Lake of the Woods.

The whole point of the channel, Peterson says, was to spend less time consuming content and more time getting out there to create content. Despite being a relative YouTube newcomer, Peterson’s videos are entertaining, well-produced and informative. He definitely knows his way around his camera and editing software.

“My whole point in making the channel wasn’t to get a bunch of followers and views,” he said. “I’ve always wanted an excuse to buy a GoPro, so I bought a GoPro and just started doing it.”

Creating videos also is “pretty time intensive,” Peterson says.

“One video a week is a big ask, but it’s fun,” he said. “It’s a way to disconnect from work, too, and I enjoy it. My dog likes it, too, because I’m outside more.”

Going forward, Peterson says he plans to scale back his “Walk and Talk Wednesday” segments to every other week.

“One thing I told myself when I started this was I was not going to burn myself out,” he said. “I’m doing this just because I want to have fun, and I want to make videos and document (life in northern Minnesota). If it starts to be like a job and it’s consuming all my time, I’m going to tone it back a little bit.”

On the ice

Typically, Peterson says, tip-up fishing gets better as temperatures rise and days grow longer, triggering the instinct for pike to stage near the mouths of streams and shallow bays to spawn.

So far, he says, the best pike fishing has been in the morning, but that wasn’t the case on this day. It was high noon when the first flag popped, “which completely contradicts my theory,” Peterson said.

The fish that tripped the first flag appeared to be a decent pike, but it spit the bait before Peterson could get it to the hole.

“Hopefully, that’s a good sign,” he said. “We’ve stuck it out all morning. I think we’re due for a few more flags.”

He was right; the next flag popped half an hour later. Peterson picked up the rod, set the hook and the battle was on.

“It’s big,” Peterson said as the rod bent toward the hole. “All I know is it’s big.”

Then it appeared at the top of the hole, a huge toothy head followed some 3 feet of feisty flopping northern pike.

It was easily his biggest of the winter so far, he said. Big pike have a completely different look than smaller members of the species, and this fish was strikingly beautiful.

“This is a huge pike,” Peterson said, admiring the fish. “Oh, my gosh.”

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He’d left his tape measure at home, but there was enough pike extending beyond his 34½-inch ice fishing rod to safely say the fish was at least 40 inches long. A few quick photos, and Peterson released the pike to hopefully make someone else’s day.

The temperature had risen past 40 degrees when we decided to reel up the lines a short time later and call it a few hours well-spent. By nature’s calendar, the best pike fishing of the season was yet to come, providing the ice holds up; pike season is continuous on Lake of the Woods.

After that, it will be time for spring sturgeon fishing on the Rainy River, open-water pike fishing, the Minnesota walleye opener, lake trout fishing in Ontario, spring hunts for morel mushrooms and a garden to plant.

So much to do and — for Peterson — so close by.

“I love the variety,” he said. “New activities just happen all the time.”

That’s life “North of Highway 2.”

The way ice skating instruction at Aldrich Arena in Maplewood was supposed to work in the mid-1980s was that kids would take a group lesson based on their skill level and then, built into the class length, they’d have a half hour or so for independent practice on the ice.

Four-year-old Deneane Richburg didn’t quite grasp the “half hour or so” part.

“It felt so much fun to just ride the wave of momentum,” she said. “My mom had a hard time getting me off the ice.”

Later, when she began participating in figure skating competitions, elementary school-aged Richburg didn’t quite grasp the “competition” part. If she scored near the bottom, she didn’t mind.

“I just liked throwing my body in the air,” she said, laughing. “The idea of placing was at the back of my mind. I was just like, ‘Ooh, I get to go out there and perform and put on makeup — and try my own choreography,’ which I’m sure my coach was thrilled about.”

But eventually, as Richburg got older and her skills became more advanced, she’d nail her routines and still regularly score last or second-to-last. As a child, she said, she didn’t quite catch the signs — “I just wanted to skate,” she said; “I didn’t necessarily intend to be like, ‘I am this Black child!’” — but the pattern soon became clear.

“Racism, I hate to say it,” Richburg said. “After they started to see I wasn’t going anywhere — I kept competing and continued to progress — it got to a point where it became obvious that I would score really low and have done all the things nicely. So, begrudgingly. Eventually I started to place and score in a way that was commensurate with how I performed, but it took a while.”

But what would it look like for the ice — both a literally and figuratively white space — to uplift Black performers and identities?

That question is at the core of Brownbody, a St. Paul-based skating artistry organization Richburg founded in 2007.

Richburg initially founded Brownbody in the model of a dance company, with a network of performers and its own repertory, mostly works choreographed by Richburg that blend Black history and cultural thought. In recent years, the organization has been most active through its Learn to Skate program, which offers free or low-cost skating lessons predominantly in St. Paul.

The next Learn to Skate session begins in the fall, and Brownbody is holding a community skate party at 11:30 a.m. March 22 at the Charles M. Schultz-Highland Arena (800 S. Snelling Ave.). Participation — and skate and helmet rental — is free. More info is at brownbody.org/learn-to-skate/.

Brownbody also partners with community organizations to bring Learn to Skate lessons to ice rinks around the metro. During the Winter Carnival, the organization hosts skating classes at Springboard for the Arts in Frogtown, and they’ve previously held community lessons and performances in Hopkins and Brooklyn Park.

“We really focus on creating an environment that makes skating safe and fun for (Black) communities, because it’s not a sport that always has been,” said Karyn Wilson, Brownbody’s Learn to Skate director and also the organization’s administration and operations coordinator. “And for that reason, a lot of people miss out on learning how to do it.”

Skating instructor Karyn Wilson, in background, monitors a student during a lesson on Dec. 18, 2021, at the TRIA Rink in downtown St. Paul. Wilson, the administration and operations coordinator for skating arts nonprofit Brownbody and a former competitive synchronized figure skater, runs the organization’s Learn to Skate program. (Alice Gebura / Brownbody)

Creating a community-focused environment that welcomes skaters of all ability levels, rather than just catering to children in the competitive figure skating pipeline, reflects Wilson’s own background in skating, too: She grew up in Washington, D.C., and briefly took skating lessons as a child but didn’t connect with it until returning to the sport as a high schooler.

And rather than entering the competition circuit, as Richburg had, Wilson joined synchronized skating teams, including at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After college, Wilson returned home to D.C., but moved to St. Paul in 2021 specifically to work with Richburg at Brownbody.

“I don’t expect that all my students are going to want to become competitive figure skaters, but now they know it’s an option if they want to do it,” Wilson said. “So just being able to open up the skating world to people in that way — if you don’t know how to skate, none of those options would be available to you.”

‘Reclaiming the ice’

In the early 2000s, about two decades into Richburg’s competitive skating career, she injured her right knee and could no longer land complex jumps.

So while studying contemporary African-American literature at Carleton College and later in a master’s program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she adapted her ice skills to dance theater, and trained with local arts leaders including Toni Pierce-Sands at TU Dance, Lou Bellamy at Penumbra and Dipankar Mukherjee at Pangea World Theater. Later, as an MFA student in dance and choreography at Temple University in Philadelphia, she studied techniques created by Kariamu Welsh, a renowned scholar and practitioner of African and African-diaspora dance.

Richburg’s work with Brownbody brings all these influences together.

Rohene Ward, Chrissy Lipscomb, Devinai Hobbs, Simeon Hanks and Deneane Richburg in a 2015 performance of “Quiet As It’s Kept.” (Jon Dahlin/Brownbody)

One piece, “Living Past (Re)Memory,” is based on the novel “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison. Another, 2017’s “Quiet As It’s Kept,” aims to draw parallels between post-Civil War Reconstruction era and modern racial justice efforts, with music co-created and performed by local singer Thomasina Petrus. One of Brownbody’s earliest productions, which Richburg initially choreographed and performed as her master’s thesis at Temple University, focused on Saartjie Baartman, a southern African woman who, in the early 1800s, was exhibited in England and France as a hypersexualized “freak show”-style attraction and whose story, in recent decades, has become important to contemporary Black feminist scholarship.

“To be able to bring her story onto the ice was really important, because I felt that I was reclaiming the ice as a place for really nuanced and honest discussion and affirmation of Blackness, which it had not been and, still, for the most part, is not,” Richburg said.

Thinking of Blackness not just as a racial identity but also as an embodied practice is central to Richburg and Wilson’s vision for skating education, both said. Following a dance style called Umfundalai, developed by Welsh, the Learn to Skate curriculum incorporates African and African-diasporic movement techniques. And in Brownbody’s apprentice program — which consists of skilled skaters, instructors and older students who have advanced out of the Learn to Skate curriculum — Richburg is focusing on West African dance styles like Manjani and Lamban.

The Black skating community in the U.S. is already somewhat small, Richburg said, and the skaters who are trained in the specific style of dance performance Brownbody’s work calls for are scattered around the country. Bringing them together to stage a full company show is quite expensive and requires more than a year of planning and rehearsal residencies, Richburg said. She is currently planning to stage the company’s next major show during the 2026–2027 season.

An eventual goal of hers, through the Learn to Skate and apprenticeship programs, would be to build up the community of local Black skaters who have the skills to perform Brownbody’s repertory. But for any style of skating, achieving a high level of proficiency requires dedicated, usually one-on-one coaching on up to a daily basis, which Richburg said Brownbody does not currently have the resources to provide.

What Brownbody can accomplish now, though, is to create opportunities for self-expression on the ice. Richburg said she frequently thinks back to a post-class survey comment from a parent who said her young daughter doesn’t conceive of skating as a predominantly white sport because she was introduced to it by Brownbody. Rather than seeing herself first as a Black girl in a white world, Richburg said, she can get to know herself as a full human being.

“For that to be her first point of contact, where blackness is normalized and is the standard, is going to shift her perception of herself as not being an anomaly, not being a counter-discourse, but being centered,” Richburg said. “And what that does to a person’s self-esteem, one’s concept of oneself, is huge.”

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After opening 128 units of affordable housing in St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood, developers Mike Hudson and Willy Boulay followed that up by moving in. The co-founders of Broadway Street Development now keep their offices at the Balsam on Broadway, a six-story, $70 million residential building that welcomed its first tenants in December.

Built to replace a one-story commercial-industrial building, downtown St. Paul’s latest residences are located at 540 Broadway St., just across Interstate 35E from Regions Hospital and north of Interstate 94 and CHS Field, an area better known for surface parking lots, government office buildings and industrial warehouses than chic living quarters.

That didn’t phase Broadway Street Development, which embraced the opportunity to install as much style as substance into a transit-connected structure with plenty of local flair and a wide range of rents. Those rents range from 30% percent area median income up to 80% AMI, rare breadth in an affordable housing industry that often leases out new construction at 60% AMI.

“We love downtown St. Paul. I live in St. Paul,” said Hudson, whose previous projects have included the Canvas Apartments, which opened last year in northeast Minneapolis.

Balsam on Broadway ranges from a single studio apartment to three-bedroom luxury units offering two bathrooms, balconies, in-unit washers and dryers and kitchen islands. Five units reserved for high-priority homeless placements receive support services from Simpson Housing Services.

Balsam on Broadway consists of 21 one-bedroom, 56 two-bedroom, 50 three-bedroom units and a single studio apartment.

It breaks down this way:

• 20% of the units are priced to be affordable to households earning 30% of area median income, with rents from $610 to $890 per month.

• 50% of units are targeted to households earning 60% AMI, with rents from $1,350-$1,860 per month.

• 30% of units are targeted to households earning 80% AMI, with rents from $1,500 to $2,500 per month.

Art by St. Paul-based muralists — including Hmong and Somali artists who invoke their heritage in paint — drapes the building’s ground-level lobby and greets elevator riders at each floor, a far cry from the generic pastels common to new housing developments. A sizable wall mural on the second floor, for instance, depicts the exterior of Lowertown’s original Red’s Savoy Pizza, which closed in 2017. Tricia Heuring, a consultant with Public Functionary of northeast Minneapolis, said she took pains to make sure artists lived or worked in St. Paul.

A grand opening ceremony was held on Thursday, March 13. 2025 for the Balsam on Broadway, 128 units of affordable housing in a new six-story residential building at 540 Broadway St. in Lowertown St. Paul.(Frederick Melo / Pioneer Press)

Burlesque of North America, a St. Paul-based graphic design firm that got its start in graffiti art, showcases its art collection in the sixth-floor club room, next to the roof deck. Back on the ground level, a children’s play area is fashioned like an indoor playground with an elaborate slide and climbing structure. An electronic screen displays the latest Metro Transit schedule in real-time.

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Cheaper units went fastest

Housing demand at the Balsam on Broadway had been brisk, until it wasn’t. Half the units were pre-leased at 30% and 60% of area median income and fully occupied between a Dec. 20 opening and Jan. 1, according to the developers. Boulay noted the Balsam on Broadway has drawn nurses who work at Regions Hospital and other downtown employees.

Now comes the tougher part — filling sizable units priced at 80% of area median income at a time when interest in luxury housing in St. Paul has slowed.

“They’re still moving,” Hudson said. “It’s a little closer to market rate, so it takes a little longer.”

At 1,275 square feet, a three-bedroom, two-bath luxury unit rents for $2,500 per month, and yes, that’s technically considered affordable housing for a family earning 80% of area median income, which was a household income of about $98,000 for a family of four last year. A one-bedroom, one-bath unit at 80% AMI rents for $1,500.

Additional amenities include a fitness center, in-unit washers and dryers, bike parking, pet spa and 5,200 square feet of office space that serves as Broadway Street Development’s new headquarters. The development, which has a solar array, is in the certification process to become a LEED Silver building and the developers hope to eventually obtain LEED Gold status.

A grand opening ceremony on Thursday morning drew St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who chairs the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority, and both delivered congratulatory remarks.

The $70 million development required an elaborate layer cake of financing to become a reality, including backing from the city of St. Paul, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development and Ramsey County. Additional financing partners included Ready Capital, US Bank, the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund and Colliers Securities. Development partners included LS Black Constructors, Tushie Montgomery Architects, Loucks, Inc., ERA Structural Engineering and the engineering firm Emanuelson-Podas, Inc.

It’s no secret that downtown St. Paul has lost some major retailers and office employers like Cray Supercomputers and TKDA Engineering over the years, leading to the virtual implosion of commercial buildings like Alliance Bank Center, which asked all its lease holders to move after nearly losing its utilities this past week.

Other housing projects in the works

Housing has been a brighter spot for downtown, despite high interest rates and opposition within the industry to the city’s voter-backed rent control ordinance.

Indianapolis-based developers Flaherty and Collins were recently awarded tentative developer status to move forward with 300 units of housing and additional commercial space in two buildings to be constructed on either side of the Green Line’s downtown Central Station off Fifth and Cedar Streets. The goal is to have a land purchase agreement in place with the city of St. Paul and the Metropolitan Council for a 20-story apartment tower and a six-story building by the end of 2026 and begin construction soon after.

Around the corner at 4th and Wabasha Street, PAK Properties is closing on the purchase of the historic Commerce Building, which spans 100 affordable units. Property owner CommonBond Communities had been unable to keep up with costs, and the purchase agreement was contingent on $1.22 million in debt forgiveness from the city, which the city council approved on Wednesday.

The sale of the Commerce Building, a former 1912 office tower, will result in the partial immediate repayment of municipal loans that would have otherwise come due to the city in 2037 and 2041, thereby freeing up more money for affordable housing development in the near future.

Just blocks away, PAK Properties is seeking financing for an office-to-residential conversion of the Hamm Building on St. Peter Street, with the goal of keeping the first floor and lower levels of the building unchanged, including the retail, restaurant and theater spaces, while adding 129 residential units on the upper floors.

Developer Carl Kaeding and the Kaeding Development Group are adding 174 high-end apartments to Stella, a former Ecolab tower on Wabasha Street, including multiple two-story penthouses. The historically-sensitive redevelopment of the 1970s-era office tower into housing will include 2,300 square feet of public-facing retail on the main floor.

Chris Sherman and Sherman Associates are weeks away from moving the first residents into the converted Landmark Tower on St. Peter Street, which has undergone its own transformation from an office tower into 187 units of residential housing.

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On a snowy morning this winter, parents and students at Dayton’s Bluff Elementary in St. Paul sat down with donuts and coffee for their monthly meeting with the principal.

Among budget discussions and questions, the parents began to share ideas to help with art projects at the school, which doesn’t have an art teacher.

Holding her son, Stephen, 2, Benita Fondren asks questions during a parents meeting with the principal and staff at Dayton’s Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary school in St. Paul on Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

If enrollment numbers continue to grow and Dayton’s Bluff has three classes at each grade level, the school can hire one, Principal Amanda Musachio told the group. That would take about 80 more enrollees, Musachio said at the time.

It’s a possibility. Since last school year, the school has enrolled 30 more students than the year before – going from 271 to 301.

Dayton’s Bluff is one of six schools in St. Paul Public Schools taking part in a multi-year district campaign to increase enrollment that includes extensive marketing efforts and reexamining how schools connect with families.

Traditional school districts like SPPS are just starting to become more focused on enrollment, said Nick LeRoy, chief enrollment officer and head of marketing with SchoolMint, a Louisiana-based company which specializes in helping districts improve enrollment and which has been working with the district on the campaign.

“And, to be honest with you, there’s a little bit of a resistance that traditional public schools feel … they don’t want to have to market their school. … But that’s kind of how education is morphing, into more of that, I hate to say a free market sort of environment, but let’s say one word — choice, and parental choice is really important,” LeRoy said.

Choices

During the morning meeting at Dayton’s Bluff with the principal, St. Paul resident Rachel Tolo visited with her 5-year-old daughter, Sophie, as she weighed her education choices.

Tolo had attended another open house in the district beforehand and was interested in several other schools, including one with a language immersion program. While some schools she was considering were further from her home, she said she was interested because of what she read about Dayton’s Bluff online.

Tolo also has considered non-public schools, in part because they offer schedules with half days or other options, she said.

“So cost is one, distance is another. And then I would say, for me, something that is important to me is that she’s still really young and sending her off to school all day, every day, feels like a lot,” she said.

Kiearra Rivers, a parent, talks about her experience at Dayton’s Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary school in St. Paul on Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Despite a decade trend of loss, a bright spot

St. Paul’s enrollment work might be paying off. The district saw an increase — around 890 students — in enrollment for the 2024-25 school year compared to last, according to numbers recently released by the Minnesota Department of Education. The district, which counts enrollment differently from the state, reported a 527 student increase.

Enrollment is the primary driver of a school district’s budget, with nearly all revenue linked to enrollment, including state aid and local property taxes, according to SPPS.

While a one-year increase in enrollment does not equal a trend, it’s the first year in a decade the district has had higher enrollment than the year before, said district spokesperson Erica Wacker.

“…That is very exciting for the district, and we know that there’s still a lot of work to be done to attract families and to make sure that we have the education offerings that they want and deserve for their students,” Wacker said.

The change comes as the district works on its third phase of the $425,000 enrollment campaign, which comes from the district’s general fund. It’s unclear if the campaign will continue beyond phase three.

The share of St. Paul’s school-age children enrolled in district schools has been dropping over the last decade. As of the 2024-25 school year, around 55% of the more than 59,000 students attending St. Paul schools in-person or online are attending St. Paul Public Schools, a drop of around 8% since the 2015-16 school year.

The losses for the state’s second-largest district are largely due to competition from charter schools, as well as homeschooling and students picking private schools or neighboring districts through open enrollment.

Where else do students go?

St. Paul charter schools enroll the largest number of students after the St. Paul Public Schools district and have steadily grown in the last ten years.

In the 2024-25 school year, St. Paul charter schools, excluding online students, reported enrolling 16,537 students, or close to 31% of pre-kindergarten to 12th grade students enrolled in the city, according to data collected by the Minnesota Department of Education. With online students included, it was around 36% of students.

From the 2015-16 school year to the 2024-25 school year, the number of students enrolled in St. Paul charter schools in-person or online has increased by 6,374 students, according to the state.

The next largest share of St. Paul students outside of SPPS attend private schools or other school districts. The smallest number are homeschooled.

Because Minnesota has open enrollment, St. Paul residents also are able to enroll in other districts. In the last ten years, neighboring Roseville Area Schools and North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale School District have received the largest numbers of St. Paul students. The majority of non-resident students coming into SPPS have come from the North St. Paul-Maplewood Oakdale school district.

SPPS itself reports different enrollment numbers from the state for a few reasons. State numbers in this story are based on public schools with addresses listed in St. Paul in order to follow the same method used to find enrollment in other schools in the city. They should align closely with schools in the St. Paul Public School District, but some schools in the district actually list non-St. Paul addresses, according to the state. To see SPPS’s own enrollment reports, go to spps.org/about/departments/research-evaluation-assessment/data-center/school-district-data/enrollment.

Some students, such as some preschoolers, are funded with district money — rather than state funds — so they are not included in state enrollment numbers, but are included in SPPS numbers. This school year, SPPS reported 33,589 total students enrolled. Last year, it reported 33,062.

Enrollment and funding

With a total of $2.2 billion in new funding for the 2024-25 two-year budget, Minnesotan school districts saw a nearly 11% increase over the last state budget, the Pioneer Press reported in April. But despite the record funding, many school districts across the state still face budget shortfalls, including St. Paul.

The district’s 2024-25 budget included a $108 million deficit, in part due to federal pandemic aid expiring, inflation and declining enrollment. The district projects a shortfall of approximately $51 million in next year’s budget, which must be approved by the district Board of Education by the end of June.

More than 70% of metro-area school districts in Minnesota expected deficits last year, according to the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, and St. Paul had one of the largest.

State funding for the two-year budget gave a 4% increase to the per-student state funding formula in 2024-25 — tied to future inflation increases.

The total general fund expenditures per student pre-kindergarten to 12th grade for SPPS during the 2023-24 school year was $23,112. By comparison, the state average is $16,649 per pupil, according to the district.

As charter schools are public, state and federal governments help fund education in both charters and public school districts. However, charter schools receive less per pupil funding than traditional public schools, may not levy property taxes for funding and receive no funding from local property taxes, according to the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools.

General education revenue is the main source of operating funds for Minnesota’s public schools. In the 2023-24 school year, the state provided approximately 66.4% of the total costs of elementary and secondary education, according to a November school finance guide by the Minnesota House Research Department. Local revenue sources, which are primarily property taxes and services fees, such as those for athletics, made up approximately 27.2% of operating revenues. The federal government provided approximately 5.4% of public schools’ revenue.

The total adopted 2015-16 budget for the district was $697.8 million. In 2024-25, the total adopted budget was $1 billion.

Declines in per-pupil state aid have resulted in districts relying more heavily on local property tax levies to support budgets.

Local property taxes contribute to approximately 20% of SPPS’s annual revenue, according to the district. In December, the St. Paul school board approved a property tax levy for the 2025-26 school year in the amount of $220.8 million, a 7.92% increase and the maximum allowed.

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SPPS campaign to boost enrollment

Historically, the district has done annual marketing around school choice and enrollment periods, according to Wacker. Marketing has included an annual school choice fair, postcard mailings, school guide distribution, open houses and other events.

But, in fall 2022, a district enrollment committee began its campaign to stabilize enrollment. The committee included representatives from the school board, the teachers’ union, community members, as well as members of different district departments.

While phase one of the campaign took a district-wide approach to increasing enrollment, phase two focused on six schools selected by the district. Phase three continues previous social media efforts for six schools.

As part of the campaign, LeRoy acted as a “secret shopper,” to see how easy it is for a potential parent to find a school online, check out its offerings and book a tour. LeRoy then attended posing as a prospective parent. Principals of schools received feedback on the shopping experience and areas for improvement.

“So we did the secret shopper, met with the principal, did an evaluation on that, then we built a more enrollment-focused website for them that kind of talked about why you should choose this school. Schools are great, but oftentimes they’re not good at describing how good they are,” LeRoy said.

For Dayton’s Bluff, a feature that makes them stand out is their focus on the whole family, said Musachio. That includes having family feedback on curriculum and offering dental clinics, free household goods and adult classes at the school.

Marketing themselves is an area charter schools typically have more experience with. While many traditional urban public school districts are just beginning to recognize the need for marketing, those efforts have been a necessity for charter and private schools, LeRoy said.

“(Private schools) for the longest time, this is how they had to market themselves in order to get tuition-paying families,” LeRoy said. “Then the public charter schools — again, these are schools of choice, people have to actually choose them — and so they’re probably the next level in terms of sophistication around marketing and advertising.”

This year’s campaign for phase three targets enrollment at six schools: Riverview Spanish/English Dual Immersion Program, Cherokee Heights Elementary, Dayton’s Bluff, Highwood Hills Elementary, Chelsea Heights Elementary and Crossroads Elementary.

A student gets a hug from the blue dragon school mascot after receiving an award at Dayton’s Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary school in St. Paul on Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Factors outside of school options

SPPS looks at several types of data to predict its enrollment rate, including birth rates, charter school openings or closing and migration in or out of local neighborhoods, as well as historic enrollment trends, according to the district.

The district considers stabilized enrollment to be when decreases are at 1.5% or less.

In 2023, consultant and former state demographer Hazel Reinhardt presented to the Anoka-Hennepin school board, which oversees the largest district in the state, on the demographics that can impact enrollment.

According to Reinhardt, kindergarten classes in public schools have been smaller than pre-pandemic levels in part due to lower birth rates, housing mixes that yield fewer students and alternative schooling options.

Immigration from abroad also slowed, a factor Minnesota has been dependent on for its population in the last 25 years, Reinhardt said during the 2023 meeting. And, more young adults are moving out of the state, she said.

“So we have fewer and fewer students who are in St. Paul, paired with a larger and larger number of schools for them to choose from,” said SPPS board member Uriah Ward, who helped develop the campaign.

Statewide, Minnesota’s total public school enrollment peaked in 2020 and is in a period of slow decline, according to the state Legislature. At the same time, charter school enrollment is continuing to grow at a modest pace.

Lower birth rates and growing school choice initiatives, such as private school vouchers, are impacting schools across the country, LeRoy said.

“You’re seeing lots of chronic absenteeism as well, and so we’re kind of in an enrollment crisis, if you will,” LeRoy said.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total public elementary and secondary school enrollment is projected to be lower in fall 2031 than in fall 2022 nationally, primarily due to declines in the school-age population. Minnesota is projected to have a 2% enrollment drop in that time period compared to the national projected average drop of 5%.

The four Ps

At SPPS, the district has focused on the four Ps: Program, Principal, Place and Promotion. This means school programming, training principals to market their school and connect with families, making it easy for families to find information and locations for schools and how well the school is promoted.

“When we hear from families and we ask them what they’re looking for and what’s most important to them … the number one is curriculum,” Wacker said.

That’s followed by available transportation, school schedules and afterschool programs, Wacker said.

A consultant helped Dayton’s Bluff work on its marketing materials, such as including school start and end times on flyers and working with stakeholders to pinpoint the school’s strengths to market to families. Work also included making the enrollment process as seamless as possible online and at the school.

Now, the school focuses on enrollment all year, rather than only during enrollment periods, Musachio said.

An ongoing challenge with enrollment efforts is that families want consistency in curriculum and schools cannot always guarantee that, especially as enrollment fluctuates. Schools also do not always have staff specifically dedicated to enrollment or family engagement.

The campaign has, however, focused on how principals like Musachio play an important role in enrollment efforts.

“And the promotional stuff is great, and you need that, but you need to have the principal who’s really engaged and out there. You need to have the programming that families want. So, you can’t just put a flashy ad on Facebook and expect that to do it. You need to have the backbone in place to live up to what the ads are selling,” Wacker said.

Whether or not the enrollment campaign continues, schools can continue to use what they’ve learned from it, Musachio said.

“And so I think that the data that we have from that, the marketing materials that we have from that, the lessons we’ve learned from it, will still continue to help us, even though the official (campaign) is over,” Musachio said.

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