As a teachers strike looms over St. Paul Public Schools for the fourth time since 2018, district leadership on Tuesday said it is open to taking contract talks into arbitration to avoid a March 11 walk-out.

While the St. Paul Federation of Educators and the school district say there has been some progress in closed-door mediation sessions over the last month, they’re still working through major disagreements on pay and insurance.

District human resources chief Pat Pratt-Cook told reporters at a Tuesday news conference that the district hopes to settle the contract over the weekend, though there are no more mediation sessions scheduled after Friday.

“We are committed to being there the entire weekend,” she said. “A potential educators strike impacts not only our students but has significant disruption for the greater community.”

Arbitration

If the district and union can’t reach an agreement by March 11, another option to avoid a strike would be to enter arbitration, Pratt-Cook said. Each side would present their case to a third party who would make a final decision on the new contract.

The district said it was sending a letter to the union Tuesday to request the option, though the union would have to accept the offer. For now, there’s little indication they are interested.

SPFE President Leah VanDassor said they first heard of the district’s arbitration proposal through the news conference on the negotiations.

“Our union is disappointed to learn of this development in a news conference, instead of talking to us first,” she said. “We remain committed to reaching a settlement that benefits both our students and our educators, and believe this can still be accomplished via mediation.”

Gap in spending targets

St. Paul Public Schools faces a $107.7 million budget shortfall and district officials have said they can only expand spending by about $12.4 million. Union requests for spending total around $112 million, according to the school district.

Declining enrollment, the expiration of federal pandemic aid and growing operational expenses are to blame for the shortfall, and a $56 million boost in ongoing funding from the state tied to inflation still isn’t enough to shore up losses.

District leaders say they’ll have to make cuts to programs to balance the budget, but they haven’t shared which ones will be affected.

“We’ve got a long list of things that we’re going to be reducing or removing from our budget,” said Superintendent Joe Gothard. “We don’t have them itemized and certainly the result of this contract settlement could play a factor in that.”

At the St. Paul school board’s Feb. 20 meeting, district officials said it would be hard to avoid cuts affecting employees since they make up 80% of the budget.

“There’s no way we’re not going to touch people,” said Jackie Turner, the district’s chief of administration and operations.

Bargaining has been behind closed doors since mediation started in January, so it’s not exactly clear what each side is offering at this point.

Offers on both sides

But in the most recent publicly available offers, the union was seeking a $7,500 pay bump for all teachers and community service personnel in the district in the first year, and a 7.5% raise in the second year. They’re also asking for a $5.43-an-hour raise for educational assistants followed by a 7.5% raise in the second year.

Meanwhile, the district was offering a 2% raise in the first year, and a 3% increase for teachers at the lowest pay level.

St. Paul teachers have threatened to strike every bargaining cycle since 2018. The union went on strike for four days in 2020 and almost went on strike in 2018 and 2022.

In this year’s strike vote, two-thirds of the union’s 3,700 members voted, with 92% supporting the strike — far higher than the last two strike-authorizations.

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Thomas Dunne, who fought two tours in Vietnam as a Marine and went on to serve in the Minnesota National Guard and the Wisconsin Army Reserves, died Friday at Regions Hospital, nearly a month after St. Paul police say a 17-year-old severely injured him with a punch to the face at Harriet Island Regional Park.

Dunne, 76, and his wife, Helen Broderick, had finished a walk before 5 p.m. Jan. 28. He’d put his walker in his car, and saw a male urinating. He pulled out his phone to try to catch the act.

Thomas Dunne, 76, of St. Paul, died Feb. 23, 2024, at Regions Hospital. (Courtesy of Helen Broderick)

That didn’t go over well with three teens. One of them threw and landed a punch, knocking Dunne to the ground, according to a Jan. 30 juvenile petition charging the Rosemount teen with first-degree assault causing great bodily harm.

At Regions Hospital, Dunne had emergency surgery for “traumatic damage” to his right eye. He had several fractures to both his eye socket and nose.

He left Regions the next day and had follow-up visits with an eye doctor and at the VA Hospital in Minneapolis, his wife said this week. He came down with a high fever on Feb. 4 and was taken by ambulance back to Regions, where he was “bouncing from progressive to ICU,” she said. “He went unresponsive at one point, and they had to intubate him.”

He died just after midnight Friday.

St. Paul police spokesman Sgt. Mike Ernster said Tuesday the Ramsey County medical examiner’s office is working to determine Dunne’s cause and manner of death.

A spokesman for the Ramsey County attorney’s office said any new evidence presented by police will be reviewed and considered for additional charges.

Dunne was a “hero,” his wife said.

“For a hero like him to come home to his local park after being at risk in foreign wars,” she said, “and to be assaulted like that …”

Park visitor saw the punch

Officers were called to the 100 block of Water Street after Broderick reported her husband was punched in the face. Officers found him standing next to his car with blood streaming from his right eye socket. St. Paul fire medics were called to the scene.

He told officers that after he saw a male urinating and took out his phone to take a picture, two other males got out of a blue Ford Fusion. They approached him and tried to take his phone. One of them punched him in the face.

A witness told police she was getting out of her car and saw a male urinating in the “pond.” She said three males then confronted Dunne and that one of them slapped the phone out of his hand and punched him approximately two times in the face. She said she yelled at them before they walked away, headed east.

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Officers saw three males walking east along the river and asked if they were involved in a fight. One of them spoke up and said, “Yeah, that was me,” the petition says. He declined to give a formal statement.

One teen told police they confronted Dunne because they believed he was recording them and that he should have “minded his business.”

The other teen said he couldn’t find a public bathroom and began urinating in the “pond.” The other teens walked over and one “indicated that (Dunne) was recording or taking a picture of him,” the petition says. “(He) then approached (Dunne) and said, ‘Let’s get to it,’ before punching (him).”

Hospital staff told the police investigator that Dunne’s eye injury was “very severe” and that he “may permanently lose most of his vision in that eye, and it would be months before they could tell if there was any improvement.”

Born in Ireland

Born in Clonaslee, Ireland, Dunne emigrated to the U.S. at age 2 with his parents and his younger sister. They ended up on Chicago’s far southeast side, where growing up he delivered Chicago Tribune newspapers and graduated from George Washington High School. He then enlisted in the Marines Corps and served two tours in Vietnam as an infantryman. He was a staff sergeant when he got discharged in 1972.

Dunne moved to St. Paul in 1975. He met Broderick the next year in Ireland and they married five years later.

He re-entered the military in 1984 as a Minnesota National Guardsman, drilling once a month and going away for two weeks every summer, according to a biography he wrote and submitted to Twin Cities PBS’ online project, mnvietnam.org, which records local vets’ stories.

Dunne was recalled to active duty when Desert Storm began in 1991. He later transferred to the U.S. Army Reserve and had assignments in Somalia, Haiti and northern Iraq, where he helped coordinate and implement the evacuation of Kurds.

In 2002, Dunne became the command sergeant major of a Wisconsin Army Reserve battalion that sent most of its troops to war after 9/11, he wrote. “It was difficult for me as a Vietnam vet to do this as I was very much aware what they were heading into; it would have been much easier to go than stay,” he wrote.

Friend and fellow Vietnam vet Tom Storey said this week that Dunne was an “excellent writer who always had a real sympathy for the victims of war, the civilians. Some of his writing brings tears to your eyes.”

Friend Vernon Hall first met Dunne in the early 1990s through the Vietnam Veterans of America, St. Paul Chapter 320. “I can’t think of another person in the world who was more patriotic to this country than him,” Hall said.

Residents of the downtown St. Paul condominium building where Dunne lived with Broderick hosted a small memorial gathering Monday night.

“He loved St. Paul,” his wife said.

Funeral services for Dunne, who also worked for Ramsey County Public Works for over two decades and retired in 2010, will be held at noon Tuesday, March 5. A visitation will be at the O’Halloran and Murphy Funeral Home location in St. Paul, followed by a burial at Fort Snelling.

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Enjoy the spring-like warmth? Temperatures will plummet to single digits Tuesday.

New Power Generation bandmates Michael Bland and Sonny Thompson will lead a bill of onetime Prince associates and those influenced by him on April 20 at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis.

General admission tickets are $48 and seats are priced from $148.70 to $82 and are on sale now via Ticketmaster.

Dubbed 2Gether: Celebrating the Music and Life of Prince, the concert takes place the night before the eighth anniversary of Prince’s death.

Drummer Bland and bassist Thompson were among the musicians in New Power Generation, a band Prince formed in 1990. They went on to record a series of albums with the Purple One, including 1991’s “Diamonds and Pearls.” Various versions of NPG backed up Prince through 2013 and reunited to play on the final album of his life, 2015’s “Hit n Run Phase Two.”

Bland and Thompson’s band (BR)OTHERS will headline and will be joined on stage by fellow NPG vets Tommy Barbarella (keyboards), Levi Seacer Jr. (guitar) and Tony Mosley (vocals).

The rest of the lineup includes the Steeles (Jearlyn, Jevetta, Fred, J.D. and Billy), singer/songwriter Chastity Brown, Jesse Larson (“The Voice”), Margaret Cox (Ta Mara and the Seen, Dr. Mambo’s Combo), G Sharp (Urban Classic), Jay Bee (Urban Classic, the Routine) and the Urban Classic Horns (Scott Agster, Josh May and John Bertsch). Local rapper Nur-D will open the show.

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