By Khalique Rogers, Joe Nathan, and Tressa Pankovits
Earlier this year, with strong bipartisan support, Minnesota legislators passed a pair of bills that they call “triple win” legislation. The new laws are designed to address three critical issues: ensuring public school students graduate with marketable skills, the shortage of certified construction workers, and a pervasive lack of affordable housing.
Minnesota’s forward-thinking initiative is the subject of a Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) webinar on Tuesday, December 5. The 74 Million, Progressive Policy Institute, and Minnesota’s Center for School Change are co-sponsoring the webinar, which is the latest in RAS’ series on reinventing high schools.
The successful passage of these laws provides funding to replicate programs like the one at GAP School, which is an alternative school in St Paul, MN, serving students aged 16-24. The school’s director, Jody Nelson, will participate in the webinar. GAP’s program:
• Enables students to learn marketable construction skills, thus giving a head start into a well-paying career;
• Constructs homes for low-income families, thus helping meet Minnesotan’s need for more deeply affordable permanent housing;
• Helps provide workers for construction and related fields, which are encountering significant shortages.
Khalique Rogers, co-director of Minnesota’s Center for School Change (CSC), helped lead the legislative effort, with good reason. Rogers, who is featured in the webinar, personally experienced homelessness.
Rogers explained that after moving from Chicago to what they hoped would be a better life in Minneapolis, his family’s meager resources were soon exhausted by hotel bills and by landlords who demanded rental application fees, even when they secretly already had another renter identified. Resources exhausted, the family was forced to sleep in their car. Finally, they found a shelter, but it only welcomed his mother and siblings. His father wasn’t allowed to stay because all of the shelters were for single parents — mothers and children only. Rogers describes the experience as “dehumanizing.”
Though no one wants anyone to freeze in Minnesota’s severe winters, Rogers continues to challenge what he and other youth see as Minnesota’s over-reliance on temporary shelters. After interviewing more than 30 youth who also experienced homelessness, he shared his findings in an online Minnesota publication, and a Minnesota Public Radio interview, explaining “It’s important to hear and learn from youth experiencing homelessness in the Twin Cities.” As he testified at the Minnesota legislature, “Many students find shelters to be dangerous places — we need to provide permanent housing options.”
To help challenge that over-reliance, CSC has completed four case studies of schools that currently have home-building programs. These include GAP, two schools building “tiny-homes”: Exploration Charter High School, and Hutchinson High School, and a collaboration between GAP and Good Will/Easter Seals Minnesota that is constructing housing for low-income veterans and vets experiencing homelessness.
Now a graduate of St. Paul College and a student at the University of Minnesota, Rogers convened 40 advocates, including 12 students already learning construction skills and building homes. Under Roger’s leadership, their activism during the 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions convinced lawmakers legislators to spend $20 million per year over the next six years, much of it on permanent deeply affordable housing. In 2023, Minnesota lawmakers doubled funding for Youthbuild, a program for “at-risk” youth that helps them earn a high school degree as they develop marketable construction skills and knowledge. Lawmakers also agreed to modify existing legislation so that public schools can apply for up to $100,000 from a pool of more than $40 million to help construct permanent affordable housing.
Minnesota Democratic State Representative Matt Norris, lead sponsor of HF 1310 and HF 2492 in the Minnesota House, is also on the webinar’s panel. Norris said he authored the bills because, in addition to addressing the shortage of much-need, deeply affordable housing and ensuring students graduate with marketable skills, the high school construction training programs already in operation have proven cost-effective and should be scaled. He calls the state’s positive response to the urgent need for more young people to enter construction and related fields a “win-win-win.”
The success of schools with home-building career pathways helped convince lawmakers that the money to scale the model would be well spent. “Our students have renovated four houses and built two new homes,” said Jody Nelson, executive director of Change Inc., which runs GAP School. For years, the school’s construction career pathway has been affiliated with the national YouthBuild USA, as well as Minnesota’s own YouthBuild program.
“Lots of our students are immigrants and refugees,” Nelson said. “It’s a great way into high-wage, high-demand jobs.
GAP alumni Hser Pwe was born in Burma and grew up in a Thailand prison-like refugee camp after his family fled murderous Burmese soldiers. He testified to the legislature that the YouthBuild program at GAP not only taught him construction skills, but also helped improve his English and realize that he really “did” have opportunities. When he graduated from GAP in 2014, GAP helped him find a job installing floor covering. Eight years later, he’s been promoted to foreman, loves his career, and makes more than $44 per hour.
Pwe told lawmakers, “Because of this program I can speak English and support my wife and children. I have even become a U.S. citizen. Without YouthBuild, I do not know where I would be today.”
Thanks in part to this collaboration of legislators, educators, students, and people who’ve experienced homelessness, Minnesota is now on the path to simultaneously providing dignified affordable housing options and livable-wage careers for high school graduates (even those who may also be college-bound).
RAS has strongly promoted reinventing public schools. Its work at Progressive Policy Institute has included a series of online discussions offering practical examples, for policymakers, educators, and community members. Register here for the webinar on December 5 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. (EST).
Khalique Rogers and Joe Nathan are Co-Directors of the Center for School Change, and Tressa Pankovits is Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools at Progressive Policy Institute.
