Some parents press lawmakers to overhaul Perpich Center

Parents at Woodbury's Crosswinds Arts and Sciences School are pushing for a change in leadership, saying the school is being mismanaged after a state arts agency took over two and a half years ago.

Their complaints are resurrecting long-standing critiques of leadership at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, although the agency's board says it stands behind the director.

Once part of a broad state-funded school integration effort in the Twin Cities, Crosswinds lost funding and was slated to close in 2013. Lawmakers stepped in and turned management over to the Perpich Center board, which has run its namesake arts high school in Golden Valley since 1989.

"We will have a wonderful group of teachers and staff that will be able to support the culture that exists now that will continue," Perpich executive director Sue Mackert said in 2013 when the deal was announced.

Some Crosswinds parents, however, say that instead of supporting the culture, Mackert has scuttled it.

They note that before the power transfer, Crosswinds used the rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum with an emphasis on the arts but that in the years since Crosswinds has cut its theater department and orchestra director position and is no longer an International Baccalaureate school.

The changes have a group of parents so upset, they're asking the Legislature to audit the Perpich Center and fire Mackert. The state Office of the Legislative Auditor is considering a review of the school.

"It was a difficult process to even have a conversation with the school about anything going on," said La Rae Mills, who pulled her daughter out of Crosswinds last year. "We wouldn't get clear answers. There wasn't ... a strategic plan in place for where things were going."

State Rep. JoAnn Ward, who wrote the bill conveying Crosswinds to Perpich, said Perpich's management hasn't delivered the results she expected. She also wants Mackert removed.

"If I had understood what the challenges are in leadership at Perpich, I would have been much more skeptical that this was the right way to go," said Ward, DFL-Woodbury.

In an interview, Mackert turned aside the criticism of her leadership and experience. Crosswinds, she said, has a strong vision and is as much an arts school as ever. She added that she feels qualified to lead it.

"We'll use our expertise in arts education, and that comes in a variety of forms," she said. "It's classes, but it is also the extended day where you're bringing in more culturally rich arts programs, and then most critically bringing in the professionals of the Perpich Center for arts integration."

Crosswinds enrollment has gone up very slightly the past few years. It had dropped by half before Perpich took over as parents pulled out their kids when the school was slated to close.

Ward and the parents say their concerns with the Perpich Center go beyond Crosswinds. In 2011, four Perpich board members wrote to Gov. Mark Dayton criticizing Mackert's appointment as director and what they called a dysfunctional Perpich board.

One of the members, Margaret DiBlasio, was vice chair of the Perpich Center board when Mackert was appointed. Mackert was board chair at the time and leading the center on an interim basis. After a failed search, Mackert got the job, even though the initial posting required a masters' degree and Mackert didn't graduate from college.

DiBlasio said she tried to stop the move.

Mackert was "over her head" trying to lead Crosswinds, DiBlasio said. "She wasn't trained to do it. From our knowledge she has no training, no education in human development or in student work. She doesn't have a degree in education."

Mackert said that she left college for a job offer before receiving her undergraduate degree. She declined to discuss her education credentials further.

Enrollment at in the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley has fallen from 268 to 209 since Mackert's appointment, but the high school still attracts students from across the state. Their work lines the halls and they spend half their days in art classes.

DiBlasio, however, said Mackert has continued long-running cuts to the center's other state-mandated mission to support and train arts teachers. Perpich used to have experts in each art area who visited schools and answered questions about state art standards.

All but one of those positions are gone. Perpich replaced them with four school turnaround efforts and workshops in teaching art across the curriculum that reached 31 schools last year. Perpich officials argued teachers need a different kind of support than they used to. The Minnesota Music Educators Association disagreed and says it's protested the changes for two years.

Current Perpich chair Pierce McNally said the board is unanimously behind Mackert. When she took over, legislators were threatening to cut funding for the center and its hallmark arts high school, he said.

"Sue came in and she completely turned it around, and over the course of the last four years we have made incredible strides," McNally added. "Whatever her educational background is or was is completely conducive to what she's doing now, because she's doing an excellent job."