Dec. 14—ROCHESTER — Superintendent Kent Pekel was awake until the middle of the night on Election Day. The presidential race had long since been called, the watch party he had attended was over, and his wife, Katie, had already gone to sleep. But he was still awake, waiting for local results on whether voters approved providing more funding to Rochester Public Schools.
Part of the promise Pekel made leading up to the November referendum was that it would be a way to provide stability for the school district. No cuts are necessary for the coming years. Teachers shouldn’t have to worry about their jobs. Families shouldn’t have to worry about their music programs disappearing or their sports programs being compromised.
Ultimately, the referendum proved favorable to the district’s request, greenlighting an influx of nearly $20 million per year in additional revenue.
It was a crucial moment and marked a new chapter for the district in several respects. One was to end the financially precarious era the district had just gone through, with workforce reductions and schools nearly closing.
But it also means Pekel now has a clear runway to move forward with the goals he has for the district. In a way, he thinks this is the point where the real work can begin.
“So far we have built the infrastructure,” Pekel said. “We’ve built the rail lines in some important ways that weren’t there before. I think the challenge ahead is really going to be a really high-performing system.”
The first three years of Pekel’s government were anything but easy. In addition to the district cutting $21 million from its annual budget, which resulted in the reduction of more than 100 positions from the list and the need for the November referendum in the first place, there were numerous other challenges.
When he first set foot in the district, the schools were just coming off a year of distance learning during the pandemic and were trying to figure out the best way to return to a traditional classroom. Mask regulations resulted in one person being removed from a school board meeting and cited by law enforcement. Other times they led to heated arguments with RPS employees denying people access to the building in the first place.
Those first three years also included dissatisfaction with the district’s emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion, and accusations that the district was teaching “critical race theory.” According to Pekel, the hysteria at that time even rose to the level of people flying drones outside the windows of the district office.
In the spring of 2023, Rochester Public Schools were targeted by a cyberattack, forcing the district to go offline for several weeks.
In the fall of 2023, Rochester voters rejected a $10 million-a-year funding request from the district, forcing the district to close several schools — only to be bailed out soon after by a $10 million donation from the Mayo Clinic.
Although the case was ultimately dismissed, RPS was sued in the run-up to the 2023 referendum.
In other words: Pekel’s first three years at the helm were nothing but a trial by fire.
“All this has softened the focus on the academic agenda,” Pekel said. “But we’re here.”
Amid all these obstacles, Pekel began making changes in the way the district functioned.
He tossed out the meager strategic plan the district had previously had and brought in a research firm to help draft a new document that spans more than a hundred pages and includes more than a dozen goals.
He added a research and development office to gauge whether students were actually making progress in a given area. He oversaw the purchase of a new curriculum and coordinated endless hours of debate between the city and the school district over the use of school staff.
There are signs that all that preparatory work is starting to pay off. In 2024, RPS students showed improvement on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment tests for the first time in a decade.
However, progress has also come in fits and starts. In March 2024, it was reported that the district’s 2023 graduation rate had fallen by 1.91% from the year before and that the graduation rate of black students had fallen by more than 10%.
“As we see changes in our data from year to year, we must remember that school improvement is a marathon, not a sprint,” Pekel said in a statement at the time.
The school board will have a new member in January for the first time since Pekel joined the district. The board in its current form has consistently given him high praise. Most recently in August, board chair Cathy Nathan read a prepared statement following Pekel’s performance review, in which she said, “He provides the kind of leadership that is simultaneously visionary, analytical and strategic.”
This year, the Rochester Public Schools board will begin negotiating with the district’s teachers union, The Rochester Education Association, on a new two-year contract. Although the last cycle of negotiations became a lengthy process and involved the occasional heated exchange, Pekel has generally also found favor with the district’s teachers.
“This will be the fifth superintendent I have worked for in Rochester, and without a doubt the best of them,” said REA President Vince Wagner.
Two weeks after Election Day, the district announced that Pekel had signed another three-year contract, extending his time in Rochester until at least mid-2028. Presumably his next three years will be quieter than the first three.
So now that the school district’s financial fate is no longer in question and Pekel has committed to a new contract, what comes next for the Rochester Public Schools?
The district’s existing strategic plan runs through 2025, so school leaders will soon create a new set of goals, expanding the work of the existing document.
Part of that process involves going back to basics, such as revising the district’s mission and vision, and even branding.
“We are in a competitive environment and we want to be the supplier of choice,” Pekel said. “We need to do that at the district level, and we need to do it in each of our schools.”
Another part of the work will be revising the district’s graduate profile, which is the blueprint for what the district wants students to know by the time they graduate.
The obvious goal in all of this is to increase test scores and graduation rates. Another goal is to increase enrollment by making the district as attractive as possible for families.
In an age where artificial intelligence is creating an unknown future for today’s students, one of the district’s overarching goals is to emphasize a concept they call “deeper learning,” which focuses on “mastery, identity and creativity.”
But beyond the incremental gains outlined in a three-year plan, does Pekel have a long-term goal for Rochester Public Schools? Located in the heart of a highly academic medical community, what kind of neighborhood does this have potential?
“I think the potential we have is to be one of the most diverse school systems in the country,” Pekel said. “I think Rochester Public Schools has the potential to be, I would say, not just one of the few school systems, but honestly one of the few institutions where people in our society are coming together across divides and divides that are becoming increasingly fractured. “
As admirable as that goal may be, it will be no small task in an era when schools have become hotbeds of political and social division.
As recently as July, the school board meeting room was the focus of months of controversy over the district’s procedures for supporting transgender and gender-expansive students. One of the features of the document was that staff were not required to notify parents if students asked to be referred to by an alternative name or pronoun.
The district’s procedures led to widespread criticism, including from now-former school counselor Christina Barton, who has made several media appearances on the issue. The national organization Parents Defending Education also includes Rochester Public Schools on its “Indoctrination Map.”
Yes, the days of distance learning are over and the recently passed operating levy has heralded the promise of financial stability for the time being, but the utopia of unanimous support is anything but reality.
And yet, even outside the school district, there are those who believe RPS is poised to do good things. One of those is former RPS Superintendent Jerry Williams, who compliments both Pekel and the current version of the school board.
In addition to a brief period serving on an interim basis, Williams served as superintendent of Rochester Public Schools from 2004 to 2007. He says Pekel’s research background will pay off for the district as it continues to develop.
“I think the skills he brings to the district are some of the most impressive I have ever seen in a superintendent,” Williams said. “He knows what good schools look like, and he knows what low-performing schools look like.”
