By BECKY Z. DERNBACH
Tuesday July 12, 2022
After ten years as a classroom teacher, Qorsho Hassan, the 2020 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, decided to step away from teaching at the end of this past school year. Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle | Sahan Journal
A few days before the end of the school year, Qorsho Hassan
gathered her second graders for their daily morning meeting at Echo Park
Elementary School, in Burnsville. She had some hard news to share, she told
them, but it was happy news too.
They would not see her in the hallways next school year, she
told them. She would not be teaching second grade.
Would she be teaching them in third grade? her students
asked.
No, Qorsho told them. She would not be teaching at all.
“I made myself a
promise ages ago that when I get to a point where I no longer can dream in the
classroom, can feel the passion just flowing through my veins, that I would
step away,” she told me in June over an iced chai, at a table outside an Eagan
cafe.
I’ve been reporting on Qorsho’s journey since she became the
first Somali American to win the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award, in 2020.
Over that time, I visited her classroom, spoke with her students, and talked to
school parents and fellow teachers. All of them praised Qorsho’s teaching
methods, her uncanny ability to connect with children, and the representation
she brought to their schools. In the classroom, at award ceremonies, and even
at a school board protest, I’ve observed how much Qorsho means to her
students—and how much they mean to her.
“We’ve got children all across Minnesota that believe that
they can do anything because of your example, and for that I am incredibly
grateful,” Governor Tim Walz told Qorsho in a speech at the following year’s
Minnesota Teacher of the Year ceremony.
But more recently, the joy Qorsho had once found in the
classroom was fading, she told me. She dreaded going to work. She felt like she
was becoming less of herself.
After that award ceremony in 2020, when I first met Qorsho,
she told me she wanted to use her platform to advocate for better retention and
more support for teachers of color. The issue was personal: She’d already faced
retention challenges. Just that summer, she’d lost her job in the Burnsville–Eagan–Savage
school district during budget cuts: the district first-in last-out policy left
newer teachers of color vulnerable during layoffs.
Two years later, she feels like she’s been pushed out of the
classroom again.
“I didn’t willfully walk away,” Qorsho said of her recent
action. “I felt like I didn’t have the proper support.”
Qorsho Hassan was named the Minnesota Teacher of the Year in a ceremony on the Capitol lawn in August 2020. Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle | Sahan Journal
Many educators had hoped the 2021–2022 school year would
bring a return to typical school rhythms. Some, like Qorsho, hoped the
disruptions of the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd would allow
space to reimagine education. Instead, many teachers reported it was the most
stressful year of their careers.
After two pandemic years, students had fallen behind
academically and socially, and were struggling with major mental health
challenges. And staffing shortages meant teachers had to take on extra work.
Minnesota public school staffing levels declined by 7
percent between March 2020 and May 2022, according to Bureau of Labor
Statistics data. That meant teachers needed to cover for other staff during
their limited free hours.
For teachers of color, this additional workload presented
even greater burdens. Even before the pandemic, many of these teachers paid an
“invisible tax” by providing unpaid leadership on anti-racism in their schools
and delivering extra support to students of color. Those needs grew
exponentially after the twin upheavals of the pandemic and Floyd’s murder.
Emily Buss, the communications supervisor for
Rosemount–Apple Valley–Eagan Public Schools, acknowledged the challenges of the
last few years in education, but said the district was on an “upward
trajectory.” She praised district office employees for stepping in to fill
paraprofessional and substitute teacher roles while putting the needs of students
first. The school district has nearly reached pre-pandemic staffing levels
again, she said.
“Everyone experienced a horrible time with this pandemic,”
Buss said. “In District 196, we continued to provide the best education under
the conditions that we were dealing with, and I think that’s what our families
expect.”
Yet as teachers stretched themselves ever thinner, Qorsho
felt the existing school structures were inadequate to serve her students’
growing needs. Behavioral and academic intervention could not solve
homelessness or help a self-harming second-grader. She did not want to provide
“Band-Aid solutions” to structural problems.
This June, at the start of summer vacation, Qorsho began a
discretionary leave from her school district. This means she could return after
a year. But right now, she doesn’t think that’s likely.
“I’ve been fearless and unapologetic about teaching for
justice and liberation but now I must rest,” she said in a tweet announcing her
indefinite departure. “Looking forward to the next chapter of my life that
includes healing and peace.”
She included a photograph of herself flashing a peace sign
and preparing to drop a microphone.
“We’ve been tasked with the impossible job of fighting
systemic racism,” Qorsho told me at the cafe. “I haven’t just been able to
teach. If I were, I could see myself teaching for 10 or 20 more years. But I
don’t do the same work as my white colleagues.”
‘I thought this is
rock bottom. And it’s just gotten worse.’
When I first asked Qorsho, 32, to speak about her decision
to leave the classroom, she told me she was still processing her thoughts. A
week later, she met me, wearing a floral head scarf and a nose ring. We spoke
for more than an hour.
She described her past few years in the classroom with
matter-of-fact candor: her fears of not being enough for her students; her
questions about the role public schools play for children of color; her deep
love for her family; and her initial feelings of guilt about leaving the
classroom. She laughed about being able to use the bathroom whenever she
wanted, now that she would not be teaching. At other times, she neared tears
while reflecting on one student’s experience with trauma.
Ultimately, a clear narrative emerged: An extraordinarily
passionate teacher had poured herself into her craft during a time of
compounding crises, leaving herself depleted.
Qorsho first started to feel the signs of burnout during the
2018–2019 school year, when she taught 35 fifth-graders in one class. (The
average Minnesota elementary classroom has an enrollment of 23 students.) Most
of her students were Black and brown. She knew these students could benefit
from seeing a teacher who looked like them. But she did not have enough support
for such a large class.
“I just felt like I couldn’t be enough for all of those
students, and that I wasn’t even enough for myself,” she said.
As the 2019–2020 school year began, she looked forward to a
smaller class size of 27, “which is still a lot, by the way,” she added. Then,
in March, COVID–19 shut down schools across the country, forcing teachers and
students to adapt to remote learning.
“I thought, oh my God, this is rock bottom,” Qorsho said.
“And actually, it’s just gotten worse. Exponentially worse.”
In September 2020, Qorsho Hassan decorated her new classroom at Echo Park Elementary School with posters of diverse leaders. Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle | Sahan Journal
As Qorsho began her new job at Echo Park in the fall of
2020, her school opened using a “hybrid” model. That meant Qorsho’s students
were divided into two cohorts: Each day, half her students were in the
classroom, while the other half completed online assignments from home.
I’d seen how that worked in September 2020, when I visited
her fourth-grade classroom. The walls were lined with posters affirming
immigrants and diversity. I watched as she led her students through an activity
to identify their unique characteristics.
Qorsho modeled the exercise for them by identifying her own.
“I’m silly, I speak three languages, and I can write with both hands,” she told
her students.
A blond girl raised her hand to share her special traits.
“I’m small, I can eat mashed potatoes with chopsticks, and I speak two
languages: English and gibberish,” she announced.
On a break, Qorsho told me she designed the activity to lift
up their strengths and identify areas where they can grow. Developing this
“growth mindset” would help them recognize where they could overcome
challenges, she explained.
At the same time, Qorsho was struggling to overcome
challenges of her own. She effectively had to teach both her cohorts at once,
managing one group in person while providing real-time feedback on the other
group’s online assignments. She had to spend more time policing students’
behavior with the new COVID safety protocols. And she was working long hours to
prepare dual lesson plans.
“Sometimes Qorsho dreamed of leaving teaching to open a
bakery. “I keep a close circle of educators who are positive, passionate, and
equity-minded,” she said. “I’ve never had so many teacher friends, including
myself, think about quitting.”
Sometimes she dreamed of opening a bakery, she told me.
“I keep a close circle of educators who are positive,
passionate, and equity-minded,” she told me that September. “I’ve never had so
many teacher friends, including myself, think about quitting.”
The picture book
incident
Another factor making her job difficult: backlash from
parents who disagreed with her anti-racist teaching methods, she told me.
Sometimes that backlash showed up in “unsaid words” and “passive behavior.” But
in one case, it boiled over into a social media firestorm.
In October, her second month at her new job, Qorsho’s
teaching methods came under fire when she read the picture book Something
Happened In Our Town with her fourth-grade students. The book, published by the
children’s book imprint of the American Psychological Association, aims to help
children process the trauma of a Black man in their community being killed by
police. Qorsho’s students—a diverse mix of mostly white, Black, and Latino
children—had been bringing up Floyd’s murder and the subsequent unrest since
school reopened that fall.
Jai Hanson, a Bloomington police officer, found out about
the picture book assignment from a classroom parent and wrote a Facebook post
about it. (Hanson is now a candidate for Hennepin County Sheriff.) Hanson wrote
that he was disappointed to see the book being used at Echo Park Elementary. He
worried it could teach children to fear the police.
His post received hundreds of shares. Minnesota’s largest
police association took up the cause. Its executive director penned a letter to
Governor Walz, whose departments of education and health had publicly listed
the book as a resource, and asked him to remove the recommendation. Though
neither Hanson nor the police association mentioned Qorsho by name, an
inflammatory conservative blog did.
The Rosemount–Apple Valley–Eagan school district told media
outlets the book was not part of its curriculum. Only one teacher was using it,
the district added, and they would investigate the use of the book further.
“Essentially, they threw me under the bus with their
statement,” Qorsho told me that November.
On the night of a school-board meeting, Qorsho’s union
local, classroom parents, and students organized a protest at the district’s
Rosemount headquarters to support her and demand the district take a bolder
stance. (The superintendent, Mary Kreger, said in an email to families that the
district had not responded to the Facebook post in order “to not further
inflame the responses of hate and intolerance that were shared.” Kreger added
that while the book was not part of the curriculum, it could be used
appropriately with elementary school children.)
When rally organizers handed 11-year-old Nashaad Ali the
megaphone, she told the crowd about her favorite teacher.
“She helped her students when they needed help and she would
do anything to help us,” Nashaad said. “That’s why Miss Qorsho deserves better
than what she’s dealing with right now.”
‘There were just so
many needs, and not enough of anything’
Qorsho hoped the 2021–2022 school year would mark an
improvement.
“I thought we were getting to a better place,” Qorsho said
when we met at the Eagan cafe. “But we were just experiencing more needs, both
emotional and academic needs, and not enough personnel.”
Her school experienced more staffing changes than she could
count, on top of staff COVID leaves and high student absence rates, she said.
(Buss, the district spokesperson, acknowledged “significant staffing
challenges” in terms of absences.)
“There’s just a lot of intermittent learning, and not enough
being taken off of our plates,” Qorsho said. “The same level of high
expectations, with the most minimal amount of support and resources.”
For example, she said, her district does not provide a literacy
curriculum. So when Qorsho switched to a second-grade classroom this year, she
had to create a literacy curriculum herself.
(Buss said a new literacy curriculum was implemented during
the pandemic. That meant limited professional development opportunities to
share the curriculum with teachers.)
“There were just so many needs, and not enough of anything,”
Qorsho told me at the cafe. “And I felt that every day. I had students who were
self-harming,” she added, choking up. She paused to collect herself, looking
out at the parking lot. “A lot of outbursts. It was hard.”
Salma Hussein has served as a mentor to Qorsho over the past
few years. Since 2020, she has been an assistant principal at St. Paul’s
Central High School; on July 8, she was named the incoming principal at Gideon
Pond Elementary School in Burnsville—the same school where Qorsho taught for
three years before losing her job in budget cuts. Salma observed that Qorsho’s
empathic nature made it difficult for her to witness inequities in the classroom.
“I tried to encourage Qorsho to take care of herself and not
get burned out,” Salma said. “But that’s really hard to do when you care about
the work, and you’re in the classroom like Qorsho is. She sees the children.
She sees what people talk about in terms of policy, she sees it live out in her
classroom. So for her, it was deeply personal.”
Qorsho started to wonder why the education system failed to
meet the needs of so many students, especially students of color and those
living in poverty. Her thoughts turned sociological and dark: Does society need
an underclass of poor and uneducated people?
She reflected on her own experiences as a student and why
she’d ended up teaching. “Why did I go back to the crime scene where I was
harmed?”
She’d thought George Floyd’s murder, the pandemic, and
rising poverty would serve as a “wakeup call.” Now, she’d come to a different
conclusion: “There’s just a lot of comfortable people making decisions that are
more than fine maintaining the status quo.”
Qorsho’s spirits hit a low point during the Omicron surge in
January 2022. So many teachers and students were out sick that she felt like
she was expected to provide childcare at school, rather than education. While
some school districts temporarily switched to remote learning to alleviate
these pressures, Rosemount–Apple Valley–Eagan schools did not.
“It just felt very hopeless,” she said. “There was a moment
of thinking, when is there light at the end of the tunnel? And at that point, I
don’t know. None of us saw it.”
Qorsho’s mother encouraged her to take a leave.
She recalled her mother’s advice as she reflected on her
teaching career: “I planted many seeds the past 10 years, and the garden that I
have taken care of is in abundance. And I need to just sit back and observe
it.”
A retention problem
grows
Retaining teachers of color was already a challenge for
Minnesota school districts before the pandemic. Advocates say that’s a barrier
to addressing Minnesota’s notorious achievement and opportunity gaps. Studies
show that when Black students have even one Black elementary teacher, their
academic performance increases. They are also less likely to drop out of high
school and more likely to apply for college.
But hiring more teachers of color is not enough to increase
their total number in the state’s teaching force. Districts need to retain
them, too. The Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standard Board
told a state House committee in January 2021 that even as school districts hire
more teachers of color, retention problems offset hiring gains.
Since then, the pressures on teachers have only grown. This
spring, Education Minnesota, the state’s largest educators union, surveyed 14
chapters statewide, and asked about teacher turnover. Seven percent of surveyed
teachers said they would not be returning to the classroom this fall. Union
leaders say this decline is the largest one-year exodus they have witnessed in
their careers. (Buss, with Rosemount–Apple Valley–Eagan Public Schools, said nearly
all of her district’s departures this year are due to retirements.)
A Gallup poll last month found that K–12 education workers
have the highest burnout rate of any profession in the United States. And those
stresses have fallen disproportionately on teachers of color. A February survey
from the National Education Association found that 55 percent of teachers,
including 62 percent of Black educators, were considering leaving the
profession earlier than they had previously planned.
“It’s a matter of not just hiring us,” Qorsho told me when
we met in June. “You have to really be intentional about the space that you’re
bringing us into, the curriculum that you are providing, the feedback that
you’re expecting. And you have to be ready to hear the truth.”
“Qorsho is the best of us. She really is,” Salma said. “She
received the best award in the state of Minnesota. And yet, it wasn’t enough to
protect, support, retain her.”
Salma continued, “What that tells me is we’ve got work to
do. And the system is broken.”
‘She was putting in
extra emotional labor that white people aren’t expected to do’
Becca Buck, a Burnsville music teacher, got to know Qorsho
when they shared an office space at Gideon Pond Elementary School.
Buck remembers being impressed with Qorsho’s students when
they came in for music class.
“You could tell that she worked so hard on empowering her
students,” she said. “Students were just so proud to be themselves and to bring
their whole selves into the classroom.”
Buck had seen how Qorsho poured more of herself into
classroom teaching than anyone else she knew—and then fielded extra
responsibilities.
“I knew that she was putting in a lot of extra emotional
labor that white people aren’t expected to do,” Buck said. That meant white
colleagues frequently asked Qorsho for advice, Buck said.
But it also meant that she had to defend her teaching from
additional scrutiny. “They’re questioning everything she’s doing. There’s this
extra policing,” Buck said. As a white teacher, she added, she has not had to
face those challenges. “I’m not as burnt out as she is, because I have not had
to do that extra emotional labor.”
The firestorm over Something Happened in Our Town took a
major toll on Qorsho, Buck said.
“That was just really devastating,” she said. She recalls
Qorsho telling her she did not feel safe in the classroom, and asking the
school for a room with a lock. (The school honored her request, Qorsho said.)
“Since then, she’s had to kind of look over her back,” Buck said.
When Buck visited Qorsho’s Echo Park classroom in February,
after the Omicron surge, she could see that something had changed. Qorsho asked
Buck how her year was going. They looked at each other in silence and shook
their heads.
“What’s your next step?” Buck recalled asking her. “I just
could tell.”
She could see the strain on her friend’s mental health.
Qorsho lives with her family in Apple Valley, but at home, she did not feel
like a good sister, aunt, or daughter. At the end of the school day, she mostly
wanted to be alone.
Qorsho’s choice to leave the classroom should serve as a
warning to school districts, Buck said.
“We talk so much about hiring and retaining teachers of
color, and there’s so many, quote, ‘pushes’ for this in the districts,” Buck
said. “But where is the follow-up? How are they tangibly being supported?”
“She is the most passionate teacher that I know,” said Becca
Buck, a music teacher who worked with Qorsho in Burnsville. “If she is stepping
away from teaching, there’s a big issue that is happening.”
“She is the most passionate teacher that I know,” Buck
added. “If she is stepping away from teaching, there’s a big issue that is
happening.”
The abundant garden
In March of this year, Qorsho took her second-graders on a
field trip to the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. They came to see
an adaptation of Something Happened in Our Town.
The performance was full of “beautiful moments,” Qorsho
said. As part of the class trip, the theater invited the students backstage to
talk with the actors. Since some educator colleagues had come to chaperone the
trip, Qorsho took an opportunity to step back and reflect.
She wished she could have given this experience to her
fourth-graders, after the previous year’s book battle. But a year and a half
after that firestorm, she could see signs of progress. The previous year, she’d
said her district “threw me under the bus” for using the book.
Now, the district included Something Happened in Our Town as
a school resource for Black History Month. The Children’s Theatre Company
commissioned a playwright to adapt the book for the stage. And the district had
approved her field trip to see it.
“In Islam, we talk about how with every hardship, there’s
ease,” she said. “I couldn’t see it at the time when I was going through that
experience, but I can see it now. The book gained traction and was made into a
play. And I honestly don’t think any of that would have happened without the
initial exposure of it.”
Qorsho had wrestled with guilt about leaving the classroom.
But at the Children’s Theatre, she could see that she had left a lasting
impact. And she could feel the beginnings of something else: healing.
She would not forget what she had been through. But she
could move past it and let it go. She would watch her abundant garden bloom,
from a distance.