Superintendent Johnson Announces New Leadership Structure

With school back in session for the 2013-2014 school year, Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent Dr. Bernadeia H. Johnson recently announced a new organizational structure at the central offices in a Leader Letter:

Dear MPS partners and friends, 

As I embark on my fourth year as superintendent of MPS, I feel optimistic and encouraged that our school district is headed in the right direction. We have many strategies and programs in place to support our efforts to accelerate academic growth. My goal is to facilitate a massive Shift across MPS, a change that will result in all central office departments and schools working collaboratively to make our school district a national model for academic success. We are committed to a shift in culture, behavior, attitude and service – and, especially at the central office, a shift in how we prioritize, how we support and how we work. I expect that all staff members at school and non-school sites alike are here to support students, families, staff and schools – period.

With that in mind, I am announcing some changes to my leadership structure at the central office that better aligns departments so that we all can be more responsive to schools, families and the community. The new structure represents a more streamlined approach to providing central office services to our schools. Last spring, we took a close look at the size of our administrative staff and eliminated 52 central office positions to direct more resources to school support. My new structure continues these efforts by reducing the number of chiefs on my leadership team; in addition, several departments have been either eliminated or merged into other departments.

The new structure also improves the alignment of all non-academic departments with the academic team, which is essential in areas such as finance, facilities, human resources and instructional technology. One new department will be created to focus solely on establishing and implementing aggressive strategies to close the achievement gap for schools and specific student groups. This department will report directly to our new Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin-Ziebart. Two restructured functions will report directly to Chief Executive Officer Michael Goar: the renamed Office of Student, Family and Community Engagement, which previously operated under the Office of Equity and Diversity; and Partnerships and Institutional Development, which will be charged with solidifying relationships with community organizations providing services to students and fundraising to support our academic agenda.

Another significant change is in the area of human resources. The school district must be able to recruit and retain top quality staff to accomplish our ambitious goals. For this reason, I have separated the human resources division into two components – human capital and employee relations. The human capital department will implement aggressive, proven strategies designed to recruit the best talent to work for MPS. Employee relations will handle more of the day-to-day operations including labor negotiations for all of our bargaining groups.

As I often say to my leadership team, an organizational chart is not the secret ingredient to the success of an organization. It’s about having the right people in the right place at the right time. It’s also about having all of these talented, hard-working people reading from the same playbook – our strategic plan.

I believe MPS is on track to accomplishing great things. This new structure will help us get to better outcomes for students at a much faster pace. 

Sincerely, 
Bernadeia H. Johnson, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools