The shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church School left two children dead and stunned the community.
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
Annunciation School shooting overshadows opening days
To be honest, I didn’t know about any prior school shootings in the Twin Cities, so I thought the shooting that killed two children and injured 17 other people might have been the first one here. It was not, but I was right in thinking Minnesota was not at the top of the charts in school shooting incidents. It’s in the middle of state rankings, with a count of six out of the 300 most recent school shootings. Still, six out of 300 is only a fifth of 1%, whereas a single state is 2% of the states in the country. If the incidents were divided evenly across states, it would be 60 rather than six. Since 2023 had 349 school shootings and 2024 had 335, those most recent 300 were just within the past year.
Sorry to go all math-nerd like that, but it’s not because I am immune to the shock and suffering; quite the opposite: it’s my coping mechanism. This story caught me, the city, and the world, unaware. Public schools would not open until the 2nd of September, but the August 27 mass shooting was during the first week of school at Church of the Annunciation Catholic School, not in the school building but in the church, where the first mass of the school year was being celebrated, attended by the entire school, many of their families, and community members.
After the deadly shooting, crime scene tape blocked the road near Annunciation Church
The shooting was unusual in a way that made all the classroom shooter drills of no use. The shooter stood outside the church, spraying scores of bullets from an automatic rifle through the stained glass windows. Two children, Fletcher Merkel (8) and Harper Moyski (10) were killed, and a total of 17 other children and adults were injured, some critically.
Of course all the local news outlets, followed soon after by national and international media, covered the breaking story on August 27. I am choosing to cite from and link to coverage by Racketmn.com, which was very sane and thorough. (It wasn’t all sane, what a surprise.) See tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-Racket-Shooting for the reporting at the time, before either the victims or the perpetrator were fully identified. Also see their coverage on the following day, with a bit more detail.
Fundraisers and services for victims filled the weeks after the tragedy, with classes not resuming until three weeks later. Now the church and school are trying to get back to normal – holding their century-plus old
Rayah Toles, a sophomore at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists, holds a sign reading Òare guns more precious than us?Ó as an upside down flag flies behind her while students walk out to protest at the Minnesota State Capitol, calling for a ban on assault weapons Friday, Sept. 5, 2025 following the mass shooting at Annunciation Church.
September Fair. But obviously it’s not normal. GoFundMe established a “hub” of verified fundraising accounts for the victims, which you may want to support. tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-FundHub.
“You don’t need data. You don’t need research. You need to look in the eyes of my 7-year-old at night who looks at me and says she can’t sleep because she’s afraid there’s a shooter in the house,” a trauma therapist said through tears. “This is our family’s new reality and this is the reality that so many families in our Annunciation community are suffering.”
These are the words of just one of many Annunciation family and community members who testified on September 15 to an opening session of a Minnesota Senate work group focused on addressing gun violence, which lawmakers established in the days after the shooting.
Also, according to the September 5 edition of “The Glean” on MinnPost (minnpost.com) students at several metro-area schools staged walkouts to demand gun control. The number of politicians and pundits who have been using this as an opportunity to demand or promise way overdue gun control legislation is too large to list, but it is highly probable something will be done here in the Twin Cities, if not statewide.
Charter schools – still in the news a lot!
Why are charter schools so controversial? Of all the parts of the public K12 education system, charters seem to attract the most media attention, both bad and good, with the bad outweighing the good to varying extents. Looking just at charter schools in Minnesota, an April 19 article in the MN Star-Tribune began:
“Charter schools receive more than $1 billion a year from taxpayers, but the people who run and oversee these schools often act more like members of a private club than stewards of a public school…”
To be fair, a lot of things charter schools get in trouble for are problems in some public schools as well. Basically the problems some charter schools encounter, along with the nonprofits contractually responsible for them, called “authorizers,” are endemic problems with any private undertaking that receives government money:
• Violating open meeting laws by holding closed meetings, overpaying leaders, or spending on items not allowed under their contract
• Further violating open meeting laws by not allowing community members to speak at the meetings when they are allowed to attend
• Authorizers not enforcing their own standards (because they need the government money)
Additional problems are also weaknesses inherent in the “public-private” model that the neoliberals and conservatives are so fond of: being non-union unlike true public schools (although a few have begun to unionize), being allowed to cherry-pick enrollment despite school non-discrimination laws, and having a much wider pay gap between administrators and workers.
Southside Family Charter School incorporates both travel and activism into their curriculum.
Despite these pitfalls, there are good charter schools, and they can fill a gap in things like learning styles, instructional emphasis, or experimental or non-traditional education theories. Charter schools have enabled many low-income students to benefit from a “private” education experience without having to pay tuition or win scholarships.
Minnesota, and especially the Twin Cities, had more than their share of non-traditional private schools before the charter movement and its model of public money came into existence. For some of these schools, becoming a charter was a lifeline, meaning they could expand their enrollment without having to worry so much about money.
A good example is the Southside Family Charter School (SFCS) in South Minneapolis.
According to the school’s website, SFCS has a rich history of innovation and activism:
• Founded in the 1970s as Model Cities Mini School, part of a community initiative to support families
• Evolved into a Minneapolis Public Schools alternative site before becoming an independent charter school
• Incorporated activism into education, helping students understand and shape the world around them
• Began Travel Study with our Civil Rights History Trips in 1993, taking students on powerful learning experiences across the country.
(Also read Basil Shadid’s article in the March edition of Southside Pride – tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-SFCS.)
Southside Family Charter School is a K-5 teacher powered school with a social justice mission and a long history of travel study. Southside took their first family travel studies and camping trip of the year to the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post on Thursday, September 25th.
They visited The Four Seasons room there, toured the exhibits and played traditional Anishinaabe/Ojibwe games. They went to the Mille Lacs Cultural Grounds and met with Carl Klimah, who operates the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe fisheries department, and elders from the Mille Lacs reservation. Students learned about sustainable fishing practices and how to parch wild rice. Everyone learned more about the importance of wild rice to the Anishinaabeg/Ojibwe people.
U of M Teamsters and their supporters on strike with Scabby the Rat
We still have a Department of Education but what else is going on in public education?
I expected this to be the largest section of my article, as it usually is, but then the shooting and various Trump shenanigans intervened so now it’s the smallest. Still, it’s important to keep up with this stuff. Trump and his minions were seriously trying to simply liquidate the federal Department of Education, but it looks like they got distracted a bit so now they’re just randomly slashing funding for things. Meanwhile, in River City and elsewhere …
• Schooling in Socialist America_(substack.com/home/post/p-145983340) David I. Backer, February 12, 2024 (not really news but you should read this) – No Austerity for Minneapolis!
• MinnPost.com, Community Voices, Jake Schwitzer, March 14 – Private school vouchers: a bad idea that keeps losing but won’t die
• MinnesotaReformer.com,
Melissa Whitler, Aug. 14 – State: Minneapolis Public Schools violating disability law – Audit finds major problems in special education
• Schooling in Socialist America (davidibacker.substack.com) David I. Backer, July 14 – Breathing, Bad for Prices (Better AQ raises test scores 25% but it doesn’t raise property values so districts don’t care)
• MinnPost.com, Alyssa L. Olson and Susi Keefe, Sept. 23 – Student food insecurity is a big problem on Twin Cities campuses; Research conducted on three Twin Cities campuses showed that 54% of students sometimes aren’t getting the nutrition they need to learn.
For further resources about public education, charter schools, school board politics, school finance issues and school shootings, see the following:
1. In the Public Interest (ITPI) online magazine, inthepublicinterest.org/issues/public-education
2. Schooling in Socialist America, davidibacker.substack.com
3. K12 School Shooting Database, k12ssdb.org
News in higher education – ending on a high note!
In case you hadn’t noticed, the Trump administration really, really hates higher education. It’s right up there with their other main evils threatening their version of America – trans people, brown or black immigrants, wind power, and people demanding to see the Epstein files.
To be honest, things were taking a dark turn in higher education even under the preceding Democratic administration, in terms of selective enforcement of academic freedoms and outright suppression of certain types of political activity. Now we have all that on steroids, plus random and brutal cuts to science and health care research, attacks on faculty of color, attacks on trans students and staff, and the ICE Gestapo situation being so bad that international students just don’t want to come here anymore.
It was against this bleak backdrop that University of Minnesota staff, organized by Teamsters local 320, were facing a terrible contract bargaining situation. Despite a history of their union leadership avoiding strikes and urging members to accept bad contracts, there was a new feeling of solidarity simmering in the rank and file. This came gloriously to the surface when they rejected the University’s “final and best” offer by a vote of 82% against acceptance.
Both the U of M management and the old guard union leaders were caught off-guard, but the Teamsters were prepared for this. Local 320 represents about 1400 workers in areas like cleaning and food service. It looked like they all showed up at once, in one of the largest strikes seen since the historic MFT (Minneapolis Teachers, now MFE) strike in 2022. Also other unions and community supporters came out in large numbers to swell the pickets.
In their blind panic, the U of M administration did some stupid things. They accused strikers of “calling ICE” on the scab workers brought in, and used unnecessarily brutal policing tactics, arresting picketers and in one (televised) case, assaulting a 67-year old community supporter to the point of breaking her ribs and giving her a concussion.
The Teamsters would have probably won this strike eventually anyway, but what everyone acknowledges kept it to four days was the impending Farm Aid concert at the Huntington Bank Stadium. My friend Paul in his Twin Cities Labor substack describes it succinctly:
This week, over 1,400 UMN Teamsters went out on an absolutely massive four day strike. They went out asking for the same raises that other workers at the U got, and to keep their contract expiration date in the summer. They ended up getting exactly that, after four days of huge, militant pickets, solidarity from students and other unions, and intervention by Willie Nelson of all people. [Subscribe to Paul’s substack here – twincitieslaborreport.substack.com]
Basically, the good old farmer-labor-(country music) solidarity held fast as Farm Aid organizers told the U of M in no uncertain terms that they would not cross a picket line and had contingency plans to cancel their booking even at the very last minute. The U came through with an acceptable offer the very next day.
Two things came in the aftermath of the strike. Paul’s substack newsletter is again my source. First thing:
AFSCME Local 3800- U of MN- After the successful strike by the Teamsters, 2,000 clerical, technical, and healthcare workers at the U also won a TA [tentative agreement] last week. Their agreement models the Teamsters TA, with a three year deal with 10% raises, back pay, and recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day being highlights. Congrats to the AFSCME workers, who in addition to many pickets and rallies of their own, were extremely active in strike solidarity with the Teamsters.
The second thing is that there is a shakeup in the upcoming elections in the Teamsters local led by Jackson Kerr, the business agent for the U of M Teamsters.
Together, these changes may alter the face of U of M union contracts in the future.
