Mothers of Major Resistance: PTA Members Organize Minneapolis Relief Efforts
After federal agents killed Minneapolis mother Renee Good on Jan. 7, Fox News commentator David Marcus decried “organized gangs of wine moms,” groups of “self-important white women” who he said were using “antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.” Wine moms? Try PTA moms. It is indeed mothers who, throughout the […]
After federal agents killed Minneapolis mother Renee Good on Jan. 7, Fox News commentator David Marcus decried “organized gangs of wine moms,” groups of “self-important white women” who he said were using “antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.”
Wine moms? Try PTA moms.
It is indeed mothers who, throughout the Twin Cities, form the vanguard of community organizing to keep their kids’ classmates and educators safe. But many of their efforts to supply food, rent money, medical treatment and even veterinary care to people too endangered to leave their homes are ad hoc, emergency extensions of the parent networks that, in normal times, raise money for the things not in their school’s budget, organize events and fulfill teachers’ school supply wish lists.
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Over the last month, parents who belong to PTAs and other Twin Cities school support groups have tapped their collective organizing and fundraising expertise to meet extraordinary needs that school systems and local governments are hard-pressed to address.
When COVID forced students and teachers online six years ago, schools were pressed into service to meet families’ basic needs. Now, as some 3,000 federal agents target bus stops and school playgrounds in search of immigrants, the need is more profound, according to Minnesota parents who are trying to help.
This time, there is no federal relief funding, no government infrastructure to coordinate ordering Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots for students forced into distance learning, no eviction moratoriums for those who can’t work, no meal box deliveries and frequently no secure way for principals and educators to communicate to their broader school communities.
Instead, there are dozens of GoFundMe campaigns, organized by parents who, in the last three weeks, have tapped their networks to organize patrols to keep children safe as they move from home to school and back, to deliver diapers and formula and, as Feb. 1 draws near, to crowdsource rent money.
Because many of these fundraising campaigns identify vulnerable school communities and individual parents and educators — and because so-called mutual aid networks have become a prime target of federal agents — The 74 is not linking to them. In addition to K-12 schools, some of the funds are intended to meet needs at day care facilities and afterschool programs.
Not all the funds show how much has been raised, but many have running tallies. Some have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars — eye-popping, but, according to organizers, not nearly enough to stave off the anticipated wave of more than 1,600 evictions expected when February rents go unpaid.
Contrary to the “wine moms” trope, these parents say their efforts are a natural, if unfortunate, extension of the ways in which school-based groups normally attempt to fill gaps. Some of the funds are specifically dedicated to paying for diapers or prescriptions, while the largest are for rent.
The parents are also screening people who want to join secure neighborhood online communications channels to try to stop federal agents from identifying and following people delivering supplies. Network members hope the same vetting processes are helping recognize opportunists posting scam solicitations.
“We’ve seen [federal] agents posing as parents to try to infiltrate some of these safety patrols that are happening,” says a mother with two elementary school pupils in Minneapolis. “The level of vetting happening in these virtual spaces is really something.”
City residents mobilized online to support one another in the chaotic days after George Floyd’s murder by police officers in 2020. The outside provocateurs identified by state officials then were Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys and other far-right militants who circulated in neighborhoods, sometimes planting homemade explosives in alleys and hedges and setting fire to gas stations, pharmacies and public buildings such as post offices. Neighbors teamed up to patrol and to alert one another to the presence of outsiders.
The skeleton of an infrastructure, then, already existed when heavily armed federal agents poured into residential neighborhoods — haunting their schools — over the course of the last month.
Some districts, such as suburban Fridley Public Schools, have publicly acknowledged that they are accepting donations to distribute to struggling families. Others, though, are quietly letting parent networks know which families staff have been in contact with, and who has the greatest need.
“We have had schools call our organization and say, ‘We know this family hasn’t been coming to school, can you step in,’” says a Minneapolis mother and advocate whose child attends school in the neighborhood where ICE and Border Patrol agents recently killed two legal observers.
“The power that is coming from PTAs and school site councils and neighborhood organizations is just considerable,” says the mom. Her two children go to affluent schools where some parents have written five-figure checks.
“We’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that’s hardly the actual cost to our city,” said another mother with three children in high-poverty Minneapolis schools. “Public schools are on the front lines of everything ill facing society — and that’s no different now.”
Demonstrations are taking place throughout the Twin Cities, she continues, but the parents and educators finding health care providers who can make home visits or locating someone to take in children whose parents have been detained didn’t ask to be the spine of the resistance.
“I wish they would stop calling us protesters,” she says. “Far from being ‘paid agitators,’ we are paying for it, literally.”
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