A transgender woman charged with murder in Hennepin County is currently being held in solitary confinement in the county jail, local LGBT rights activists say. The activists are attacking the county for using a measure criticized by many national transgender rights organizations as a flawed attempt to keep the accused safe while she awaits trial.

The prisoner, 23-year old Chrishaun McDonald, has been charged in the murder of 47-year old Dean Schmitz, of Richfield, outside the Schooner Tavern on the night of June 5. Despite identifying as a woman, McDonald is currently being held on $150,000 bail in the men’s section of the county jail in downtown Minneapolis.

Solitary confinement is an imperfect solution to a terrible problem, said Michael Silverman, Executive Director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“In jail, as in post-sentencing prison, transgender people are at great risk of harm from other prisoners,” Silverman told the Minnesota Independent. “We see high incidences of violence and sexual violence committed against them because they’re transgender.”

In a high-profile February report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), researchers found that 37 percent of transgender inmates surveyed reported harassment by correctional officers, while only 35% reported harassment by fellow inmates. Sixteen percent reported physical assaults, and 15 percent reported sexual assaults while in a prison or a jail. Furthermore, black transgender inmates reported harassment rates 20–25 percent higher than their white peers.

“As a guiding principal, the safety and security of all inmates is paramount,” said Lisa Kiava, spokseperson for the Hennepin County Sherif’s Office.

Officials with the Sheriff’s Department could not be reached for comment on the county’s policies for holding transgender detainees, or why McDonald was being housed in the men’s section of the jail. However, several transgender rights organizations say solitary confinement is one way jails and prisons try to protect transgender prisoners from other inmates.

“It’s a terrible proposed solution that’s implemented too widely,” said Lisa Motett, an attorney with the NGLTF and an author of the Task Force’s recent report on anti-transgender discrimination.

While solitary confinement keeps a transgender prisoner and their assailant separated, Motett said, being kept in solitary confinement typically limits or eliminates a prisoner’s ability to use exercise yards, libraries and other prison facilities.

“Solitary confinement is incredibly punitive,” Motett told the Minnesota Independent. “It punishes the victim instead of the perpetrator.”

“Chrishaun McDonald’s case is a tragedy, but unfortunately it’s not a rarity,” said Katie Burgess, Executive Director of the Trans Youth Support Network. “Although none of us knows all the details about what happened on June 5, we do know that the deck is stacked against Ms. McDonald, and we ask concerned community members to support her in her trial.”

Burgess said at a press conference on Tuesday that she and other community members worried McDonald would not receive a fair trial because she is transgender.

McDonald reportedly confessed to stabbing Schmitz in a fight after Schmitz and others at the Schooner Tavern asked her, “Did you think you were going to rape somebody in those girl clothes?” The remark started a brawl, during which Schmitz was stabbed. He later died from his wounds.

Hennepin County attorneys say Schmitz was trying to break up the brawl when McDonald stabbed him, but McDonald’s friends maintain the attack was in self-defense. In a letter sent from jail, McDonald recanted her earlier confession, saying she was covering for unknown members of the group she was with at the Schooner Tavern.

Burgess suggested that transphobia could make a jury discount these and other pieces of McDonald’s story.

Meanwhile, friends of McDonald present at Tuesday’s press conference were adamant that she was not a murderer.

“That’s not CC,” said McDonald’s friend David Tomlinson. “That’s not who she was.”

Republican Rep. John Kline looks like he’s becoming the for-profit education industry’s proverbial “man in Washington.” In February, he proposed an amendment to defund any attempt by the federal government to overhaul regulations governing the industry, without a clear sense of what those new regulations would look like. In April, his quarterly campaign finance report filings with the Federal Election Commission showed that he’s raised more money from for-profit higher education–related PACs in the first four months of 2011 than in the entire 2009-2010 election cycle.

Now, following the federal Department of Education’s release of the final regulations Thursday, Kline released a statement condemning the changes, which the Obama administration says are essential to making sure students at 2- and 4-year for-profit colleges receive an adequate education and are able to pay back their often expensive educations.

The statement, issued in cooperation with Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), bemoaned the “red tape” and “unfair” targeting of places like the University of Phoenix and the ITT Technical Institutes which chiefly provide career-oriented vocational training for their students.

“At a time when Americans are desperate for jobs and opportunities, it is deeply troubling the administration continues to push an initiative that will limit the ability of millions of individuals to gain the skills and training necessary to succeed in the workplace,” said Kline.

Kline’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Whether those institutions actually teach students marketable skills and effectively prepare them for jobs in fields like healthcare, however, isn’t even an open question at this point. Numerous media reports have highlighted the fact that many graduates aren’t able to pay their student loans (they comprise about 46% of student loan defaulters, despite being a little over 10% of the post-secondary student population), and their tuition typically is double that at non-profit institutions.

Concern over this sector’s abusive treatment of their mostly poor and lower-income students has risen so high that 10 state attorneys general, led by Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, have launched an investigation into the industry’s practices.

The for-profit career college industry has pushed back in public and in private, according to industry watchdogs, culminating in Kline’s February attempt to defund enforcement of regulations on the industry.

“The lobbying and marketing effort put forth by the for-profit industry speaks volumes about their reluctance to be held up to scrutiny,” said Jose Cruz of Education Trust, “even though the majority of the dollars generated by this industry come from taxpayers [via federal student loans].”

Some of those taxpayer dollars are making their way back to Kline’s campaign. In 2009 and 2010, Kline was the ranking member on the House of Representatives’ Education and the Workforce committee, which gave him a bully pulpit, but not much opportunity to influence legislation moving through the committee. According to FEC filings covering those two years, his campaign and his Political Action Committee received $21,200 from the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (then known as the Career College Association) and a number of PACs run by these for-profit institutions. The committee chair, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), raked in $34,300 from the same or similar sources over the same time period.

As Kline took over the Education and the Workforce Committee gavel in January, and as the regulatory battle heated up, the industry’s largess grew significantly. From January through March of this year (the earliest data available from the FEC), Kline and his PAC found themselves with $21,400 from the for-profit college sector, while Miller, now the ranking member, collected no donations from that industry.

Perhaps the dirtiest secret of Kline’s professed outrage over the new regulations, though, may be the sheer mildness of the regulations issued last Thursday.

According to Education Trust’s Cruz, there are countless ways in which the for-profit college industry can circumvent these measures.

“The way it’s structured now, it provides a series of loopholes and conditions,” he said. The administration is “bending backwards for these companies to give them many opportunities to dance around the new regulations.”

In the face of legislative and lobbying pushback, Cruz charged, the administration has become more concerned with limiting political fallout than with issuing tough regulations, possibly because the legislation giving them authority to regulate the industry in the first place is soon to come up for renewal.

A Department of Education spokesperson defended the regulations, repeating comments made by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement announcing the new regulations.

“We’re asking companies that get up to 90 percent of their profits from taxpayer dollars to be at least 35 percent effective,” Duncan said. “This is a perfectly reasonable bar and one that every for-profit program should be able to reach. We’re also giving poor performing for-profit programs every chance to improve. But if you get three strikes in four years, you’re out,”

For Cruz, though, the changes are not enough.

“Hundreds of thousands of students that will continue to be underserved,” he said.

“What do they know about kids living in poverty, about kids whose parents are refugees and immigrants? What do they know about those experiences and challenges? ” said Minneapolis School Board Chair Jill Davis, speaking about GOP legislators who approved the plan to defund Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth public schools by $415, $395 and $132 per student, respectively.

“Every child deserves every opportunity they can get, and to not have this be a driving value of this legislation makes me very angry,” Davis said.

Holding mostly true to their promise not to raise taxes, Republicans passed an education funding bill that shifts money from three kinds of dedicated school funding — integration funding, “compensatory” funding for districts that have high concentrations of poor students, and a fund to help districts manage rapidly growing special education costs — to increase the basic per-pupil aid given to schools by the state. The money Minneapolis will loose has previously been used to provide support services for poor students, students who are still learning English and special education students.

“It doesn’t mean they can’t learn,” said Sarah Snapp, budget director for the Minneapolis Public Schools. “It just means we have to do more as a school system and as a community to give them what they need so that they can do more.”

The problem, Snapp said, is that those supports are all very personnel-intensive.

The same rule holds true in Worthington, a rural town in the southwestern corner of the state that has become a magnet for Latino and Asian immigrants over the last 15 years, according to superintendent John Landgaard.

“Right now, we have three Hispanic interpreters,” Landgaard said. “We also added three ELL [English Language Learners] teachers just last year, we have different software programs, and we have put in place educational specialists to help address some of those challenges [faced by ELL students].”

All these positions cost money, and after years of state education budgets that have either cut funding or not kept pace with inflation, there’s not much of that green stuff to go around.

“If we loose integration funding, for example,” said Minneapolis’ Snapp, “we’ll have to eliminate [the magnet schools it funds], or find another way to fund them. But if we find another way to fund them, and that would mean taking money from general aid [the basic $5,124 that districts get from the state per student under the GOP proposal].”

If the cuts were to pass, most districts would be seeing modest increases of around $50 per student. This pales in comparison to the potential $415-per-student loss that Minneapolis schools’ Snapp said would devastate the district’s ability to pay for support services. As suburban school systems like Anoka-Hennepin, Hopkins, Elk River, Eden Prairie, North St Paul, Rosemount-Apple Valley and others see more and more “vulnerable students” move into their districts, they could be on the hook to provide a lot more services than they have the money to pay for.

An analysis of data from the Minnesota Department of Education shows that many of these districts, which cover many mostly Republican-controlled legislative districts around the Twin Cities metro, have seen their numbers of ELL students grow by between one and 10 percent between 2003 and 2009. However, most have seen their numbers of poor students jump by 40, 60 or even 341 percent (in the case of the Elk River school district), although increases of between 40 and 100 percent were more the norm. The Farmington school district, which is partly represented by House Education Finance Committee Chair Pat Garofalo, saw its numbers of poor students jump by 128 percent. Garofalo did not return calls requesting comment on this story.

As reported in the Star-Tribune on Thursday, and previously noted by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race and Poverty in 2010, these demographic trends are long-term, and not necessarily related to the impact of the economic downturn.

Jim Grathwol, the Minneapolis schools’ state lobbyist, says he thinks the potentially short-sighted budget bill is fueled by the large number of freshmen in GOP ranks, and the relative inexperience of GOP leaders in the House and Senate.

“They may not know how to do this three-way dance,” Grathwol said, speaking of budget negotiations.

“They see what they think are worse results costing more money [in the Minneapolis and St Paul schools], and they want that money back,” he added, referring to the achievement gap between poor students of color and white students.

“There’s an attempt to pin the achievement gap fail on the core cities donkey — it’s a twofer with political appeal, as the core cities are mostly DFL strongholds,” he said.

To some, Friday morning’s raids on members of the Twin Cities-area Anti-War Committee by FBI agents look like a replay of the 2008 preemptive arrests by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department of activists planning protests around the Republican National Convention.

“Fighting for peace is not a crime!” chanted members of the Anti-War Committee and their supporters at Friday afternoon’s press conference on the front lawn of a member’s house. “Stop the harassment now!”

Meredith Aby, a leader of the Anti-War Committee and one of the targets of Friday morning's raids. Photo: James Sanna for the Minnesota Independent

One of the search warrants, whose details were first published by Twin Cities Indymedia, sought information on the possible “US to travel to Colombia, Palestine and any other foreign location in support of foreign terrorist organizations including but not limited to FARC, PFLP and Hezbollah.” It authorized FBI agents to seize computers, and some Anti-War Committee members said their personal cell phones, personal computers, passports, videos and some documents were also taken. According to Meredith Aby, a leader in the group, agents also took a computer and checkbook belonging to the Committee.

“They’re trying to make it so the Anti-War Committee can’t function,” she told the Minnesota Independent.

In interviews with the Independent, Aby and committee members Jess Sundin and Steph Yorek disavowed connections to Lebanese Hezbollah, the Colombian revolutionary group FARC or the small Palestinian militant group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“We meet with human rights activists in other countries to get understanding of situations they face,” said Yorek.

Sundin said committee members use the trips to gather information that the group then uses in presentations to the public back in the United States.

“All trips always been very public,” Sundin said.

Aby said that in Palestine, committee members met with the Palestinian Women’s Commission and another group that advocates for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. In Colombia, she said members met with representatives of Colombian unions.

“In Colombia, you’re considered to be a FARC supporter if you’re a member of a union,” Aby said. Critics of current Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos or former president Alvaro Uribe were also considered supporters of the FARC by Colombian authorities.

“We meet with them to bring information back to the United States to reveal the reality of Israeli apartheid and to illustrate what our taxpayer dollars are funding,” Aby told the Independent.

Peter Erlinder, a professor at St. Paul's William Mitchell College of Law and member of the Anti-War Committee. Photo: James Sanna for the Minnesota Independent

Fact-Finding Leads to Investigations?

Aby said Anti-War Committee members sometimes engage in “political accompaniment work,” where they stay with activists “to keep them from being abducted or bombed” by authorities.

On their lawyers’ advice, neither Aby nor Sundin would answer questions about whether they’d met with avowed members of the terrorist groups named in the search warrant. However, Aby told members of the media that she did not keep in contact with members of the groups they met with on their fact-finding trips.

Aby said she had traveled to Palestine in 2002 and to Colombia in 2004 and 2006.

Peter Erlinder, the controversial William Mitchell College of Law professor and a longtime Anti-War Committee member, told the media that the committee was being targeted under an expanded definition of what constitutes “material support for terrorism,” upheld by a recent US Supreme Court decision. The Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder case, he said, confirmed that a US citizen could be prosecuted for even offering legal counsel to a member of a group labeled as a terrorist organization by the State Department. He suggested that the Anti-War Committee’s fact-finding meetings with Palestinian and Colombian dissidents may have opened themselves up to these raids under the loose guidelines.

“The political effect is to attack political opposition,” Ehrlinder said. “Even though local law enforcement may not intend it, that is the effect.”

In a video produced by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was involved in the Humanitarian Law Project case, a lawyer for the plaintiffs argued that under current law, the definition of “material support” has too many gray areas that could trap ordinary citizens.

“The terms are too blurry. Ordinary citizens can’t determine what’s prohibited or what isn’t,” Shayana Kadidal said.

He argued that the supreme court’s 6-3 decision in Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder ran counter to a previous decision, US vs. Scales, that struck down attempts to outlaw membership in the Communist Party.

“They said the government couldn’t hold people criminally liable for all the things the Communist Party did just because they chose to associate with [that Party].”

Photo: Dierdre Conde, Flickr

“It started in middle school,” Gary Skarsten said, remembering a gay student he used to mentor from a town near Braham, Minn. “He was being taunted on the playground — being called a ‘fag,’ and that sort of thing.”

It’s an all-too-familiar story for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or transsexual students or their parents – students being singled out and mercilessly harassed by other students because school administrators can’t, or won’t, act. A coalition of Minnesota LGBT advocacy groups is trying to keep this story from repeating with a bill that would require all schools to have anti-bullying policies that protect a broad range of youth, including LGBT students.

“The student [near Braham] would come home in tears; his parents didn’t know what to do – they tried everything with the school district,” said Skarsten, a member of the Cambridge, Minn., chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, known as PFLAG, and a gay rights advocate in north-central Minnesota.

When I met them for the first time [after this bullying had gone on for some time], they were in tears because nothing had worked.”

At one point, Skarsten said, the parents “feared for his [their son’s] life.”

Fed up with inaction by the school, they eventually pulled their son out of the district and sent him to a school in St. Cloud, about 35 miles away.

“The school administrators knew what was going on, because the parents had met with them several times. I think the problem was the district didn’t know how to deal with it,” said Skarsten.

Stephanie Hazen of the Minnesota advocacy group Rainbow Families says a number of school districts around the state are in a similar position, mainly because administrators may be confused about laws about bullying.

Districts tend to follow the lead of the statewide Association of School Boards in setting their anti-discrimination policies. The association in turn follows a statute requiring schools to have a “model policy” that includes sexual, racial and religious harassment (harassment is a legally recognized form of discrimination). The Minnesota Human Rights Act specifically protects citizens based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.

That’s why, she said, Rainbow Families is crafting the Safe Schools for All Bill in cooperation with OutFront, Minnesota’s biggest LGBT lobbying group, and state Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL- Minneapolis.

“The bill will essentially fix the ["model policy"] statute and broaden it beyond the Human Rights Act to include physical appearance,” as well as gender identity and sexual orientation, Hazen said. “Our research shows it’s the biggest reason a student gets bullied.”

Or, as Monica Meyer of OutFront put it, “You’ll be protected, even if you’ve got big ears.”

Hazen said she couldn’t speak on the legislation’s prospects once it’s introduced, as the bill’s wording was still being finalized.

Alan Horowitz of St. Paul Public Schools’ Out For Equity program said Safe Schools for All would give local advocates across Minnesota “resources to go to their school boards and community meetings and ask for policies” to protect LGBT students and students from LGBT families.

Both Minneapolis and St. Paul have long-standing policies protecting these students, he said, and have created offices to train teachers and administrators to deal with anti-LGBT bullying and help students educate their peers about what it’s like to be an LGBT student or to have LGBT parents.

“Because the issue is so new,” said Horowitz, “a lot of people don’t know what to do and are afraid to ask. The legislation has the potential to put vocabulary words in the law and be a conversation-starter.”

If you were to map the environment for young LGBT Minnesotans, the result would look like a patchwork quilt – some towns are fairly friendly, activists said, but in others it feels intimidating or even dangerous to be out.

“In small towns, it can all depend on one teacher or a principal who makes it their mission” to make the school welcoming, says Leigh Combs, the LGBT Kids Abuse and Prevention coordinator at Minneapolis-based Family and Children’s Service. “It’s different from town to town.”

Since the student Skarsten formerly advsied left his school for St. Cloud, he said, a number of district leaders havetried to improve the climate for LGBT students. But in Bemidji, said activist Cathy Perry, “as far as I can tell, we haveno ongoing, active support groups.”

“There are no GSAs [Gay-Straight Alliances] in the schools,” Perry said, ”and the area PFLAG group shut down a few years ago because they claimed a lack of interest. The only people who were coming to their meetings were gay or lesbian.”

“If no programs are being provided, if evangelical churches who see their sexuality is an abomination are so strong [in Bemidji], what do you think their life is like?” asked Perry, speaking about LGBT students.

Perry said she thinks Horowitz is being overly optimistic when he suggests the Safe Schools for All bill would give her fellow Bemidji activists much leverage. She predicts a “Minnesota Nice” reaction. “They’ll smile and say, ‘Thank you, we’ll address that and we have policies are addressing it,’” she said.

Language for the Safe Schools for All bill is being finalized, said Outfront’s Meyer, and it will be circulated for review “in a few days.” It’s hard to gauge its prospects should it hit Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s desk, although there’s promise because it requires no funding and targets not only LBGT students. But even if it does get passed, said Perry, “it would still be an uphill battle. We have no political allies here. No one on the school board, no one in the courts, no one on the City Council. Will they [the bill’s authors] have anyone who patrols and monitors it?”

While the bill may offer limited help in some communities, it certainly could have helped the student Skarsten advised, who is now doing well, albeit at a school a good drive from home. He’ll be graduating this year in St. Cloud, Skarsten said. His former high school will be putting on the “Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepherd in 1998.

“We’ve got a long way to go yet,” Skarsten said. “And we’re taking it one step at a time.”

Photo: Dierdre Conde, Flickr

Photo: Lisa Yarost, Flickr

Will state funding for education take a hit in efforts to close Minnesota’s gaping $5.3 billion state budget deficit?

State Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis, thinks so. “Do the math” was his pessimistic analysis at a panel in Bloomington last Tuesday, pointing to education’s 40 percent share of the state budget. Without new taxes, significant cuts throughout Minnesota’s budget will have to be made, and education’s huge share of the budget makes it a tempting target, said State Rep. Mindy Greiling (DFL-Roseville) in an interview on Friday.

Ask public school officials, though, and they’ll probably tell you what Lois Rockney, the chief financial officer of St. Paul Public Schools, says: After years of underfunding, “[t]here’s no fat left to cut” in school districts’ budgets.

In St. Paul, the Capitol may be dividing against itself over the issue of funding. Pogemiller has floated the idea of a 1.6 percent cut in every major budget area, and while the idea is not even a firm proposal yet, it’s already eliciting strong reactions from other members of the Legislature.

“I don’t think that’s a sensible approach,” said Greiling, who chairs the House K-12 Education Finance Committee. “The House does not agree with [Pogemiller’s suggestion],” she said flatly.

And Greiling feels she has Gov. Tim Pawlenty in her corner. According to Minnesota’s Constitution, Pawlenty has the authority to unilaterally cut unspent funds in the current fiscal biennium (ending in June), and he will propose the budget for the 2010-11 biennium. In an interview last week, Greiling said, “The governor has named education funding as one of his priorities to protect, and I look forward to holding him to his promise.”

If the governor decides to protect education funding, this would mean other huge budgets, like health care and welfare dollars, would see deep cuts — hardly a popular decision and one that could severely impact those sectors of government.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do for the long term” if education funding is cut, said Peggy Ingison, the chief financial officer of Minneapolis Public Schools. Most districts rely heavily on aid from St. Paul to fund all aspects of their operations. On average, 20 percent or less of a district’s funding comes from local property taxes.

Minnesota’s school districts vary widely –- some urban, some rural; some small, some large; some financially healthy, some barely holding their heads above water –- so any cuts in state education aid would impact them all differently. Some school districts may weather this crisis relatively well, because their voters have recently approved multiyear property tax levies that will give some cushion to their budgets through the most tumultuous times of this recession. Dennis Peterson, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools, said he was confident his district won’t even start feeling pressure until 2010-11 because a property tax levy passed in 2007 makes up 27 percent of the budget. In 2005 the district restructured itself, anticipating declining amounts of state aid, and now draws students from area private and charter schools.

But to most of the school officials this reporter spoke to, the future is unclear, verging on gloomy, and many were anxious about their districts’ future health.

In Minneapolis, Ingison says district leaders are afraid parents will pull their children from the district if too many specialized programs — such as culturally focused schools or language immersion programs — are cut. After struggling with declining enrollment for many years, MPS established many of these programs in recent years in an effort to woo parents back to the district and away from the charter schools that have attracted parents with these kinds of alternative education options.

“The 2010-11 school year doesn’t look good,” Burnsville-Eagan-Savage schools Superintendent Randy Clegg said in an interview Friday. While that’s 16 months away, if state aid gets slashed, the most serious cuts will hit then. Clegg said his district “needs to know what we can live without.”

In New Ulm, in southern Minnesota, Superintendent Harold Remme said his schools would be freezing all non-essential new hiring, and were also experimenting with ways to share some administrative personnel with neighboring districts. For Remme, this is a bitter decision. “We just came off of six years of declining enrollment… [where] we cut $700 million from the budget each year.”

“We’ve made as many reductions as we possibly can,” said Superintendent Chuck Futterer of the Cook County Schools, on Minnesota’s North Shore. “We’ve been looking at reductions for many years” as enrollment has declined and state aid has not kept up with inflation. “We’ve cut bus drivers, custodians, support staff, maintenance workers, and we’re looking at cutting one principal [out of two],” whose duties Futterer will take on. “The only thing left to cut is teachers.”

Superintendents are waiting on tenterhooks for January, when the governor is to issue his proposed budget for the next two-year fiscal cycle, so they can start planning ways to accommodate any state budget cuts. Most schools, they said, will manage to scrape by through cutting what are usually considered essential staff and programming. However, it’s an open question how healthy and effective public school systems will be after serious cuts like these.

Photo: Lisa Yarost