I’m running for school board so I can hold our public school system accountable to its stated goal of providing a high quality, anti-racist, culturally responsive education for every Minneapolis student.
My name is Lara Bergman. I’m an early childhood educator, MPS parent and proud MPS alum.
I grew up in Minneapolis.
I grew up in the Kingfield neighborhood while attending Audubon (now Lake Harriet Lower) and moved to the Windom neighborhood where I attended 3rd-8th grade before attending South High. Ask me about sledding at Lyndale-Farmstead Park, eating ice cream at Sebastian Joe’s in Linden Hills or what color the Lake Harriet Bandshell should be and I will tell you. I will also tell you that I am proud to be a product of public school. I had great experiences and great teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools I attended. I developed my sense of compassion and a deep acceptance for difference because of experiences at Windom. I developed lifelong friendships through band, cross country running and theater at South. When I reflect on who I am today, I am grateful for the education I got both in and outside the classroom.
I’m raising my kids in District Six.
When my husband and I were deciding where to put down roots, we knew we wanted to stay in Minneapolis. We moved into the Armatage neighborhood when my oldest was four months old and on the first night in our house I remember hearing the clink ring through our windows of baseballs on aluminum bats from the park across the street. We were home. Our kids are spending their formative years developing a strong sense of place in some of the same spaces I did. I love getting to recreate childhood memories with my own children. Ten years later and our kids are now in 2nd and 4th grade at Armatage. I know that ALL families in Minneapolis want great schools, opportunities for enriching extracurriculuar activities and a safe place to play.
I’ve dedicated my life to children.
I’ve loved working with kids for as long as I can remember. Ask my sister and she will tell you how we spent countless hours playing “school” in our upstairs hallway growing up. It wasn’t until I become an Americorps member serving as an early literacy tutor in college that I knew I had found my calling. I went on to receive my Montessori teaching credential in 2011 and Master's in Education in 2014 from St. Catherine University in St Paul. For over 15 years I worked in early childhood classrooms as a teacher (with the exception of one year when I taught at an International Montessori school in Thailand) and what I’ve found is that in supportive environments all children can thrive and reveal their brilliance. This is why children will always be at the center of what I do.
As a CARE Fellow during Minnesota’s 2023 legislative session I organized efforts to advocate for historic investment for both early childhood and public education. It was after that experience that I felt the call to have a bigger impact on the systems impacting children and families, so I left the classroom for a job at the state. My work at the Department of Human Services focused on building relationships with communities to inform how Minnesota is building an equitable early childhood system and addressing compensation for the early childhood workforce. Through it all, I feel lucky to do what I love and that the work I get to do has a real impact on children and their futures.
As an educator, I’ve also experienced the challenges of systems that undervalue the critical work we do. I understand the need for systemic changes to funding for education, accountability to the children and families we serve, and the importance of community coming together so that our students have what they need both in and outside the classroom.
Equity is embedded into everything I do.
When I began teaching full-time for a Head Start program in Iowa City after college, I saw firsthand the challenges facing children and families experiencing poverty. After returning to Minneapolis a couple years later, I worked in a Montessori school near the University of Minnesota campus and realized certain educational opportunities are only available to certain kinds of families. That’s not okay. Now as a parent of school-aged children, I see the same inequities playing out in our public schools. Right now race and zip code can too often be used to determine a child’s experiences, opportunities and success in school.
What I’ve come to understand in my lifelong journey of interrogating systems that perpetuate these inequities is that disrupting them and ultimately working to dismantle them benefits EVERYONE. As a trained racial equity facilitator, I have led honest conversations about equity as part of the Armatage PTA, Armatage Neighborhood Association Board, and chair of a nonprofit Montessori preschool in St. Paul. I also organized a network of over 100 Montessori educators in early 2020 dedicated to anti-biased and anti-racist practices in schools. Always committed to learning, I am currently participating in an Embracing Equity Leadership Residency that equips leaders in Minnesota to build equity into organizational climate, culture, systems and structures.