Regional Industry & News

ROCHESTER — When Julie Workman first drove into Rochester, she wasn’t necessarily expecting to work in the school district for long.

That was more than 50 years ago. And ever since then, she’s been either a teacher or an education policymaker in her adopted city.

She’s seen a lot of change in that amount of time. Some of the schools she used to work in have since closed or been repurposed. One of the schools she was teaching in when she retired didn't exist when she first arrived.

She’s worked under superintendents and has had a hand in hiring them. She worked with the district to navigate a pandemic and launch a large-scale building project — all the while watching thousands of students pass through the city’s schools, including her own children.

And now, she is finally stepping down from her decades-long tenure with Rochester Public Schools once she finishes her current term on the district’s school board this December.

By the time her term ends, it will have been 52 years since she first arrived. She spent the first 36 as a teacher and the last 16 as a school board member.

She feels like the district is on solid-enough footing that she can feel comfortable about stepping aside for others to take over.

“Are things perfect? No. Is everything fixed? No,” Workman said. “But I know there are people there who can do the work.”

Although Workman has dedicated most of her life to education in one form or another, music was the first love. She remembers sitting at a piano with her grandmother when she was just a child at a piano, trying to pick out a tune.

“I remember her saying to my mother, ‘Julie’s going to be a musician when she grows up, I can feel it’,” Workman said about her grandmother.

Even after switching her major from performance to education, she maintained her own skills as a musician and performed with the Rochester Symphony Orchestra for almost 20 years.

Raised in Virginia and college-educated in Indiana, Workman found her way to Minnesota in the first half of the 1970s when her brother was working on his doctorate in Minneapolis.

As fate would have it, the connection that originally brought her down to Rochester was one that reached all the way back to her childhood.

Her family stayed in touch with her brother’s elementary school teacher throughout the years. And, it just so happened that he suggested she look into an open position he knew of in Rochester.

That’s when she made her way down to an interview.

For the next three and a half decades, she would be a music teacher and orchestra conductor in the city’s schools — including Edison Elementary, which is now the district’s central office and the place where Workman has presided as one of seven school board directors.

On top of being an educator and a musician, she also considers herself a problem solver. It’s a skill she tried to teach her students in the classroom, and one that helped propel her to the boardroom.

“When I was teaching high school, in particular, I’d stand up in front of the group and I’d make a sound on my violin and say ‘what do I have to do to fix this?’” Workman said. “They had to analyze how I could fix (the sound).”

She officially retired in October 2009, but continued teaching part-time — a move which dropped her to the bottom of the seniority list. Shortly thereafter, her position was scheduled to be eliminated due to budget constraints.

Even though she had already retired the year before and was ready for whatever may come next, her students weren’t as willing to see her go.

In 2010, a group of music students set up a concert outside the school district’s central office. A Post Bulletin article from the time said “the students hauled out their instruments and music stands and played in the setting sun next to a sign that read ‘Save Mrs. Workman’s job’ in a sort of musical protest of the cutting of 53 teachers.”

One of the students leading that protest concert was Nathan Schwab, who praised Workman's teaching.

"Mrs. Workman is the best teacher I've ever had," Schwab was quoted at the time. "No other teacher comes close. The orchestra is the best it's ever been at Century, and there are many who would echo that sentiment."

Later that year, she would be elected to her first term on the Rochester School Board. It was a decision born, at least in part, by the concern she had for the status quo.

From 2007 to 2010, the superintendent was Romain Dallemand. A controversial figure, he would go on to an eight-month prison term for tax evasion connected to his time as a superintendent in Georgia after leaving Rochester.

Workman remembers an event in Rochester’s Central Park where protesters came out with signs saying “I represent a scared staff member.”

“The trust factor among teachers was effectively zero,” Workman said. “If the district in 2010 was in the same place it is now, I might not have filed,” she said. In 2010, the district "was a mess.”

But file, she did. She went on to be re-elected in 2014, 2018 and 2022.

Most of her first decade on the board corresponded with the leadership of Superintendent Mike Muñoz, who joined the district in 2011 after an interim superintendent filled in following the departure of Dallemand.

Muñoz would go on to resign from Rochester Public Schools in 2021 in the wake of plagiarism accusations. However, Workman says she still maintains the opinion that “he was the right person at that time following Romain Dallemand.”

She also respects Muñoz for his efforts to lead the district through the pandemic until he resigned at the end of the 2020-21 school year.

In 2021, the district hired Kent Pekel as the superintendent, which Workman calls “The best decision that the board has made.”

By the time her third term came to an end in 2022, Workman had already been on the board for over a decade. And after a tumultuous term that included the departure of Muñoz, as well as the pandemic and all the chaos surrounding it, it would have been an understandable moment for Workman to bow out.

After all, the district had hired a superintendent Workman was confident in. Students had returned to school following the pandemic. It wouldn't have been surprising to have felt burnt out from the experience.

But that election of 2022 also represented a wave of pent-up frustration toward the school district and the decisions it had made on a range of issues.

“We worked through it; it was difficult,” Workman said about that era. “You have to have a pretty thick skin when you get all kinds of just hideously nasty emails from people who tell you all kinds of things about who you are that you’re not."

That resulted in a group of four candidates who filed for seats on the Rochester School Board and campaigned as a bloc.

The group told the former publication “The Med City Beat” that “The election results will either solidify anarchy, confusion, racial divide and lack of academic focus, or give us the chance to regain the academic excellence that was once associated with our city.”

Describing herself as "inherently stubborn," Workman decided to file for one more term. Part of the decision was based on the prompting of her husband.

“He said ‘I think you need to run,’” Workman said. “This is the same husband who said to me in 2018, ‘This is your last term, right?’ I figured, for good or for ill, my name is out there. ... So even if I found someone who I thought would be a good replacement, that person would not have the name recognition.”

Workman went on to win her seat in the 2022 election with 61.48% of the vote.

Now, four more years later, Workman is in a place where she feels like it’s time for someone else to take the reins.

She said it’s hard to know whether she would have done anything differently over the years.

What she does know is that 54 years ago as a young teacher, she wasn’t confident about her decision and consoled herself with the thought that once the year ended she could “ru