Dear partners,
As many of you know, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is launching a new public engagement division at MDE to help better support families, communities and schools.
I am excited to share that Lee Her is MDE's new public engagement director. Creating a public engagement division at MDE has been an important priority for many months and I’m so excited that it is Lee who will be the one shaping and leading this new team.
Lee has been with MDE for three years as a community engagement specialist. Her role was designed to help build understanding and promote implementation of community engagement requirements in federal and state education laws as the enduring foundation of schools’ relationship with immigrant/refugee-experienced families and the organizations that serve these communities. For parents, Lee was a navigator who could help interpret school policies and practices and connect parents to the appropriate individuals within a school or political system who can address their concerns. For the community, she was a liaison between MDE and Minnesota’s immigrant/refugee-experienced populations. For schools, Lee was someone who could help strengthen language assistance services and build strategic relationships with external stakeholders.
Before coming to MDE, Lee worked for the Emma B. Howe YMCA Youth Intervention Services division, where she provided transitional housing case management services to formerly homeless young adults. She worked closely with school counselors, homeless liaisons and student/youth-focused community-based organizations in the Hennepin and Anoka school districts to expand and streamline homeless prevention services in schools. In this role, Lee advocated for the Safe Harbor Law that passed in 2011 that ended the criminalization of youth who engage in prostitution. She also supported the implementation of Minnesota’s homeless youth co-coordinated assessment system that ensures every individual receives equal opportunity to housing and supports they need. Lee’s experience working with homeless youth ultimately refined her career trajectory to focus on the intersection of education, public policy and civic engagement.
Prior to the YMCA, Lee served in AmeriCorps for two years with the Child Abuse Prevention Center in Sacramento, California. Again, her role was multifaceted because it involved facilitating a home-based positive parenting curriculum with families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Lee worked with parents as young as 16 to as old as 65 years of age who participated in the program as part of transitioning out of Child Welfare Services. Community engagement was a critical component of effective facilitation because it was important to understand how collective experience, poverty and racism factored into families’ daily lived reality.
Lee grew up on the east side of Saint Paul where she lived with her parents and seven siblings in a house built for them by Habitat for Humanity. They have lived there for more than 20 years. She is a daughter of Hmong refugee parents, a former English Learner and a humble graduate of Saint Paul Public Schools.
I’m sure many of you may also have questions about the new director role and the additional positions to be hired in the new public engagement division. We hope to provide that update in the next couple of months as Lee settles into her new director role.
With Lee's help, we look forward to strengthening our partnership with you.
Thank you,
Wendy Hatch
Chief of Staff and Assistant Commissioner for the Office of External Relations
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