Bemidji school board accepts purchase agreement for Central School

BEMIDJI — The Bemidji Area Schools Board of Education approved a purchase agreement for the former Central Elementary School building near the city’s downtown.

Sacred Bundle, a nonprofit through the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, offered $250,000, which the district accepted in a special meeting Friday, Feb. 20.

The agreement for the surplus school was unanimously approved, with board member Ann Long Voelkner thanking those who worked on this sale.

"I think that the buyer will be good for our community as a whole,” she said. “So I'm looking forward to that transition.”

The deal was discussed in a recent closed session, and Sacred Bundle’s planned use fits the district’s deed requirements: that it can’t be used for anything related to the cannabis industry, nor could it be used as a K-12 school.

Central School was retired at the end of 2020-21 school year as a cost-saving measure. A previous purchase agreement from the Red Lake Nation was accepted in November 2023, but the tribal nation withdrew its offer a few months later.

Contributed

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Erika Bailey-Johnson

Erika Bailey-Johnson, an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band, is the vice president of Sacred Bundle’s leadership team and is the manager of the Minwaadizi Project. Her team has been in talks with the district about purchasing Central since late 2024.

Minwaadizi, in Ojibwe, means “one who leads a good life” and is used to describe someone with good character and who lives honestly. Bailey-Johnson said the first grant-funded project will be a public computer lab, but future goals include spaces for environmental programming, a child care center and affordable housing.

She described the Indigenous-led project as an “un-boarding school,” referencing the harms of the residential boarding school system that disconnected Indigenous children from their culture.

"We're flipping that around, we're gonna take people and connect them to the land. That's the environmental education piece,” she said. “We’re also going to do a lot of multi-generational teaching — a lot of elders with kids and all kinds of ages. We're also going to focus on Ojibwe language and culture.”

Bailey-Johnson emphasized that Sacred Bundle’s largely Indigenous board of directors feels strongly about programming that is available to all in the community.

“So if anybody wants to learn about how to harvest wild rice the traditional way, they can. They can come and we'll teach," she said. “We'll have these programs, courses, camps and different things throughout the year that people could participate in. Anybody can participate at any age.”

The sale is expected to close Feb. 27, and programming could begin as soon as this summer.