| July 14, 2021 Weather tonight will be mostly cloudy with chance for showers and some thunderstorms possible in southern Minnesota. Thursday's skies will be hazy with temperatures in the low to mid 80s. There’s an air quality alert through Friday for northern Minnesota.. Find the latest on Updraft. Minnesota school districts will be left to decide if they’ll require that students be masked when they return to classrooms in the fall. That’s because the state won’t mandate use. Education Commissioner Heather Mueller says that authority went away when Gov. Tim Walz’s peacetime powers blinked off this month.
Theresa Battle is Superintendent of the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District. She led Walz, Mueller and other state officials on a tour of a summer learning program where children were wearing masks. Battle said decisions about the fall are still pending.
“We want to protect our youngest learners as you saw today because they do not have the opportunity to be vaccinated," Battle said. "And so we’ve led with the science throughout our response to the pandemic.”
The education department along with the health department expected to provide nonbinding guidance in coming weeks. Federal rules still require mask use on school buses. Minnesota’s top government watchdog says it found no problems with how two COVID-19 testing companies are billing the state for people on state subsidized insurance or workers in the state employee health program. The Office of the Legislative Auditor studied how the state of Minnesota reimbursed New York-based Vault and New Jersey-based IBX for testing for those programs.
Auditor Joel Alters says the office conducted the review after receiving complaints that the two companies initially charged prices considered too high by insurance companies managing the state programs.
“The health plans reviewed those invoices and for the most part they said we’re not comfortable with the bills that have been submitted," Alter said. "We’re going to pay a fraction of what you billed us for.” He said his review focuses solely on state payments related to testing costs for people on subsidized insurance such as Medicaid and MinnesotaCare and state employees.
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