- Candidates for the school board in Minnetonka, Minn., participate in student-led forum on Oct. 18. Courtesy of Amin Rahmatullah
|
By Elizabeth Shockman
In some ways, it’s a quiet election this year. Some school districts are asking voters to approve referendums to pay for operating or capital costs. Just over two dozen districts have their regularly scheduled school board elections.
But for an odd year, Minnesota School Boards Association executive director Kirk Schneidawind said there are an unusually high number of district special elections.
“We have a number of special elections around filling vacant seats. We’ve seen a number of school board members have resigned or moved on to special positions and as a result it’s going to require some elections,” Schneidawind said. “It certainly is a number that is higher than normal.”
According to Schneidawind, nearly 70 school board members have resigned their positions this year — triple the resignations in a normal year. The vacant seats are, in large part, the result of contentious disagreements over things like masking, COVID-19 policies, and critical race theory, or CRT.
Violent school board meetings and threats toward school board members over these issues have caused dozens of board leaders to quit their positions. And now, Schneidawind said, these issues seem to be at the center of many school board campaigns and platforms. [Continue reading] | |
|
|
|
- People or profit? Facebook papers show deep conflict within Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — not to mention the last shreds of its carefully crafted, decade-old image as a benevolent company just wanting to connect the world. Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.
Hate on trial The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned violent, left one counter-demonstrator dead and revealed how well-organized the far right had become. Four years afterward, jury selection is set for Monday in a case seen as the most sweeping attempt yet to hold to account those associated with the march. To do so, those behind the suit are taking a page from a decades-old playbook: they're turning to civil litigation in an attempt to put extremists out of business.
- Gold for Prince?Minnesota's Congressional delegation on Monday is introducing a resolution to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to pop superstar Prince, citing his "indelible mark on Minnesota and American culture," The Associated Press has learned. The medal is one of the nation's highest civilian honors and past recipients include George Washington, the Wright Brothers, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Dalai Lama.
| |
|
|
|
Preference Center ❘ Unsubscribe You received this email because you subscribed or it was sent to you by a friend. This email was sent by: Minnesota Public Radio
480 Cedar Street Saint Paul, MN, 55101   |
|
|
| |
|
