As students across the country return to school, a mass school shooting in Minneapolis has again reignited debates aboutĚýĚýin the U.S.,Ěý — and youth embrace ofĚý

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz this week announced plans to convene a  in the wake of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting that took place while students attended an annual Mass to kick off the new academic year. Two children were killed and 21 people, 18 of them students, were injured.

Vice President JDĚýVance and his wife went to the church Wednesday,ĚýĚýand visited one of the hospitalized young survivors. The injured girl’s father,ĚýHarry Kaiser, questioned Vance on whether he would “earnestly support the study of what is wrong with our culture, that we are the country that has the worst mass shooter problem?”Ěý

As has happened in shooting after shooting, attention quickly turned to the assailant’s online presence as people sought to understand what could motivate such a heinous act. On social media,  â€” from anti-Christian hate to the radicalization of transgender people — reached millions of eyeballs.

The 23-year-old perpetrator died by suicide after the rampage. Like other shooters, the Minneapolis attacker  indicating mental health struggles, suicidal ideation and, perhaps most importantly, a . 

The attacker “appeared to hate all of us,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a briefing. “More than anything, .”

In the news

A ‘catastrophic’ hack:ĚýTexas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Wednesday against education technology giant PowerSchool, which fell victim to a massive cyberattack last year that compromised the sensitive data of some 60 million students and 10 million educators globally. The state alleges the breach, which affected some 880,000 TexasĚýteachers and students, occurred because PowerSchool “failed to implement even the most basic security features.” |Ěý

• The move is the latest in a slew of lawsuits from parents, students and school districts adversely affected by the massive hack. |ĚýĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ
• Matthew Lane, a 19-year-old from Massachusetts, is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court next week after pleading guilty to the extortion scheme over the summer. |Ěý

As Texas and other Republican-controlled states seek to erode the separation of church and state by endorsing Protestant Christianity over other faiths, Paxton has urged students to use a new law allowing prayer time in public schools to practice the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.” | 

Victims speak out: Haley Robson, who was 16 when she was first sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein, recounted on Wednesday how she was forced to recruit young victims from her high school. | 

Florida’s surgeon general announced plans to end state vaccine mandates for children attending public schools, while officials in California, Oregon and Washington joined forces to preserve access to the life-saving shots. | 

The Los Angeles school district has settled a lawsuit filed by parents who allege the pandemic-era remote learning policies of the country’s second-largest K-12 public education system discriminated against students of color, English learners and those with disabilities. | 

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over alleged children’s privacy violations after the entertainment behemoth improperly uploaded kid-focused videos to YouTube and enabled targeted advertising. | 

• Meanwhile, the FTC announced a settlement with a Chinese robot toy manufacturer accused of illegally collecting U.S. children’s location data. |Ěý

Stainless steel water bottles made by Stanley and Yeti are all the rage. But this New York district says they’re a no-go on campus — claiming they pose safety risks. | 

Trump vs. trans kids: As the administration seeks to clamp down on districts that don’t inform parents when their children identify as transgender at school, the Education Department revived an obscure 12-year-old privacy case to access district emails. | ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ

• Two Northern Virginia school districts have sued the Trump administration challenging the federal government’s assertion that policies allowing transgender students to use restrooms and locker facilities violate anti-discrimination laws. |Ěý
  • The legal dispute has been fodder in the state’s gubernatorial race, in which Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has placed anti-trans bathroom policies among her top campaign issues. |ĚýĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ

• In South Carolina, state officials filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after an appeals court blocked enforcement of a new law denying trans youth access to facilities that align with their gender identity. |Ěý
• The Trump administration warned officials in 40 states they could lose federal funding unless they scrap lessons from sexual education materials that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. |ĚýĚý

An online group that calls itself Purgatory has claimed responsibility for a string of swatting calls that drew massive law enforcement responses to college campuses at the start of the new academic year. | 

In a middle-of-the-night operation, the Trump administration scooped up 76 unaccompanied minors as they slept at federal shelters, in a deportation bid that was then temporarily blocked by a federal judge. | 

A new Florida law will require educators to get parents’ permission before spanking students as a form of school discipline. | 

• Student activists lobbied for the law after an investigation by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ revealed that Florida educators most often used corporal punishment to address minor infractions like “excessive talking,” “insubordination” and “horseplay.” |ĚýĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓĚý

ICYMI @The74

Confusion as Kids Head Back to School and RFK Jr. Calls the Shots on Vaccines

Kids Shouldn’t Access Social Media Until They’re Old Enough to Drive, Book Says

Emotional Support

Sinead ponders summer’s end while boating over Labor Day weekend.Ěý: Kathy Moore

The issue is not new, but the numbers are trending in the wrong direction: A shows 19.2% of children lived in food-insecure households in 2023, the second consecutive yearly increase following a 15-year low , when just 10.2% of children lived in food-insecure households. The spikes came as pandemic-era policies expired, like the Enhanced Child Tax Credit in 2021 and emergency allotments for SNAP in 2023. 

This is unacceptable, especially when the U.S. has the tools to end child hunger.

Free school meals have been around for more than 50 years. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that well-nourished kids achieve better academically, and everyone benefits from a stronger economy and greater national security, when children are fed.

For the first time in a long time, the role of school meals in eliminating hunger made it into the national conversation when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz while accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president.

While it may be unusual for hunger in the classroom to make a prominent appearance in a presidential campaign, it’s not unusual for an educator — which Walz was for many years — to insist that food is the most important school supply. For many kids, school meals are the most nutritious of the day, helping to fuel their success in the classroom and beyond.

Good work is happening across the country to reach more students with school meals. At least eight states, including Minnesota, have made school meals universal, meaning they’re available to all students regardless of family income. Others, like Texas, are getting rid of categories of need — making meals programs run more efficiently, reducing the stigma of receiving free or low-cost meals and feeding .

For decades, barely half of students who got free or reduced-price lunch also ate breakfast at school. Now, many schools have embraced breakfast-after-the-bell options, like letting kids eat in class during first period or offering grab-and-go options. This overcomes the challenge of getting to the cafeteria before school starts, and the stigma in doing so.

And in summer, when schools are closed, new flexibility in rural communities is allowing food service providers to reach many more kids with meals thanks to pick-up and delivery options.

These innovations and policy wins have helped feed millions more children each day.

But with food prices unusually high — an issue acknowledged by presidential candidates of both parties — lawmakers on both sides of the aisle must come together and support an anti-hunger agenda.

Just as school meals are an important part of a vision for a country without child hunger, so are investments in programs that connect families with the economic resources they need.

This year, Congress had the opportunity to expand the Child Tax Credit and extend a lifeline to families with very little income, ensuring they could receive the full refundable credit for every kid in the household and ultimately reducing . But though the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House, it was blocked in the Senate. With major tax policy negotiations on the horizon in 2025, lawmakers should prioritize reinstating an expanded Child Tax Credit.

When lawmakers make feeding children a priority, families get transformational improvements like the new Summer EBT program that launched this year, providing food assistance to the families of an estimated 22 million kids. It’s the first new federal nutrition program in decades, working alongside traditional summer meals offerings to make sure kids get the food they need during the hungriest time of year. 

Yet, in this first year, 13 states did not participate, leaving money on the table that could have fed an and helped their families stretch their food budgets. Summer EBT is a tremendous opportunity to end hunger when school is out. All 50 states must opt in.

Federal nutrition programs and tax benefits for working families are really investments in opportunity for everyone. School meals create the opportunity to learn. Summer EBT creates the opportunity for families to eat healthy all year round. The Child Tax Credit creates opportunities to achieve economic mobility. And the aspiration for opportunity truly is universal.These programs aren’t just good policy; they’re good politics, too. conducted statewide polls this year in , , and , and in all four states, respondents were nearly unanimous (93% agreement or above) that ending childhood hunger should be a shared bipartisan goal. In an election year that’s likely to see precincts won on slim margins, it’s prudent that aspiring leaders keep this in mind.

The first night of the Democratic National Convention, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s lieutenant governor strode onto the stage to help kick things off. To Minnesotans, Peggy Flanagan has been a constant presence during Walz’s two terms as governor. But to many delegates in attendance — and people watching the event from around the world — hers was a new face.Ěý

“My name in the Ojibwe language is Gizhiiwewidamoonkwe, or in English, Speaks with a Clear and Loud Voice Woman,” . “I’m a member of the White Earth Nation and my family is the Wolf Clan. And the role of our clan is to ensure that we never leave anyone behind.”

If Kamala Harris is elected president in November, Flanagan will assume Walz’s office, making her the first Indigenous woman governor in U.S. history. Since her DNC appearance, headlines in national news outlets have dubbed her Walz’s “understudy,” a rising party star “waiting in the wings” for her turn. 

The actual story is much more interesting. In a rise marked by serendipity, two pivotal moments stand out. The first took place in 2002, when, as a new University of Minnesota graduate, Flanagan was walking past Sen. Paul Wellstone’s campaign headquarters and decided to stop in. She was 22 and eager to help him win a third term. 

It didn’t happen. The senator was killed in a plane crash 12 days shy of what seemed certain re-election — a tragedy that served as prelude to the second defining moment. Wellstone’s death galvanized a generation of progressive political activists who created an organization, Wellstone Action, dedicated to teaching ordinary people the fundamentals of running a grassroots campaign. 

Flanagan — who had used the Wellstone formula to become the youngest person ever elected to the Minneapolis School Board — was working for the candidate incubator in 2005 when a small-town high school teacher and football coach named Tim Walz turned up at one of its boot camps. He was considering a run for Congress as a Democrat in a deep-red southern Minnesota district. . They as each rose through the political ranks. 

As lieutenant governor, Flanagan has been a driving force behind many of the policies now being showcased as the middle-class wins Walz brings to the presidential ticket. Advocacy for kids, vulnerable families and early childhood education have topped her agenda at each stage of her political career. 

The universal free school lunches, child tax credit and paid family and sick leave that Harris and Walz are campaigning on? Good retail politics, certainly — and also an outgrowth of Flanagan’s childhood experience knowing that her friends were watching as she handed the lunch ladies the issued to kids who got free food. 

“Universal school meals is one of the most important things that I’ve ever worked on in my entire career — removing that shame and that stigma is a powerful tool to make sure that kids are eating right,” Flanagan says. “Anecdotally, we have heard attendance is up. … And instead of asking if kids have enough money in their account, we are asking, ‘Do you want chicken and rice or do you want pizza?’ ”

A literal political pedigree

Flanagan grew up at political strategy meetings. Her grandmother, mother and aunts were Irish social-justice Catholics who worked alongside the late Hubert Humphrey in Democratic politics for decades. When Humphrey ran for president in 1968, Flanagan’s mother, Patricia, moved to Washington, D.C., to work on his campaign.

“I grew up in a family where women just did the work,” Flanagan says. “I didn’t know anything different, right? My grandmother was absolutely the matriarch and was involved in party politics before it was, you know, polite for women to do that work.”

She did not realize that organizing was an activity with a name until she was older and doing it herself, Flanagan continues. “It was just like, well, you see a need, and then you bring people together and try to work together to solve the problem.”

Pat Flanagan was a single parent, getting by thanks to Medicaid, a Section 8 housing voucher, food stamps, state child care assistance, free- and reduced-price school lunches and the Minnesota Family Investment Program — the household subsidy that replaced welfare. She used the benefits to move herself and her daughter to a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, that had good schools and stable neighborhoods. 

Eventually, Pat became a phlebotomist, but struggle shaped Peggy Flanagan’s views. She has also referred to herself on several occasions, without elaborating, as a “ of domestic violence.” She speaks passionately about her mother’s insistence that when food was scarce. Somehow, she says frequently, Pat Flanagan always found enough resources to meet her daughter’s needs.  

If the women in Flanagan’s life taught her to build coalitions, her father nurtured her sense of resolve. Marvin Manypenny spent to recoup lands swindled from , one of the homes of Minnesota’s largest indigenous group, the Anishinaabe, who were dubbed Ojibwe by colonists. In 1986, Manypenny sued the U.S. government in a case that chronicled more than a century of betrayed promises by federal officials to respect Native lands. In 1991, an appeals court , ruling that it did not have jurisdiction to decide the claims. 

Manypenny was a frequent fixture at protests and active in tribal politics, but not a consistent voter himself until his daughter’s name appeared on a statewide ticket as the candidate for lieutenant governor in 2018. 

“My dad oftentimes would say, ‘My girl, I want to burn down the system, and you want to get into the system and change it from the inside out,’ ” Flanagan when he died in 2020. “That’s a pretty good summary of how my dad operated and how I operate.”

When Flanagan walked into Wellstone’s campaign office, it was with her maternal lineage’s coalition-building skills and her father’s spine. Wellstone’s organizers put her to work mobilizing the urban Native American community. 

A political science professor at Carleton College, located an hour south of the Twin Cities, Wellstone ran a then-unorthodox, bare-bones campaign for U.S. Senate in 1990, ousting two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz, the owner of a chain of lumber stores. 

Accompanied by an army of door-knockers — many of them his students — Wellstone rode an old green school bus around the state, giving stump speeches from a platform on the back. He could afford to air only one TV ad one time, but his grainy, low-budget “Looking for Rudy” — in which he went seeking his rival to set up a debate — became a news story itself. 

Flanagan was an early linchpin of Wellstone Action’s grassroots training efforts. A campaign policy aide and longtime friend of the senator’s, Pam Costain traveled the country with Flanagan for several years, teaching people about what they called the Wellstone triangle. Even in her 20s, Costain says, Flanagan had experience with all three legs.

“You cannot do electoral politics without an appreciation for what it takes to build grassroots involvement,” she explains. “And you can’t do [community organizing] work if you’re not willing to contend for power — because then you’re just always going to be the agitator and not the decision-maker.”

Out of college, Flanagan was employed by the Division of Indian Work, a Twin Cities nonprofit service provider, helping to build relationships between the school system and Native families. She had been encouraged by a longtime Minneapolis School Board member to run for a seat in the 2004 election, but begged off.ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý

“I was like, you know, I’m 23. I don’t have any kids in the district,” Flanagan recalls. “I don’t think I’m the one. But I will help you find somebody.”

Not long after that conversation, at a meeting where American Indian Movement founder Clyde Bellecourt was speaking, she raised her hand and told the crowd that if anyone wanted to run for school board, she would help. “Folks in the room were like, my girl, why don’t you do it?”ĚýĚýĚý

As she drove home from the meeting, Flanagan passed Wellstone’s former campaign office, where she had stopped to volunteer. She pulled over and decided to run.Ěý

“I didn’t think we’re going to win,” she recalls. “But at the very least, the issues that are happening in the urban Native community … will be brought forward. It turned out that a number of people in Minneapolis shared those concerns.”Ěý

‘It wasn’t a small thing’Ěý

Flanagan was not the first Native person to serve on the board, but her presence made the district’s ongoing failure to serve its Indigenous students harder to ignore. In the 1970s, Indigenous dropout rates in Minneapolis schools hovered around 80%, fueled by decades of official indifference to the continued legacy of American Indian boarding schools that stripped Native children of their languages and cultures. Mistrust of government-operated schools is still high.Ěý

Bullying and a near-total lack of Native teachers or curriculum fueled truancy rates, sometimes leading to court-ordered removals of Native children from their families. Before its closure in 2008, a free, private alternative school operated by the American Indian Movement graduated more Indigenous students than Minneapolis Public Schools combined.

Flanagan had graduated from high school in St. Louis Park, a suburb located just west of Minneapolis, but she understood what it was like not to see herself represented in the classroom.ĚýĚýĚý

“When I got to the University of Minnesota, I had for the very first time a teacher who looked like me … in my intro to American Indian Studies class,” she says. “It changed everything. Learning accurate history, knowing that there is a teacher who will absolutely understand who you are and where you come from.”Ěý

On the school board — where she served alongside Costain, who had also sought and won a seat — Flanagan was instrumental in the negotiation of , long in coming, between urban tribal leaders and the district. The first of its kind in the country, it required the school system to create specialized programs aimed at engaging mistrustful families, preserving Native languages and strengthening cultural identity.Ěý

Now the head of the Minneapolis Foundation, R.T. Rybak was in the first of three terms as mayor of Minneapolis when the pact was signed. “It wasn’t a small thing to negotiate an agreement between a public school system and Native leaders, because it starts with an extraordinary amount of historical inequity,” he says. “That was a very significant achievement.”

American Indian students were guaranteed placement at three schools designated “best practices” sites. Educators would be required to interview for positions — a departure from the strict seniority-based placement system then required by the teachers union contract — and would have to agree to undertake ongoing, specialized training and observation. To ensure continuity, they were also supposed to be protected from being bumped from their positions during layoff.

At the time, 38% of Minneapolis Public Schools Native students graduated, more than two-thirds of them from alternative schools not operated by the district. The number of Indigenous students graduating from district schools has ticked up slightly in the intervening two decades, but partly because of a change in the way state officials define American Indian. In 2023, 42% graduated, with 14% dropping out and the fate of another 20% unknown.Ěý

Almost half of Minneapolis’s Native graduates enroll in some postsecondary education within 16 months. But in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, none had earned one year’s worth of credits within two years. Since 2021, the percentage of Minneapolis Indigenous students reading at grade level has fallen from 22% to 19%, while math proficiency has hovered between 10% and 13%.ĚýĚý

The agreement between the district and Native leaders , but there is no evidence the staffing exceptions were codified in the teacher contract. Last May, the district’s American Indian Parent Advisory Committee notified the school board that it considers the schools out of compliance with regarding its obligations to Native students.Ěý

Flanagan’s elected term on the board ended in 2009, but the following year she was appointed to replace Costain, who had resigned to take over the district’s nonprofit education partner. At , the board heard on the district’s racial and ethnic achievement gaps, complete with an estimate that at the incremental pace of change taking place, it would take decades for Minneapolis students to to their peers statewide.

Flanagan had an emotional reaction to the lack of meaningful progress. “We know what works for kids. And we’ve just got to be courageous enough to do it, to ask for it, to demand it,” she said. “If white kids were failing in this district … at the rate that children of color and Native students are failing, people would be on fire. They would be storming the Capitol, they would be burning that place down.”

In 2013, Marian Wright Edelman, then president of the Children’s Defense Fund, tapped Flanagan to head its Minnesota branch. During her time with the organization, she spearheaded a successful effort to get lawmakers to raise the state’s minimum wage — then $6.15, more than a dollar an hour less than the federal minimum — and index it to inflation. For large employers, it is now $10.85.

A few months later, Minneapolis’s new mayor-elect, Betsy Hodges, asked Flanagan to head her “Cradle to K Cabinet,” an effort to in the city.Ěý

“Peggy understood very clearly that one of the challenges of working with prenatal to 3-year-olds is you cannot help and support them without helping and supporting their parents,” says Hodges. “And lots of people love to support young people but do not love to support young people’s parents. When they’re in school, it’s a little easier to heed that reality. But when it’s prenatal to 3, it’s not. So what are the supports parents need to be really effective?”

Flanagan made it clear up front that families’ opportunities to shape the cabinet’s strategies needed to be meaningful. “We wanted to have enough parents as part of the group that they didn’t feel like they were being tokenized,” Hodges recalls. “We made sure to arrange meetings for times that they would be able to be there. We made sure to have child care. We did our best to set it up in a way where we could get their feedback in a way that didn’t feel dismissive or condescending.”

The pull of public officeĚý

But electoral politics still tugged. In 2015, Flanagan won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, serving a handful of suburbs on Minneapolis’s western boundary, including the one where she grew up. She served until 2019, authoring bills in support of early childhood education and a range of benefits for families. She sponsored just one K-12 education measure, to fund diversity, equity and inclusion training for educators in her home district.Ěý

In 2017, Walz called Flanagan and asked her to run for lieutenant governor. (In Minnesota, the governor and the No. 2 are elected as a ticket.) For many of her predecessors, the job has been a one-way trip to obscurity, but since their inaugurations, Walz and Flanagan have typically been seen together.Ěý

“Every major decision she is there from the beginning and helps me see about them differently and think about them differently,” . “You have a 55-year-old rural white guy who was in the Army [National Guard] and coached football, and you have a 39-year-old Indigenous woman who lived in St. Louis Park. That brings a wealth of [ways] to approach these issues.”

Flanagan has an office in the same Capitol suite as the governor. The White Earth flag hangs in the hall alongside the Stars and Stripes and a new state flag adopted last spring, replacing one that was offensive to Native Minnesotans.ĚýĚý

Privately, some Republicans have groused that they believe Flanagan pushed Walz to the left politically. Whether that is true is debatable, but her policy priorities have been front and center in the six years since they took office.

One of her first accomplishments as the state’s second-highest executive was securing the first increase in decades to the Minnesota Family Investment Program, the cash assistance program for low-income families her mother depended on when she was a child. In 2019, lawmakers increased the payments by $100 a month.Ěý

Flanagan also played a key role in ensuring Native history and culture are included in new state social studies standards. Topics differ by grade level and include Indigenous people’s relationships to land and water, the current state of treaties and American Indian perspectives on the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

A Flanagan administration’s prioritiesĚý

This year’s appearance was not Flanagan’s first DNC speech. In 2016, she took to the stage to read a letter to her daughter Siobhan, then 3. She was still in the state House, and only the second Native woman to address the convention.Ěý

The following year, she told the Minneapolis Native newspaper The Circle that she would run for the House of Representatives seat occupied by Keith Ellison if he did not stand for re-election. She ended up on Walz’s ticket instead.Ěý

Many of the political wins the governor and lieutenant governor have enjoyed in recent years were possible because Democrats controlled both branches of the state legislature and the executive branch —Ěýby a very slim margin. That could change if Republicans gain control of either the Minnesota House or Senate.

If Flanagan becomes governor, state Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson would like to see more emphasis on closing achievement gaps.Ěý

“While Walz and Flanagan both have experience in the education system, their priorities too often focused on satisfying political interests instead of ensuring kids were getting the education they deserved,” he says. “Once a leader in education, Minnesota now lags Mississippi in some areas despite years of historic funding increases.”

Flanagan says her priorities will remain the same if Harris and Walz are elected and she becomes governor. High on her list is addressing chronic absenteeism: “Attendance matters, especially in the post-pandemic world that we live in.”

She also hopes to promote career and technical education, invest more state aid in kindergarten readiness and continue diversifying the state’s teacher corps, which has historically been more than 90% white.ĚýĚýĚý

Flanagan says her daughter attends the same school system she did but is having a wholly different experience. “There are over 40 Native kids in her school,” and Ojibwe language is taught to fourth- and fifth-graders, she says. “She can fully show up as her Indigenous self in the classroom and know that she will be valued for who she is, that there will be a curiosity about her identity and culture that is demonstrated in a supportive way.”Ěý

The change, she adds, benefits all kids. “I am hopeful that we are in a place, not only in talking about the history of Native people and ensuring we have Indigenous education for all, but also acknowledging Native people are contemporary people who still exist and who live all across the state,” she says. “Everybody benefits from learning the full, rich history of our state.”

NORTHFIELD — Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan stepped in for Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday and greeted students on the first day of school, in an annual tradition

Flanagan, who visited a school in St. Anthony and later Greenvale Park Elementary in Northfield, is taking on a higher profile as Walz barnstorms the country as the vice presidential nominee for president.

Flanagan served Northfield students cheese pizza, which was a subtle plug for a signature achievement of the Walz-Flanagan administration and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor-controlled Legislature, which passed universal free school meals in 2023.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

Flanagan’s visit comes less than a week after the state released Minnesota students’ math and reading scores, which Fewer than half of tested students in the 2023-2024 school year met state proficiency standards in reading and math, which is unchanged from the year prior.

The data indicate Minnesota students have not yet recovered from learning losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Flanagan told reporters on Tuesday that the test scores don’t reflect all the investments the Minnesota Legislature has made into education, particularly toward reading through the Read Act.

In 2023 the DFL-controlled Legislature passed historic education funding, including $75 million for the Read Act, which focuses on phonics, or the sounding out of words. This year the Legislature passed an additional $35 million to support teachers while they learn how to teach the Read Act curriculum.

“I am confident that those scores are going to go up, and as lieutenant governor I care tremendously about it. But as Siobhan’s mom, I really care about it,” Flanagan said. “I believe there are parents across the state who want to see achievement go up. So do I, and I think we’re on our way with the investments we’ve made in the last few years.”

The Department of Education last week in a statement said something similar regarding the stagnant test scores.

“Long-term key investments from the 2023 legislative session are currently being implemented, including the largest funding increase for K-12 education in state history,” the Department of Education said. “Once fully implemented, these investments will positively impact students for many years to come.”

In the meantime, Flanagan said that rising attendance rates are an important first step.

“Attendance is one of those things that we know will help close that gap… I am confident that what we have in place, having kids in school, our incredible educators — I think test scores will go up. And just encourage our families and encourage our students to get to school. It really, really matters,” Flanagan said.

According to data released last week, about three-quarters of students attended school regularly in 2023, up about 5 percentage points from the prior year. But attendance rates still remain significantly lower than in the years prior to the pandemic, when about 85% of students attended regularly.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

On an evening that had already seen appearances by Bill Clinton, Oprah and a lengthy speakers’ list of Democratic Party officeholders, Walz was preceded in Chicago by 15 former members of the Mankato West High School Scarlets, the football team to a Minnesota state title in 1999. Wider and grayer than in their playing days, the two lines of jersey-clad supporters walked onstage to the strains of the Mankato West fight song.

The miniature pep rally was another biographical touch in the Democrats’ efforts to introduce the electorate to Walz, an obscure figure outside of party circles just a few weeks ago. The campaign has leaned heavily on the governor’s years of experience as a teacher and coach, including numerous testimonials from former pupils and . If elected, he would become the first vice president in over 60 years to have previously worked as a K–12 teacher.

In a 16-minute address, Walz credited his students with inspiring him to make his first run for Congress in 2006, a longshot bid that saw him unseat a six-term incumbent. 

“There I was, a 40-something high school teacher with little kids, zero political experience and no money, running in a deep-red district,” he remembered. “But you know what? Never underestimate a public-school teacher.”

Yet, like most of the convention thus far, the speech ran short on details related to education policy. Walz made little mention of his six-year governing record in Minnesota, where he signed sweeping school funding legislation in 2023 but also for the length of pandemic-related school closures. While delivering a passing shot at Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance for attending Yale Law School, he didn’t refer to the wave of laws passed in red states that allow public funding to flow to private school tuition. 

Instead, in keeping with attacks launched by speakers through the first three days of the convention, Walz jabbed at Republicans for seeking to review and remove controversial materials from school libraries. As governor, he signed laws both to provide universal school lunches to students and based on ideology — a combination he trumpeted with one of the night’s biggest applause lines.

“While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,” he said to cheers.

Echoing the Democrats’ longstanding commitments to gun safety legislation, Walz further pledged to fight for children’s “freedom to go to school without being shot dead in the hall.” Despite his respect for the Second Amendment as a hunter and Army National Guard veteran, he added, “our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.”

With audience members waving signs reading “Coach Walz,” the nominee brought the remarks to a close by returning to the theme of teamwork and the beginnings of his leadership on the gridiron.

“It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team.”

Tampon Tim? Try Teflon Tim.

In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris tapped him as her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — a popular former rural high school social studies teacher/football coach-turned-politician — has emerged, on education matters, as a master needle-threader. 

To wit: In 2023, with Democrats in charge of all three branches of state government, Walz signed an avalanche of education legislation. From free school meals for all kids to science-backed literacy instruction to a historic $2.2 billion boost to school funding, there was seemingly something for everyone in the sheaf of bills that crossed Walz’s desk. 

But in the weeks leading up to the 2024 legislative session, the organization representing many of the state’s largest districts put out its policy agenda, topped with a polite request for the Democratic “trifecta”: . 

Districts were scrambling to pay for new, nationally admired programs extending paid family and medical leave and sick time to all workers, as well as unemployment benefits for hourly, seasonal school employees. 

Lawmakers had set aside a woefully inadequate amount of money to fulfill their promise to reimburse districts for adopting vetted reading curricula. And the list of potentially costly things school administrators were legally required to bargain over with teacher unions — ranging from how e-learning days would be decided to what training for classroom aides would include — swelled.

Most of this, however, was invisible to voters, who enjoyed a steady stream of photos depicting the governor, surrounded by gleeful schoolchildren, affixing his John Hancock to a measure mandating free breakfast and lunch for all. 

How nice of the Trump camp to help publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and common-sense policy of providing free menstrual products to students in Minnesota public schools! Let’s do this everywhere.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton)

And yes, Walz did sign legislation — purposefully written in gender-neutral language — to provide in-school period products to any student who menstruates. A well-tested law gives Minnesota students the right to use the school facilities where they are most comfortable, so tampons and pads should be available in all restrooms, the student activists menstrual products bill insisted.  

Here are eight things to know about Walz’s record on education: 

1. In Congress … But Kept His Teaching License

Minnesota Professional Educator License and Standards Board file No. 365457, Timothy James Walz’s license to teach secondary school social studies, is currently inactive. It’s a telling document nonetheless.

Walz started his teaching career alongside Gwen Whipple, whom he would later marry, with a one-year stint in China. The Walzes taught in western Nebraska — where he insisted on as something other than an isolated event unlikely to be repeated — before moving to his wife’s Minnesota hometown, Mankato. There, he was a popular teacher who helped coach the high school football team to its first-ever state championship. 

In 2005, he participated in a boot camp run by Wellstone Action, a grass-roots candidate recruiting and training organization established by intimates of the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, another educator-turned-politician. The following year, Walz took a leave of absence from teaching to run for Congress — a longshot in the state’s conservative 1^st Congressional District. 

His win notwithstanding, Walz renewed his teaching license on June 23, 2008, a year and a half after he was sworn in for his first term in the House. He was re-elected three times before he let it lapse. 

2. ‘I Am Labor’

After six terms in Congress, Walz won Minnesota’s governorship in 2018, in part by appealing to public-sector unions — huge funders of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidates: “I am labor, I stand with labor and as governor, I will keep Minnesota a labor state.” He appointed Mary Cathryn Ricker, then vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, as his first education commissioner. 

In September 2020, Walz convened an education working group not with Ricker, but with his wife and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. Flanagan is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and another Wellstone Action alum who got her start in electoral politics by becoming the youngest person ever elected to the Minneapolis School Board. 

Five months later, Ricker’s office released a report capping the efforts of a school finance working group and a strategic plan titled “One Minnesota.” A few days later, the governor released his own “Due North Education Plan.” 

Both documents called for sweeping changes in racial equity in schools, more diverse educators and classroom materials, and new academic standards covering a host of topics, including the rarely taught history of Minnesota’s American Indian tribes. There was, however, no roadmap for effecting the called-for change. The last progress report on Due North’s implementation is dated April 2022.    

At the time the Due North plan was released, Walz was struggling to reverse course on COVID-related school closures and get kids back in classrooms. Though his administration put educators at the front of the line for vaccination, and Walz repeatedly signaled to local education officials that it was time to reopen schools for all kids, closures persisted — fueled in some places by teachers union resistance to returning to classrooms. 

In March 2021, with school district leaders in Minneapolis and several other communities showing few signs of bucking their unions by reopening, Walz ordered all schools statewide to provide some in-person learning. 

A few days later, Ricker , saying she missed being a classroom teacher. (She would go on to head the union-aligned Shanker Institute.) To replace her, Walz tapped an assistant state Education Department commissioner who had come from his home school district, Mankato. 

3. ‘I Am Labor,’ But … 

When Walz first tapped Ricker, Minnesota proponents of education reform feared that the administration would seek to curtail school choice, to roll back standardized assessments and to deliver on the state teachers union’s long wish list. Minnesota had been the first state in the nation to enact a charter school law, in 1991.

Walz and his statehouse partisans have taken nibbles, last spring introducing legislation to push back the statutory deadline for making public the results of annual statewide reading, math and science tests from Sept. 1 to Dec. 1. Advocates were quick to complain that this would obscure the degree to which children of color were not bouncing back from COVID learning losses but were, in fact, falling further behind. The push failed.

The administration has not taken up calls for lawmakers to step into a nearly decade-old school desegregation suit that would likely place major constraints on charter schools and inter-district open enrollment. The plaintiffs have not found Democrats willing to consider the wholesale rewrite of state integration laws that they have pitched as a possible settlement to the suit. 

Potentially most notable, over the last three years Minnesota lawmakers have moved to rectify a wrinkle in the state school funding system that Democrats had long resisted touching. With state aid for students in special education lagging badly behind costs, school districts have been forced to use rising portions of their general budgets to cover the shortfall. For decades, offsetting this “cross subsidy” was seen as politically inexpedient by both parties. 

In 2023, Democratic legislators proposed to close this gap. Walz countered with less than half that amount, despite having campaigned on the issue. In the end, the governor and lawmakers compromised, with more cash directed to new benefits for school employees and a plan to increase the amount of state aid directed at the special education shortfall to 50% of the cost over the next three years. 

4. A Scandal That Might — or Might Not — Stick

In June, Minnesota’s legislative auditor released on the Department of Education’s role in one of the country’s largest pandemic aid-related scandals. The nonprofit child nutrition organization Feeding Our Future had engaged in fraud that drained at least $250 million in COVID relief funding that was supposed to be used to distribute food to needy kids outside of schools.

Whether the scandal will taint Walz’s candidacy remains to be seen. His name does not appear in the audit, which says the department’s lack of oversight over Feeding our Future preceded his administration. The department has refuted the report. 

However, most of are Somali, and supporters of former President Donald Trump have begun to pepper attacks on Walz’s military record with allusions to Somalia. 

“Tim Walz has finally told everybody he hasn’t been to Iraq,” the chair of the Montana GOP proclaimed at a Trump rally days after the governor was tapped. “But he wanted you all to know that he has been to Minneapolis. He has some Black Hawk Down problems there.” 

Montana GOP Chair: Tim Walz has finally told everybody he hasn’t been in Iraq… but he wanted you all to know that he has been to Minneapolis. He has some Black Hawk Down problems there

— Acyn (@Acyn)

When COVID forced the closure of schools and day care centers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture loosened its rules for distributing free meals for children. The number of kids supposedly being fed by a network of distribution sites overseen by two Minnesota nonprofits mushroomed, continuing to rise by tens of thousands well after the pandemic was under control. 

Very little of the federal funding was spent on meals, the FBI and auditor eventually found. The U.S. attorney general began indicting participants in the scheme in September 2022. The first seven defendants out of 70 charged went on trial in May. 

The director of the state Education Department’s nutrition division testified that in spring 2021, as the number of invoices submitted for reimbursement swelled — â€œI had never seen payments of that magnitude before,” — she contacted the USDA and the FBI and then stopped the payments pending documentation from Feeding Our Future and another nonprofit meal provider.

Feeding Our Future’s two founders are white, but most of the defendants are Somali. In April 2021, the group went to court, arguing that the department was engaging in racial discrimination. A judge ruled that the department did not have the authority to stop paying the nonprofits. Claims continued to rise.      

No one associated with the , Partners in Nutrition, was charged. The state dropped the group from the program. 

Near the end of the six-week Feeding Our Future trial, the judge was forced to sequester the jury when a juror’s family notified officials that a woman had dropped a bag containing $120,000 on the juror’s front stoop, along with a promise of more if the defendants were acquitted. 

Five of the seven have now been convicted, and the mastermind of the bribery scheme pleaded guilty. Forty-four more of those indicted in the future, though the initial convictions could spark some to seek pleas.  

5. The Politics of Policing

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, which touched off days of riots involving both peaceful protesters and outside instigators, Walz called a special session of the legislature to take up police reform. Among other things, lawmakers banned the use of chokeholds. 

In 2023, after years of lobbying by advocates for children of color, Walz signed legislation barring police officers stationed in schools from using prone restraints — a maneuver that stops short of a chokehold but nonetheless is dangerous to students. Saying the new law would make it impossible for their officers to work in schools, numerous law enforcement agencies threatened to sever their contracts with districts. 

Public opinion on police reform is divided in Minnesota, with many people who live outside of the Twin Cities strongly opposed. Throughout his governorship, Walz has walked the urban-rural divide very carefully. In 2024, one of the first debates taken up by the administration and lawmakers was the rollback of the 2023 prone-restraint law — a proposition critics charged was directly tied to maintaining statewide Democratic voter support in an election year. 

​​Prone restraints are now legal again, though advocates say work on a model policy for police in schools called for as part of a political compromise is going poorly. 

6. The First Lady’s Own Education Record

Little known even in her home state, Gwen Walz is a major proponent of providing higher education to prisoners. She features prominently in a 2019 documentary, “College Behind Bars.” The four-hour deep dive on Bard College’s Bard Prison Initiative aired on PBS.  

“It is incredibly expensive, both financially and emotionally, to have people in prison,” newspaper in advance of the program’s debut. “And I think very much about victims, and I think the best way I can support victims is by trying to ensure that there aren’t more of them.”  

7. St. Paul Public Schools’s First Family 

The governor’s younger child, Gus Walz, attends St. Paul Public Schools’s Central Senior High. Located within walking distance of the governor’s mansion, the school is integrated: almost 45% of the student body is white, with 27% Black and 10% Asian.

Central’s academic outcomes are illustrative of Minnesota’s nation-leading racial disparities, with 13% of all students passing the 2023 state math assessment and 36% reading. Among white students, however, passage rates were 20% and 55%, compared with 3% and 10% for Black children. 

Asian students — who in St. Paul tend to be Vietnamese, Hmong and of other Southeast Asian origins — scored poorly as well, with 15% passing the math test and 37% reading. 

The Walzes’ older child, Hope, has featured prominently in the governor’s cheeky social media campaigns, among other things cajoling her dad onto daredevil state fair rides. Gus has not been as visible.

My daughter, Hope, tricked me into doing the most extreme ride at the Minnesota State Fair.

— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz)

Shortly after Harris announced Walz as her running mate, the family that Gus has a nonverbal learning disorder, ADHD and anxiety. The Walzes were careful to avoid describing their son’s disabilities as deficits, telling the magazine that, “W​hat became so immediately clear to us was that Gus’ condition is not a setback — it’s his secret power.”  

Gus Walz will turn 18 in October. 

8. The Football Coach and the Gay Kids

About the presence of tampons in restrooms: In Minnesota, long-settled law allows students to use the restroom they are most comfortable with. Some schools are doing away with gendered facilities altogether, creating single-stall bathrooms for all kids.

In March 2023, Walz issued an executive order declaring the state a sanctuary for transgender individuals, protecting the right to gender-affirming medical care and shielding patients, parents and care providers from efforts by officials in other states to obtain health care records or punish those involved. The legislature — which boasts a sizable, multiracial “Queer Caucus” — quickly enshrined the protections in law. 

Over the last few years, as “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on sports participation and medical care for gender nonconforming youth have swept statehouses, LGBTQ families have — asking on Facebook and other sites for help in finding affirming school systems and providers with room for new patients.

Walz has repeatedly said he realized early he was uniquely positioned to act on behalf of LGBTQ youth. In 1999, with the brutal murder of gay Wyoming student Matthew Shepard still in the headlines, Walz volunteered to help a handful of students organize the first gay-straight alliance at Mankato West, the rural high school where he taught social studies.

It was a risky move for a teacher at the time. But a member of the National Guard, a hunter and a popular football coach, Walz said, provided impeccable cultural credentials in his conservative southern Minnesota community. The half-dozen students who formed that first GSA went on when he made his first congressional bid in 2006.Ěý

Correction: The June report about the Minnesota Department of Education was released by the state’s legislative auditor.

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appeared together in Philadelphia Tuesday at a rally on Temple University’s campus, the first time she has visited Pennsylvania as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president. It’s been less than a month since Harris’ last visit to the City of Brotherly Love, but in that time she’s gone from being President Joe Biden’s running mate to leading at the top of the ticket.

The speculation about Harris’ running mate reached a fever pitch on Monday, with observers looking for any clue about who her pick would be. On Tuesday morning, she ended the guessing, .

The running mates took the stage at the Liacouras Center to raucous applause from the full arena, with “Freedom” by Beyonce playing.

“We are the underdogs in this race. But we have the momentum, and I know exactly what we are up against,” Harris said. She said in her past roles as a prosecutor and senator she “took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who scammed consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But her campaign is not just a fight against Trump, Harris added, “It’s a fight for the future.”

Harris described Walz’s career path as a teacher and high school football coach, taking a winless team to a state championship. He also championed students who were struggling with acceptance, she added, becoming the faculty advisor for students who wanted to start a support group for LGBTQ students.

“Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved,” Harris said. “Tim Walz was the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having, and that every kid deserves that kind of coach, because he’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong, and then inspires them to dream big. And that’s the kind of vice president he will be.”

WatchĚý— Walz on Education:

When Walz took the stage, he began by praising Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was also a finalist for the VP role.

“He can bring the fire. This is a visionary leader,” Walz said. “Also, I have to tell you, everybody in America knows when you need a bridge fixed call that guy,” in an apparent reference to Shapiro’s work to get a after it was damaged in a fiery crash in 2023.

He thanked Harris for bringing back the “joy” to the race for the White House.

Walz touched on several issues that illustrated his record as a lawmaker. He said he was old enough to remember “when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now, what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves.”

He also spoke about the challenges he and his wife Gwen had using in-vitro fertilization to start their family. “We spent years going through infertility treatments, and I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked,” Walz said. “So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.

When the vice president and I talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and for our children to be free to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in their classrooms,” Walz added.

Walz next turned his focus on GOP vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, mocking his oft-told origin story of growing up in rural Ohio.

“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community,” Walz said. “Come on, that’s not what Middle America is. And I gotta tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

The Harris campaign said there were 14,000 people at Temple either watching the rally at the Liacouras Center, or in an overflow room at nearby McGonigle Hall.

Shapiro warmed up the crowd before Harris and Walz took the stage. The fired-up audience began a chant of “he’s a weirdo” when he mentioned Vance, a call-back to comments and that the Harris campaign has run with, branding Trump and Vance as “weird.”

“I love you, Philly. And you know, what else I love? I love being your Governor,” Shapiro said. “I want you to know I am going to continue to pour my heart and soul into serving you every single day as your governor, and I’m going to be working my tail off to make sure we make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the next leaders of the United States of America.”

If Shapiro was disappointed to not get the VP nod, however, he did not show it, thanking the audience and praising the Democratic ticket.

“Let me tell you about my friend, Kamala Harris, someone I’ve been friends with for two decades,” Shapiro said. “She is courtroom tough. She has a big heart, and she is battle tested and ready to go. Whether in a courtroom, whether fighting as attorney general, whether remembering the people who have oftentimes been left behind when she was sitting in the halls of power in the Senate, Kamala Harris has always understood that you got to be, every day, for the people.”

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign released a statement shortly after the Walz news was announced Tuesday. “It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” Trump campaign Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide. If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”

Walz gets positive response

U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-4th District) said after the rally that she had been pulling for Shapiro to get the VP nod, but was impressed with Harris’ pick. “I was a hometown girl for Josh, but I think this is a terrific combination and Josh will be right by their side, lifting up this ticket,” Dean said. “This is a ticket that believes in the American values of small d, democracy, rule of law and freedom. It couldn’t be a greater contrast, so this was spectacular.”

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, the city’s 100th mayor and the first Black woman to hold the position, was the first local elected official to speak at the rally on Tuesday.

“I need you to know that this is a history-making day here in Philadelphia and in our country because we are on the cusp of electing our Vice President Kamala Harris to be the 47th president of the United States of America,” Harris said, to big applause.

Parker praised Harris’ record as vice president and noted they are both “divine nine sisters and graduates of Historically Black colleges and universities.”

Parker warned about staying focused on the race.

“Don’t let Trump the trickster take our eyes off the prize,” Parker said. “We have to remember that there is nothing that is more important than electing the Harris-Walz team and taking them where they belong, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”

Carlos Ruiz III of Philadelphia told the Capital-Star that prior to the rally his first choice for vice president was Shapiro, but after doing some research on Walz, he liked what he read and is happy with the pick.

“I think one of the, one of the groups of voters that she was probably going to have a hard time connecting with was older white voters, and I think that’s probably why she leaned towards Gov. Walz” Ruiz said. “And he’s very relatable, seems like the everyday kind of guy, and I think that’s going to bring what was missing to the ticket.”

Jane Poblano, a teacher from Montgomery County, told the Capital-Star that Walz seems like a “great guy, very humble,” and offered words of encouragement to him joining the ticket.

“I think it’s a good choice,” Poblano said. “She had a lot of good choices.”

How it started/How it’s going

The month of July began with Biden trailing in the polls after a poor debate performance in late June raised concerns about whether he could beat GOP nominee Donald Trump. Two days before the Republican National Convention, a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, killing one rally-goer and injuring two others. The following weekend, Biden bowed out of the race and immediately endorsed Harris, with Democrats quickly coalescing behind her candidacy.

Late Monday, the Democratic National Committee announced Harris had secured the support of 99% of delegates to formally become the party’s presidential nominee, following the conclusion of a five-day virtual vote.  She is expected to formally accept the nomination at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

The Biden-Harris $284.1 million between January 2023 and June 30, 2024,  while Trump’s campaign raised $217.2 million during that time period. Trump entered July with $128.1 million on hand, while Biden’s campaign had $96 million on hand.

But Harris raised $310 million in July according to her campaign, while Trump’s campaign said it raised $138 million.

And although the election is still less than three months away, Pennsylvanians are already being inundated with ads and will continue to be throughout the campaign. showed that Trump and Harris are slated to spend more than twice as much on advertising in Pennsylvania as any of the other pivotal battleground states.

Another race in the commonwealth garnering  a lot off ad spending is Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey’s bid for a fourth term against Republican challenger Dave McCormick.

At the rally on Tuesday, Casey praised Harris’ record “as a prosecutor putting away dangerous criminals, to her time in the United States Senate and as vice president, fighting for women’s rights, voting rights, and workers rights.”

He also told the crowd that they couldn’t trust McCormick, referencing his recent previous residency in Connecticut and work as a hedge fund manager.

McCormick, who was also in Philadelphia on Tuesday, sent out a statement earlier in the day calling Harris-Walz the “most liberal presidential ticket in history” and linked them with Casey  on border policies, inflation, energy production, and other issues.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), delivered brief remarks at the rally on Tuesday noting that he’s a “yinzer,” Steelers and Sheetz guy, referencing his roots on the opposite side of the commonwealth — which drew boos from the crowd — he said they were all on team Harris/Walz, which drew applause.

“This election is about moving our country forward with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz,” Fetterman said. “Or a couple of really really really really weird dudes.”

After Fetterman exited the stage, some “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants broke out.

While most of the state’s delegation backed Shapiro to join the ticket, about having him in the role.

Prior to Biden’s exit from the race, Trump was consistently polling slightly ahead of Biden in Pennsylvania. However, since Harris emerged as the presumptive nominee, shows the race in a statistical tie.

“One of the things that stood out to me about Tim is how his convictions on fighting for middle class families run deep. It’s personal,” Harris said in a statement  Tuesday, offering praise for Walz’s record as governor, including passing a law to provide paid family and medical leave and making Minnesota the first state in the country to pass a law providing constitutional abortion protections, and  a bill requiring universal background checks for gun purchases.

Tuesday is Harris’ seventh visit to Pennsylvania this year, according to the campaign. Her most recent appearance in the commonwealth was on . She’s also to tout the administration’s infrastructure investments, in , and in Montgomery County to . Harris has been the Biden administration’s primary voice on abortion rights, particularly in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

And in case anyone doubted Philadelphia’s importance in the 2024 race, Vance on Tuesday as well, for his first campaign event in Pennsylvania.

Trump was most recently in the state last Wednesday for an indoor rally in Harrisburg, since the assassination attempt.

Harris’s campaign swing with her running mate begins in Pennsylvania, then she’s scheduled to campaign in other key battleground states over the next few days. Planned campaign stops in and were postponed due to Hurricane Debby.

Trump and Vance are also slated to make appearances in key battleground states later this week.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on and .

Kamala Harris’ new running mate is an unabashedly progressive midwestern governor who appeals to veterans, hunters and football fans. If elected, he’d also be the first K-12 educator since Lyndon Johnson to be vice president, boasting the deepest connection to public schools of any candidate in recent memory.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a former high school teacher and football coach who enacted a free college tuition program and expanded free school lunch statewide. But Walz, 60, a former congressional lawmaker who is in his second term as governor, may also carry left-of-center baggage that weighs down the ticket in a tight presidential race, observers said.

Walz rose to prominence earlier this year by informally leading Democrats’ turn to calling Republicans “weird,” suggesting in interviews that they’re out of touch and relying on culture-war fodder instead of issues Americans care about. 

Tim Walz first year as a high school football coach and geography teacher

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE)

“Who’s sitting in a bar in Racine, Wisconsin, saying, ‘You know what we really need? We need to ban “Animal Farm.”’ Nobody is!” Walz with MSNBC.

In a introducing himself released by the campaign Tuesday, Walz described the “small-town” values he learned growing up in Nebraska and later tried to instill in his students: “respect, compromise, service to country. And so when I went into government, that’s what I carried with me.”

Harris echoed those themes in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia Tuesday evening, calling him “the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having and that every kid deserves.”

As governor, Walz put forward an education agenda that unions have cheered, signing a nearly state budget last year that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools. He also signed into law a new $1,750-per-child tax credit that he said will help reduce childhood poverty.

Walz enacted for Minnesota families earning less than $80,000 per year. Analysts predict it’ll cost the state around $117 million in fiscal year 2025 and $49.5 million annually after that.

With a $17.5 billion budget surplus last year, Walz promised “to put it behind our teachers so we can educate our children.”

Despite the “historic” spending, school districts throughout Minnesota last spring were facing massive cuts, the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses. 

The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools, projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. And even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs must explain the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

Free lunch for all

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard after high school and attended Chadron State College. He earned a social science degree in 1989, and spent a year in one of the first government-sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China.

Walz went on to serve full time in the Army National Guard, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major. 

He and his wife, Gwen, met while teaching in Nebraska. They worked together at Mankato, Minn., West High School, where he taught social studies and coached football. She taught English and later served as a district administrator. 

Former colleagues said the couple were powerhouse teachers who balanced out each other’s energy-levels. He was animated, they . She was more reserved.

“He came in very outgoing, very gregarious,” former social studies teacher Pat Griffiths told The Post. “If there were 100 people in a room and 99 loved him, he would work on the one who didn’t until they did too.”

Another colleague told of a prank that a group of teachers played on Walz during his first semester there: They printed out a fake gift certificate for a free turkey as a bogus “welcome gift,” to be collected at a local grocery store. 

Walz returned to school with the turkey. 

In 2006, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating a Republican incumbent in Minnesota’s rural First District, which typically leans Republican. He served six terms before being elected governor in 2018.

These days, Walz is widely known on the national stage for last year’s Minnesota Free School Meals law, which made school breakfast and lunch free for all students, regardless of income. It made Minnesota the fourth state to do so after California, Colorado and Maine. Currently, offer free meals to all students.

At the time, Walz said the measure “puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up.”

During debate on the bill in March 2023, state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, questioned whether food insecurity was even an issue in the state, saying, “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry. I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

A video of his speech went viral, garnering on X and plenty of criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Recent coverage suggests that though the program is popular and the state’s surplus helps keep it afloat, the free-meals program than expected: an extra $81 million over the next two years and $95 million in the two years after that.

Walz has also criticized education savings accounts, saying they don’t help rural areas. Support for these accounts, championed by conservatives, may have hurt Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s prospects to become Harris’ running mate. 

A lifelong hunter, Walz shifted substantially on gun safety, moving from an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in 2016 to endorsing an assault weapons ban after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At the time, Walz said his then-17-year-old daughter asked him to do more on gun safety. He donated his NRA contributions to charity.

The move turned his rating to “straight F’s,” . “And I sleep just fine.”

On Tuesday, after word leaked about Harris picking Walz, gun safety activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg on X, “I’m smiling a mile wide right now.” 

Extreme or Norman Rockwell?

Policies like these have earned Walz endorsements on the left — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Tuesday called him “an unabashed champion for public education, for educators and workers.” 

It also doesn’t hurt that Mary Cathryn Ricker, Walz’s first state education commissioner, was a former AFT vice president. Before that, she led the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.

At Temple University Tuesday evening, Walz spoke of his 20-year career as a teacher and his wife’s 29-year tenure, saying, “Don’t ever underestimate teachers.”

Walz’s career nearly derailed when he was pulled over in a drunk driving incident as a 31-year-old teacher in Nebraska. As the reported, he was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55-mph zone. He failed a field sobriety test, but later pleaded guilty to reckless driving, a misdemeanor. He left the state in 1996, when he continued teaching and coaching football in Mankato.

Invoking his time as a coach there, Harris said he was a role model — on and off the field. She recounted the story of one of the first openly gay students at Walz’s school, who sought to start a gay-straight alliance “at a time when acceptance was difficult to find.”

Harris said Walz “knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor. And as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody.”

But in a tight race, Walz’s progressive credentials could spell trouble for Harris, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative .

Hess called the Walz pick “an odd choice” in a race in which Harris already has teachers’ union backing but needs to shore up support among independents and conservatives. He suggested that Shapiro might have been a better match for those constituencies.

“You couldn’t get the NEA and AFT working any harder for Harris than they already are,” he said. “She’s already broken out ‘the full pander’ for them.”

Hess said Harris likely chose Walz as a “vibe pick” who suits midwesterners in style if not substance: “He looks like a big, burly high school football coach, assistant principal, kind of sensible guy from Middle America” who served in the military, “whereas Shapiro looks like an investment banker. Part of the calculation might be that that visual is worth plenty.”

Harris may also be trying to “buy herself a lot more leeway with the left so she can keep tacking back to the middle on issues — and the left will be happy because they feel like Walz is one of them.”

It’s possible centrists or moderates in battleground states will be swayed by Walz, Hess said, but his progressive policy solutions could stop them in their tracks. “The guy’s a high school teacher who has been in the National Guard for 20 years,” he said. “His politics are extreme, but his profile, his biography, is about as Norman Rockwell as you can get.”

That moment when you’re a union president, and find out that a teacher and union member is going to be the next vice-president.

We’re excited for former public school teacher & AFT member to join on the ballot this November!

— AFT (@AFTunion)

But Chris Stewart, CEO of and an education blogger based in Minneapolis, said framing Walz in traditional political terms is misleading. Minnesota may be progressive, but it’s “not wild and crazy. We’re not San Francisco. … I don’t think people know how purple Minnesota can be,” he said of . 

Despite the divide, Stewart said, Walz has succeeded with a “very slim majority” in the state legislature. 

But rather than judging Walz on a “left-right continuum,” he said, we should look at him as “just a better version of a great American Democrat. He is not left or right in the way that we traditionally think about things. He kind of breaks that binary.”

The Minnesota House of Representatives voted 124-8 Monday afternoon to approve legislation that removes a ban on school resource officers using prone restraint on students. The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Nearly four years after George Floyd suffocated to death while being pinned face down to the pavement by a police officer, Minnesota Democrats are fast-tracking legislation that would undo a less-than-year-old ban prohibiting school-based cops from using that same type of restraint on students. 

As early as Monday, the state’s House of Representatives is slated to consider a proposal that presents a drastic departure by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — rules that explicitly barred school resource officers from using face-down “prone restraint.”

The ban was part of a broader police reform movement that followed Floyd’s murder. The fatal physical hold led to the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history, a national reckoning on racism, policy reforms that sought to address police brutality and, in Minneapolis and dozens of districts nationwide, the removal of sworn officers from school campuses. In Minnesota, new state rules barred police officers from using chokeholds on people and prone restraints were banned in the state’s prisons. 

Now, as the state’s Democrats make a 180-degree turn on the campus reform, education equity advocates have accused state leaders of falling to the political pressure of law enforcement groups ahead of a November election where party lawmakers seek to maintain their narrow majority in the state House. The proposal cleared the House Ways and Means committee earlier this week. 

Physical restraints have for children including injury and, in some cases, death. Yet for Republican lawmakers and law enforcement, the change in Minnesota went a step too far. Police departments statewide pulled their cops from schools in protest of the restraint restriction. 

During a recent Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee hearing, Democratic Sen. Bonnie Westlin, lead sponsor of the Senate version of the bill that would restore prone restraints in schools, presented it less as a backtrack and more as an opportunity. The issue is about ensuring campus cops remain “important team members in our schools,” Westlin said, while creating uniformity across school resource officers’ duties, their training requirements and accountability.  

Along with removing restraint rules for school-based police and campus security staff, the pending legislation would allocate $150,000 this year to develop consistent, statewide training standards for school resource officers and require police to complete the lessons before working on campuses. The bill also seeks to clarify that school-based police officers should not be involved in routine student discipline. 

“When a local community determines that they would like to engage SROs, we want to make sure there is uniformity about expectations for everyone concerned,” Westlin said.

Advocates who lauded the prone restraint ban, however, say that lawmakers have turned their backs on Floyd’s legacy. 

“How is it that — in the state where this man gets killed and the world erupted — that we are not the leading people who are banning this on our kids?” asked advocate Khulia Pringle, the Minnesota director of the National Parents Union and a steering committee member of the Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition, a group of education nonprofits that has lobbied against the legislation. “It’s banned in prisons, it’s banned for students with disabilities. 

“Why can’t we extend that same courtesy to all children?” 

The ‘fix’

Presented by Democratic leaders as an “SRO fix” bill, the proposal comes after police departments got wind of the restraint ban last fall — an under-the-radar change in a larger education bill that passed without opposition. In response, about 40 law enforcement agencies removed their school resource officers from campuses. 

, school resource officers and campus security personnel are prohibited from using face-down prone restraints and “certain physical holds,” including those that restrict or impair “a pupil’s ability to breathe” or their “ability to communicate distress.” 

The ban represented an extension of state rules that have been on the books for years. In 2015, after that “it is only a matter of time before a Minnesota child is seriously injured or killed while in prone restraint,” lawmakers banned educators from using the technique on children with disabilities. Nationally, that curtail educators from using prone restraints and other tactics that restrict students’ breathing. 

In Washington, D.C., Democratic lawmakers have sought for years to pass . Nationally, about 35,000 students were placed in physical restraints at school during the 2020-21 school year, from the Education Department’s civil rights office. Black students represented 15% of K-12 school enrollment and 21% of those placed in physical holds. Meanwhile, students with disabilities represented 14% of the national enrollment — and 81% of those subjected to restraints. 

After the new changes were put in place in Minnesota and students returned to classes last fall, law enforcement agencies argued it stirred confusion among their ranks, opened their departments to lawsuits and tied their officers’ hands in how they work to keep schools safe and combat crimes like vandalism. Republican lawmakers seized on the furor and demanded a special legislative session to repeal the law. 

The Coon Rapids Police Department, located in a northern Minneapolis suburb, is among the agencies that removed its officers from schools. That decision was reversed and the agency’s four campus cops after the state attorney general issued a clarification on the law’s limits. The school resource officer program was put on hold temporarily last fall in part because of how officers are trained to do their jobs, Captain of Investigations Tanya Harmoning told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. She said she wasn’t sure how often prone restraint had been used by her officers inside schools. Regardless of whether an officer is stationed inside a school building or on a city street, she said, they “are all trained in the same tactics.” 

“Our officers are trained a certain way to handle certain situations,” she said. “Some of these people transition back out onto the road, so to expect them to transition from ‘you can do it here, but you can’t do it here,’ kind of thing, that’s just not how we train our people.”

In last fall, Attorney General Keith Ellison clarified that the ban didn’t restrict officers from using prone restraints in cases involving imminent harm or death, which offered assurances to many law enforcement agencies that agreed to return officers to schools. 

The special session that Republicans and police brass demanded didn’t come to fruition but the issue has become a top priority this year for Gov. Walz and his Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which controls both chambers of the state legislature. 

State officials and education leaders have sought to frame the debate as being not about prone restraint, but rather the need to get police back in schools. 

‘The voices of all stakeholders’

When Democratic Rep. Cedrick Frazier appeared before the House Education Policy Committee in mid-February, he acknowledged the timing of his testimony: “We are not far removed,” he said, “from the tragic murder of George Floyd.” 

He pivoted to a state law passed in response that banned police from using chokeholds — rules that he said were critical to their discussions about school-based police. With the chokehold ban in place, he suggested the prone restraint prohibition was unnecessary. 

“The tension and anxiety that has been discussed, in large part, stems from the egregious visual of that tragic day,” Frazier testified. But even without a ban on prone restraints, he said that state law would continue to prohibit school-based officers from pinning students to the ground in ways that restrict breathing.

“Our only focus must be doing everything we can to ensure that while our young people are in our schools, that we ensure that their environment is safe from any type of harm,” Frazier said. “We must ensure our young people have the best environment to have the best possible outcomes.” 

His testimony didn’t explicitly touch on prone restraints or why police needed greater autonomy around their use in classrooms. Representatives for Frazier and the governor didn’t respond to requests for comment and state Sen. Westlin’s office declined an interview request. 

In his testimony, Education Commissioner Willie Jett focused on schools’ need for campus police officers and the bill’s new training requirements. He, too, didn’t touch specifically on restraint procedures. 

“SROs are viewed by many as essential to maintaining safe and secure learning environments and data from the tells us that an overwhelming majority of students from all demographic areas value the SROs in their schools,” Jett said. 

In Minnesota, state education officials have sought to reduce schools’ reliance on restraint tactics for years. The reveal that students with disabilities were subjected to more than 10,000 physical restraints during the 2021-22 school year, with such holds disproportionately used on Black and Indigenous students. Frequently, , these holds result in injuries — and more often for adults than children. During the 2021-22 school year, districts reported 733 staff injuries from placing students in restraints — a rate that equates to about one staff injury for every 14 physical holds. That same year, 161 students were reported injured.  

Frazier’s work leading the reform bill appears to be at odds with his broader championing of policing and public safety. After Floyd’s murder, Frazier became known in the state as in favor or progressive police reforms, often drawing on his personal experiences with inequities growing up as a Black teen on Chicago’s South Side. In September, as police agencies statewide began pulling officers from schools, Frazier signaled his support for the new prone restraint ban. The House People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, which Frazier co-chairs, released a statement expressing that same sentiment.

“The provision in the education bill passed earlier this year related to school personnel is clear: School staff, including school resource officers, are not allowed to use prone restraints,” or other holds that restrict a student’s ability to breathe, the caucus wrote in the statement, which bore Frazier’s name. Given the attorney general’s opinion extending SROs’ authority to restrain kids in serious cases, the group wrote, “changes to the law are not needed.”

In Republican’s unsuccessful bid to force a special legislative session, they found common ground with Education Minnesota, the state teacher’s union, which noted that on how to protect themselves and students during potentially dangerous situations. In 2021, union spokesperson Chris Williams told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ the group was concerned about “the ongoing racial disparities that we know exist in the use of restrictive procedures,” and noted support for rules that prohibited prone restraint in classrooms. 

Williams didn’t respond to a list of questions about the pending legislation introduced by Frazier who, along with being a state representative, works as a . 

‘Prone kills kids’

When Matt Shaver testified at the House education committee last month, he opened with a grim warning: “Prone kills kids.”

“We are advocates for kids — and prone kills kids,” said Shaver, the policy director of the nonprofit EdAllies, which is a member of the Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition working to maintain the current prone restraint ban. “This is not about whether SROs belong in schools,” as lawmakers and state education officials have cast the conversation, he said. “This is about whether we believe holds that kill children belong in school.” 

Shaver cited which examined childhood fatalities that stemmed from physical restraints over a 26-year period. Researchers identified 79 incidents where restraints led to deaths in settings including foster homes, psychiatric agencies and schools. Deaths were most common when children were held in the face-down prone restraints — and most often for benign childhood behaviors like failing to remain silent or sit without wriggling. Investigations into the fatalities found that adults routinely failed to follow proper restraint policies and laws. 

“In 15 fatalities, children vomited, urinated or turned blue during the restraint,” researchers concluded in the 2021 study, which was published in the academic journal Child & Youth Care Forum. “These signals should have been detected by an adult monitoring these events and immediately triggered a change in tactics or discontinuation of the restraint.”

Shaver told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ he believes the Democrats are reacting to the politics of the police “work stoppage” and a desire not to appear soft on crime ahead of the November election. That has placed them in the position, he said, of wanting to overturn the restraint restriction, but “not in a way that will freak out their base.” 

“They may have failed at doing that,” Shaver said.

Now, district leaders statewide are scrambling to explain to their communities that, in fact, they are facing massive cuts. In many places, balancing the budget will mean layoffs or school closures. 

Like their counterparts throughout the country, Minnesota school systems are facing the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses — in many places, going back years — that means less per-pupil state money. School funding experts call this a fiscal cliff.

“That is No. 1 with a bullet on any superintendent’s whiteboard,” says Kirk Schneidawind, executive director of the Minnesota School Boards Association. 

The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. Even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs are stuck explaining the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

The confusion among members of the public who think the schools are awash in cash has real consequences, says Schneidawind. Last year, half of school system funding referenda failed at the ballot box, depriving districts of millions more.

Billions in new state funding and a fiscal cliff: How can both be true? Here are four critical — and much misunderstood — aspects of the looming crisis.

More Money, More Strings

With Democrats in control of the Capitol for the first time in more than a decade and a $17 billion surplus in state coffers, most policymakers assumed the question wouldn’t be whether education would see a spending boost in 2023, but how big it would be and how the pie would be divided. 

“My messages to families, to students, to teachers, to support staff is, ‘This is the budget for many of us who taught for decades, this is the budget we’re waiting for,’ ” Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, said at the start of the session, newspaper. “This is the transformational moment.”Ěý

As he signed the education finance bill into law in June, Walz called it “The Minnesota Miracle 2.0” — a reference to a sweeping school finance reform measure of the 1970s that earned then-Gov. Wendall Anderson a photo on the cover of Time magazine. 

Yet even before the ink on Walz’s signature was dry, school leaders were bemoaning the fine print. In the end, the change to the basic revenue formula increased per-pupil funding from $6,863 in 2023 to $7,281 in 2025. 

Eight months, later, they’re still doing the math, but the Minnesota School Boards Association, the Association of Metropolitan School Districts and others estimate that up to half the $2.2 billion had already been earmarked for as many as 65 new mandates, ranging from free meals for all students to menstrual products in school restrooms.

Lawmakers also extended unemployment insurance to cover bus drivers, some substitute teachers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides and other seasonal workers. This made Minnesota the first state to mandate this benefit for hourly employees, but it was unclear who will pay the premiums in the long term.

After a grueling fight, the legislature allotted $135 million to pay for the first year of unemployment insurance premiums, promising to revisit funding in the future. District leaders were only partly appeased, noting that even if the state subsidized the premiums going forward, the employees who typically staff summer programs could choose not to.

Nearly $75 million is allotted to help fund a new law requiring science-backed literacy curriculum and instruction. There is $45 million for new school librarians, $15 million to support “full-service” schools — which provide health and social services to families — and money for new ethnic studies materials, Naloxone and efforts to retain teachers of color. 

Funding for K-12 education, which makes up nearly a third of the state budget, is $23.2 billion for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

Welcome though the money and new benefits are, says Schneidawind, districts will still have to scramble to cover some costs. Part of the difficulty of calculating just how much that will be is that school systems keep discovering new ways that the costs are showing up. The private companies that supply substitute teachers, for instance, are passing along their new state benefit costs.

Most likely, the cavalry is not coming. Like many state legislatures, Minnesota’s meets on a two-year calendar. Last year was the current cycle’s budgeting year; when the 2024 session begins Feb. 12, lawmakers will focus on capital and infrastructure bonding bills. 

How ‘New Money’ Becomes a Cut

Every year, after the legislative session gavels to a close, lawmakers of both parties go back home to boast that they boosted K-12 spending by adding to the state’s general fund. They rarely mention that school funding has, by many calculations, not kept up with inflation. 

One way this has traditionally been accomplished is by cutting or not increasing funding for services paid for out of other parts of the budget, such as special education and English learner instruction. School districts must then divert the “new” money to make up the shortfalls, in what’s referred to as a cross-subsidy. For the current fiscal year, Minnesota schools are spending $750 million just to fill the special education funding gap — by far the largest.

Districts have long pushed to end the practice, which many say may aid officials’ re-election efforts but has cloaked a steady erosion of state funding. With a budget surplus estimated at $17.5 billion, lawmakers last year said it was time to fully fund the cross-subsidies. 

Gov. Tim Walz, however, only wanted to , preferring to spend more on required paid family leave and other new programs. In the end, though, that didn’t happen. The funding set aside to offset special education losses was reduced to cover just 44% of the gap — freeing up almost the exact sum needed to cover seasonal workers’ unemployment benefits for one year.

The upshot: Historic infusion notwithstanding, Democratic lawmakers say there is still an $800-per-pupil gap between funding levels 20 years ago and today, adjusted for inflation. That does not reflect recent cost increases in transportation, labor and other areas, says Scott Croonquist, executive director of Minnesota’s Association of Metropolitan School Districts. 

The Democratic head of the House Education Finance Committee, Rep. Cheryl Youakim defended the outcomes, saying the 2023 increases closed the inflationary gap by one-third. “There has been 20 years of underfunding in education and that can’t be turned around overnight,” she says. “Our districts still do have needs.”

Bad News at the Ballot Box

In November, the Rochester, Minnesota, public school system lost a technology funding referendum . As tiny as the margin was, the impact was tectonic. 

The levy would have generated $10 million a year for a decade, freeing up $7 million a year the cash-strapped district currently spends on technology to reduce class sizes and stave off the impact of falling enrollment. In short order, Superintendent Kent Pekel announced that the district had no choice but to close three schools and cut transportation costs by changing attendance boundaries. 

Three weeks later, the with a $10 million donation intended to stave off the pain — but only for a year. District leaders will use that time to prep for a do-over, hoping 2024’s presidential election draws more voters than the referendum did and that a majority will agree to the tax.

When Pekel took over as superintendent in July 2021, he realized that years of eroded state funding was only one factor wreaking havoc on his budget. The district had been adding staff but losing students for a decade, albeit at a slower rate than many school systems. Instead of using federal COVID aid to close the gap, which would have postponed the fiscal reckoning, he cut $7 million in 2022 and $14 million last year.

In addition to the technology levy that failed at the ballot box last fall, the district depends on revenue from a larger operating levy. If it can’t get that approved, Rochester leaders will have to find another $10 million to cut in 2024 and $17 million in 2025. 

According to the school boards association, voters rejected half of operating levies on the ballot throughout the state last year. Perhaps anticipating this, lawmakers last year allowed districts to renew levies once without going to the voters. Schneidawind anticipates 50 school systems will take advantage of the new law this fall.

The Other Postponed Reckoning

Pekel is one of a few Minnesota superintendents who decided not to use pandemic relief funds to close pre-existing budget gaps. Many districts spent large swaths of their COVID recovery aid staving off tough issues posed by declining enrollment. Faced with a competitive labor market, many boosted educator pay. For example, despite years of shrinking enrollment, Minneapolis Public Schools added 400 jobs.

In addition to explaining to families and staff about the imminent loss of federal funding, many districts must now grapple with how to communicate why the boost in state aid won’t head off cuts.

Next door to Minneapolis, the Robbinsdale Area School District is predicting it could end the current fiscal year $2.1 million in the red and may need to cut $17 million to balance the books next year. This can’t be accomplished without layoffs. 

In January, school board member Kim Holmes acknowledged that decisions by the board and district leadership will make balancing the budget especially painful.
“We misstepped,” the suburban news site CCX Media . “This board misstepped, the administration misstepped. If we weren’t tracking historical decreased enrollment — and one of the biggest things they told us not to do with [COVID] dollars was hire positions — and we did it. So we have to come out and take some ownership.”

Minnesota teachers renewing their license must now undergo training about Native American history and culture.

The Legislature passed a law this year requiring training for K-12 teachers about the “cultural heritage and contemporary contributions of American Indians, with particular emphasis on Minnesota Tribal Nations,” in order to renew their license.

The requirement goes into effect for less-experienced teachers Tuesday and the remainder of the teaching corps Jan. 1.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

Teachers already must fulfill to renew their licenses, including training on suicide prevention and reading preparation.

In addition, they are required to undergo cultural competency training — which includes instruction on how to best serve Native American students — to renew their licenses, but Native American-specific training will eventually be its own requirement.

The Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board is working on the Native American history rollout and exactly what the training will include. Until then, teachers can fulfill the new requirement under the existing cultural competency training.

In his Gov. Tim Walz recommended Native American history renewal requirement for teachers and argued the current cultural competency requirements for teachers didn’t dedicate enough time specifically to Native American history.

“Given the rich history of American Indians and their contemporary contributions, more time and resources should be provided to Minnesota educators,” Walz’s budget proposal stated.

Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union, said in a statement that it supports the new training requirement, but noted it adds an additional burden for teachers.

“Minnesota’s Indigenous history is complex, rich and long, and it has been far too often ignored in both U.S. and Minnesota history lessons,” said Education Minnesota President Denise Specht. “At the same time, we have to be aware of the extra time and effort each new requirement adds to the plates of educators, and give them the adequate time and training they need to address these important pieces of delivering a well-rounded education.”

The state licensing board said it will release more information about the requirement’s specifics in the coming weeks.

Minnesota’s academic standards for students include material about the cultural heritage and contributions of Native Americans and the tribal nations with which Minnesota shares borders. The Legislature this past session also mandated school districts offer curriculum on the Holocaust, the genocide of Indigenous people and the removal of Native Americans from Minnesota.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday asked a group of Savage 4th graders attending summer school a question:

“How many of you think you’d like to be teachers someday?”

No one raised their hands.

“Awe, c’mon — it’s so fun!” Walz said. A few students tentatively put their hands in the air.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

The unenthusiastic response was emblematic of why Walz was there to briefly teach the students about science and the food chain — to highlight Minnesota’s teacher shortage and difficulty recruiting new workers for the profession.

Walz is entering a pivotal period for his education legacy. The former Mankato West High School geography teacher and assistant football coach seemed well positioned to elevate Minnesota’s K-12 education system, which has struggled to close wide opportunity gaps even as the student population has become increasingly diverse.

Instead, he spent the bulk of his first term dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the public safety crisis that accompanied it, both of which may have contributed to flagging student achievement.

Less than half of in math, and about half of students are proficient in reading following years when many students spent little time in their classrooms. And the racial opportunity gaps remain among the nation’s worst. Last year, nearly 60% of white students were proficient in reading, while about 30% of Black and Hispanic students were proficient.

Now, many school districts are dealing with a new crisis: A shortage of teachers and staff. Walz’s office said there are about 225,000 education jobs in Minnesota, of which over 13,000 — roughly 6% — are vacant. Nine out of 10 Minnesota school districts said they have been significantly impacted by the teacher shortage, according to a

The Minnesota Legislature during the session boosted K-12 education funding by nearly $2.3 billion — a 10% increase from the previous biennium.

Lawmakers committed more than $88 million on a particularly pressing need: programs to increase the number of teachers of color in Minnesota.

About 6% of Minnesota teachers are people of color, according by the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board, even though about 38% percent of students are Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian American.

Walz on Wednesday said Minnesota hasn’t done enough to attract teachers of color.

“I think we need to make it the case that this is a profession where you’re welcome,” Walz said at a media briefing after the class with the 4th graders. “And I think we need to make the case that this is a profession where you can sustain your family and it’s a place where we need you to make a difference.”

Research shows that increasing the number of teachers of color can

During the 4th grade class, the students asked Walz a few questions: How was your day? Do you have any pets? And, do you get a lot of paperwork?

At the end of the lesson, Walz gave all the students a challenge coin engraved with a picture of Minnesota, telling the students they’re often given to members of the military or navy when someone does a good job.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

Gov. Tim Walz on Friday signed a bill to provide free breakfast and lunch to all Minnesota students at eligible schools.

Walz signed the bill surrounded by lawmakers, community advocates and young students at Webster Elementary School in northeast Minneapolis. The second-term DFL governor lauded how universal meals will help make Minnesota the best state in the country to raise a child — one of Walz’s key budget priorities.

“This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen,” Walz said in a statement.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

The majority of Minnesota schools receive federal funding from the National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for each meal served, though it doesn’t cover the cost of the entire meal. Under the new law, schools are prohibited from charging students for the remaining cost, and the state will foot the rest of the bill — about $200 million annually.

Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan in an emotional speech talked about her experience growing up with food insecurity, noting that about one in six Minnesota children don’t always have enough to eat.

“To our decision-makers who believe they have never met someone who is experiencing or has experienced hunger — Hi, my name is Peggy Flanagan, and I was one in six of those Minnesota children who experienced hunger,” she said.

Flanagan was referencing a now- from the state Senate’s debate over the bill earlier this week. Sen. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, questioned on the floor whether food insecurity was actually an issue in Minnesota.

“I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry,” Drazkowski said before voting against the bill. “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

Minnesota is now the fourth state, including California, Colorado and Maine, to implement universal free meals for students. Walz said more funding for education is coming and that his administration is “just getting started.”

“The big stuff is still coming,” Walz said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

After a dozen years representing southeast Minnesota in Congress, Tim Walz is moving into the governor’s mansion. If anything, he promises to be even more of a traditional Democratic-Farmer-Labor leader in terms of education than outgoing Gov. Mark Dayton, whose administration blocked numerous centrist efforts to push schools to close some of the largest racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in the nation.

“I am labor, I stand with labor, and as governor, I will keep Minnesota a labor state,” he pronounced on multiple occasions, sometimes accompanied by the hashtag #WalzOrWisconsin, a jab at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

I am labor, I stand with labor, and as governor, I will keep Minnesota a labor state. I’m incredibly proud to have the endorsement of all 14 building trades unions in this state.

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz)

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Walz’s frontline education platform jibes with the positions of Education Minnesota, the state’s merged affiliate of both the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. He has called for more state funding for schools, more school support personnel such as counselors and nurses and universal preschool, something Dayton pushed relentlessly versus the pre-K funding targeted to low-income children most early childhood education leaders pushed for.

Though not on the stump, Walz has also called for innovations in science, technology, engineering and math instruction, personalized learning, high school redesign and the diversification of Minnesota’s teacher corps, which is 96 percent white. Whether the somewhat different agendas can be explained by Democrats’ universal need to get their left flank to the polls remains to be seen.

Walz spent 24 years in the National Guard and 20 as a teacher and coach, a career trajectory launched by a stint in the classroom on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

(Check out what’s going on in governor’s races across the country on ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s liveblog.)

Walz’s challenger, one-term state lawmaker Jeff Johnson, called for a laundry list of changes in education topped by “simplified” school funding. Johnson said he would push to reform the state’s Board of Teaching, despite the fact that it was dissolved at the beginning of the year after a decade of efforts to overhaul teacher licensure.

This is my favorite photo from the campaign trail.

— Peggy Flanagan (Untamed) (@peggyflanagan)

Criss-crossing the state in Paul Bunyan’s lumberjack flannels, Walz was boosted by his charismatic running mate Peggy Flanagan, a former state lawmaker who has the distinction of being both the youngest person ever elected to the Minneapolis School Board and the first Native American. The former head of the state’s branch of the Children’s Defense Fund, she has long advocated for equity in services for Minnesota children.

Johnson’s running mate, Donna Bergstrom, is also Native American.

As of midnight EST, with 67 percent of precincts reporting, Walz had captured 55 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 42 percent.

EDlection2018: This is one of several dozen racesĚýĚýthat could go on to influence state or federal education policy. Get the latest headlines delivered straight to your inbox; sign up forĚýĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter.