Minnesota voters backed school funding, union-endorsed candidates at the polls

Updated: 7:50 a.m.

Minnesota voters on Tuesday approved union-endorsed school board candidates and school funding in competitive and unusually well-funded off-year elections with more than 40 districts seeking to fill board seats and 60 asking for funding approval.

The conservative Minnesota Parents Alliance saw 10 of its 44 endorsed candidates win board seats in seven districts throughout the state. Candidates won two seats in Anoka-Hennepin, the state’s largest district, and three seats on the Hastings school board. One of the alliance's winning candidates in Minnetonka was also endorsed by the local teachers union.

Teachers unions overall, though, continued to show their longtime strength getting their candidates elected. Voters approved 85 percent of union-endorsed school board candidates, said Denise Specht, president of Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union.

Fierce competition

Board races this year saw money, support and partisan endorsements pour in with resources increasingly targeted toward candidates willing to fight culture wars or pass ideological tests.

In Anoka-Hennepin, the state’s largest district, campaign finance reports revealed spending close to $200,000 on this year’s elections by a variety of groups and donors. 

The competition for open seats was fierce in some districts. In South Washington County Schools, 11 candidates vied for three open seats. Two union-endorsed candidates and one Minnesota Parents Alliance-endorsed candidate took home wins. 

The election reflected a desire from voters to see a variety of opinions on the school board, said Simi Patnaik, an incumbent who was reelected to her second term on the board.

She said she thought voter choices had a lot to do with school board elections being local,  perhaps seeing people voting across partisan lines based on relationships they’d formed with candidates.

“People like to have a variety of opinions and thoughts on the board, and so I think there was a decent amount of ticket-splitting,” Patnaik said. “They don’t like being told, ‘This is your slate. You voted for this person for president, or you voted for this person for governor and therefore these are the people you have to vote for for school board.’”

The Alliance-backed winner in South Washington County, Ryan Clarke thought voters in his district wanted more ideological balance on the board. 

“The voters want some balance to the school board and so I'm hopeful that my other school board colleagues will want to work with myself in good faith as I do with them,” Clarke said. “While we will certainly have differences of opinion on a great many things, I think that there are … things that we can all work on together really to serve all of the kids, the students.”

In Bloomington, union-endorsed candidates swept all three open seats, including Heather Starks. She said the top question she fielded from voters had to do with a petition from local residents to remove books from school libraries. 

She said she viewed Tuesday’s election results as voters rejecting attempts to remove those books from school library shelves. 

“Bloomington voters showed that they value students’ abilities to have freedom to read, that we value that all students can bring their authentic selves to school,” Starks said. 

“I don’t want to win on a single issue. I want to win as a school board member because people think I’m competent,” she added. “They think that I listen, they think that I do my homework and I make decisions that are best for my community.”

Kyrstin Schuette, who leads the School Board Integrity Project, a newly formed progressive group, said candidates backed by her organization won seats in all but one of the districts they competed in.

“I’m really excited that the vast majority of Minnesotans rejected the extremism and outside rhetoric and national money and put our values back at the center of the conversation,” she said.

In Hastings, three Alliance-approved candidates won seats, while only one union-endorsed candidate won in a close race that saw voter approval of one MPA-endorsed candidate by only 10 votes. 

In a statement, the group said this year built on the successes of 2022. The group, however, counted fewer wins in the 2023 cycle than in the year before, when it said 50 candidates running with its endorsement won election to school boards in 15 of 19 targeted districts.

Voters ‘led with what was good’

Nearly 60 districts had questions on their ballots related to bonds, capital project levies and operating levies. About two-thirds of those requests were approved. 

That’s better than the 55 percent average for even years, but worse than the 74 percent passage rate seen in odd years. 

There were a few pockets in greater Minnesota that failed to pass their referendums. Smaller districts in southern Minnesota didn’t fare well. And neither did a patch of districts in northern Minnesota. 

In southwestern Minnesota, while voters turned down a $15 million request to expand Mankato school stadiums, they did give the district a green light for $105 million to be spent on renovations, technology and security infrastructure.

The approval came despite an infusion of nearly $50,000 from the conservative Minnesota Private Business Council in a vote-no campaign. 

“When an outside entity comes in, and tries to stir up some vote no power, the Mankato area Public Schools voting area really still led with what was good for our community and for our kids,” said Mankato Public Schools Communications coordinator, Mel Helling. 

With the election over, educators are hoping to take the focus off politics and back to education, said Specht, the teachers union president. She said local union leaders she’d been in touch with were more than ready for elections to be over, and to “put politics behind them.”

MPR News reporter Dana Ferguson contributed to this report.

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