A school district’s debate over dress codes and clubs shows how politics is shaping routine policies

For months now, Forest Lake school board meetings have drawn overflow crowds.

But parents’ and students’ handmade signs and impassioned pleas to the board have had nothing to do with district boundary changes or a coming school closure — agenda items that board members expected to be controversial.

The reason for the attention? Changes to district policies that many feared could eliminate middle school affinity groups and allow students to wear clothes featuring confederate flags or swastikas.

Once a routine, and often sleepy, bureaucratic process of updating rule books, school policy discussions have become the latest stage for culture clashes and concern over how schools should navigate opposing viewpoints and protect against litigation in a hyper-politicized environment.

School boards have always been policy-making bodies, said Kirk Schneidawind, executive director of the Minnesota School Boards Association. But policy decisions have attracted heightened attention over the last three to five years, he said.

“It used to be the superintendent would come in with a report from the policy committee and it would move on with a 7-0 vote,” Schneidawind said. “Now those policies are getting much more debate and scrutiny for what they mean for the direction of the district.”

In recent months, boardroom debate in area suburban districts has largely come down to policies or resolutions concerning diversity, equity and inclusion programming. On one side are board members who support scrubbing language that could draw federal attention amid Trump administration threats to strip funding from schools that continue such programs. On the other side are board members who say language explicitly protecting marginalized students is more important than ever.

That split has left politically-divided suburban school boards in all corners of the metro — Forest Lake, Hastings, Prior Lake-Savage and Anoka-Hennepin — with the challenging task of agreeing on language that adheres to state and federal law and doesn’t invite lawsuits, community backlash or student walkouts.

“We’re trying to thread that needle while walking through a minefield, not knowing what’s going to go off,” said Curt Rebelein, Jr., the president of the Forest Lake School Board.

Rebelein began working to update several Forest Lake board policies back in January, when two members — Tessa Antonsen and Mark Kasel — joined the board. Both new members were supported by the Minnesota Parents Alliance, a group associated with the “parents’ rights” movement.

Rebelein said the updates were meant to help standardize district rules, eliminate redundancies, respond to legal vulnerabilities and better align with model policies created by the Minnesota School Boards Association, or MSBA, to ensure compliance with state and federal law.

Opponents on the board and in the community, however, pushed back on that premise, saying some of the proposed changes went beyond model recommendations. They fear that strikethroughs and rewrites represent a quiet but partisan push against inclusion efforts and that the changes could open the door to more of the racial harm that prompted some of the policies decades ago.

“The issue comes down to whether we are dealing with topics that are actually rooted in policy or rooted in a political and politicized agenda,” said Claire Luger, the mom of a recent Forest Lake graduate and a teacher in the White Bear Lake district. “A lot of this feels like pushing the board chair’s personal belief system.”

Among the most controversial proposed changes in Forest Lake: Striking policy language banning “wearing or displaying confederate flag, swastika and KKK signs or symbols.” The language was first added after an African-American student was assaulted in the district in the late 90s, said Superintendent Steve Massey at a recent board meeting. The day after the assault, students wore white T-shirts to show their support of the racial targeting, Massey said.

Rebelein said he worried that naming one banned message would require the district to keep a list of all potentially offensive messages to be objective and avoid infringing on students’ First Amendment rights. In a policy committee meeting in May, he said that, as a Catholic, he was personally offended by the rainbow pride flag, according to the Forest Lake Times.

MSBA declined to comment on Forest Lake’s proposed policy, but a 2023 legal update on the association’s website details how to write a clear and objective dress code policy. It should include broad parameters of inappropriate messages on clothing (such as prohibiting clothing with messages that are vulgar or harass or discriminate against others) rather than a list of what messages are banned, according to the post.

Still, MSBA emphasizes local authority in determining appropriate school clothing and “decided to not attempt to create a redline version that could be universal across the state,” according to its 2023 model policy guidance.

The Forest Lake school board is set to vote June 26 on the dress code changes. After community pushback, the line explicitly banning swastikas and related symbols was added back into the proposed policy.

Student outcry also led to wording tweaks in a different policy that enshrines the right of middle schoolers to use school buildings for student-led clubs and affinity groups like Open Minds Club and Black Student Union. Funding for those clubs received unanimous approval from the board in February following a strong showing of public support. Policy updates before the board this week outline the rules for those groups.

School board races and meetings garnered more attention and scrutiny the first years of the COVID pandemic, as debate and even physical altercations broke out in board rooms over distance learning and masking mandates.

That increased engagement can be a blessing and a curse, said Dan White, chair of the school board in Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools. White has served on the board on and off since the early 1990s and sees the last few years as the beginning of a new, and more fraught, era for school board members. Districts are burdened by looming budgeting and staffing challenges, all while trying to meet the academic and mental health needs of students post-pandemic.

“There’s so much that is out of our hands that boards are forced to be reactionary, making it hard to do the regular work of the board,” he said, adding that personality and partisan conflicts only add to the problem.

Though they often vote against each other, on one point, Rebelein and fellow Forest Lake school board members Gail Theisen and Jill Christenson agree: The school board is more partisan than they ever remember.

“There’s no R or D behind your name, but that’s how people see it,” Christenson said. “It’s maybe naive to say when everything is politicized, but that’s not how it should be.”

Theisen said she’s heard from parents that worry partisan-fueled policy debates are an exercise in creating solutions that are looking for problems. That creates a distraction from the real challenges the district faces, she said. Christenson agreed.

“What frustrates me is that we need to get back to what’s important — our budget, hiring and retaining good teachers, supporting our administration and staff,” she said. “Instead, we’re splinting our district with distraction.”