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.