5 takeaways for Minnesota schools from the legislative session

Minnesota’s public schools entered this year’s legislative session with a guaranteed inflationary increase in per-pupil funding but little hope of anything else of similar heft.

Private schools had to fight a proposal to yank their pupil aid. Other legislation brought agreements on unemployment insurance for hourly school workers and improved teacher pensions. A few policy ideas were floated and then mostly fizzled.

The result of this year’s talks: Private schools skirted the threat and lawmakers managed to keep most of the cuts they were forced to make “out of the classroom,” said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.

But Rep. Ron Kresha, R-Little Falls, said recently that the budget-balancing was “the canary in the coal mine” of tough decisions to be made two years from now.

All this while districts statewide have been busy trimming their budgets.

Here is what became of several high-profile education ideas this session:

House Republicans had vowed to fight Gov. Tim Walz’s proposal to eliminate $109 million in nonpublic pupil aid over the next two years — money that for decades has been used to cover busing, textbooks, nurses and guidance counselors.

Private schools ended up being spared in the final deal. That was good news to Notre Dame Academy in Minnetonka, which would have had to figure out how to pay for $163,000 in transportation costs, and Hill-Murray School in Maplewood, which receives nearly $500,000 a year in nonpublic pupil aid.

Recently, Hill-Murray broke ground for a student union.

Sen. Alice Mann, DFL-Edina, sought to take classroom cellphone bans statewide in 2026-27, but lawmakers are sticking with legislation passed a year ago that required school districts to craft their own cellphone policies as of this March 15.

Many of them, including the St. Paul district, are aligned with Mann’s proposal to ban phones for K-8 students throughout the day, and during class time for high schoolers. Several officials, including Tim Godfrey, superintendent of the Lake Park Audubon school district, advised legislators to trust local decision makers.

A proposal surfaced late in the session to undo a law barring schools from locking disruptive students in third grade or younger in empty seclusion rooms. The practice would have been allowed again if it were agreed to by parents and the school’s individualized education program team.

Sen. Judy Seeberger, DFL-Afton, who pushed for the provision, said the use of such a room ensured her son, who has autism and mental health challenges, was safe when he acted out around adults. Critics described it as “solitary confinement for children.”

The rollback did not survive Capitol negotiations, but a working group will evaluate the use of seclusion as an emergency procedure — not discipline — and report findings and recommendations by the end of next January.

As a group of 12 school districts experiment with ways to reduce chronic absenteeism, lawmakers this year took a structural approach to the issue.

The agreement requires every school in the state to report attendance in a uniform way. It dictates how principals report to superintendents, and superintendents to counties, when students are dropped from school rolls after missing 15 days.

The proposal was pitched by leaders of a bipartisan legislative work group, who have pledged to continue efforts to keep kids in school.

State Senate leaders set out to strengthen transparency and accountability for charter schools following a 2024 Minnesota Star Tribune investigation that uncovered serious shortcomings in oversight and academic performance.

Lawmakers focused on both the schools and the authorizers who oversee them.

The bill requires authorizers to publicize performance reviews by the Minnesota Department of Education in their annual reports.

The boards of directors for charters must establish a finance committee, and upon the request of an authorizer, hire a financial expert. Schools also must publish on their websites the evaluations of their work by authorizers.

If an authorizer holds a hearing into the nonrenewal or termination of a charter school’s contract, the proceeding must be live-streamed rather than simply recorded.