On the last day of the Minnesota legislature’s 2026 session, lawmakers voted to fund a data collection project to study the spiraling health insurance costs for Minnesota school districts – a first step in reforming the health insurance program for school district employees as a whole.

This spring, more than 40 legislators from both parties co-sponsored a bill to create a single, statewide insurance pool, which would be large enough to more cost-effectively absorb expensive claims and give them more bargaining power against insurance companies.

DFL Rep. Liz Reyer of Eagan, lead author of the bill, told MPR News last month that the plan was to push for the bill to create a health insurance pool during next year’s session, which is a budget year. This year, she said the focus was on passing a companion bill, which would allow legislators to collect data from every school district to assess how much the new plan would cost the state.

“We know that all school districts are offering different benefits, paying different amounts, with different contributions from employees, so the data from this will help us really understand how it's working,” Reyer explained, “and then we'll be able to design a program that holds harmless school districts, so they don't have to pay more themselves.”

Last week, Reyer passed that first threshold. She said she is thrilled.

“It’s a really important step to being able to move forward with launching this new program,” Reyer said. “We needed good data and this is going to give it to us.”

There’s urgency in the education field to reform how school districts access health insurance.

Waseca school counselor Brianna Lawrence, for example, who is expecting a baby, faces an increase in her premium of up to nearly 400 percent after she gives birth to her first child this summer and has to switch to a family plan. She and her husband both work for the district, so now they’re seriously considering having at least one of them leave education and find a different line of work.

“[My husband] is so good at his job as a band director, and I love what I do as a school counselor,” Lawrence told MPR News. “I don't want to change. I don't want to leave this district. They've embraced us. They love us, and we love them. It would be heart wrenching to make that decision to leave, but it no longer is just us wanting to stay that's not enough. We have to see some changes happen for us to be able to stay.”

Insurance costs have long been a problem for smaller, rural districts, because their smaller staff sizes give them less bargaining power in the marketplace. But, in recent years, school districts of all sizes are getting hit by huge health insurance price increases. MPR News reported last year that even Anoka-Hennepin Schools, the largest district in Minnesota, saw premiums go up 22 percent in 2025. Other districts saw even bigger spikes.

There are several reasons for the higher insurance costs, including inflation, an aging population with greater medical needs, and expensive new pharmaceuticals like GLP-1s.The current system, in which school districts individually negotiate plans with health insurers each year, can increase those costs even more.

When the pool of workers is small – like in a 200-person district – just a few serious accidents or illnesses in a year can significantly drive up premiums. The proposed Educator Group Insurance Program, known as the EGIP bill, would create a statewide health coverage plan — one huge health insurance pool for all public school employees, spreading out the insurance risk.

The plan is modeled off SEGIP — the state employee group insurance program that has covered legislators and state government workers for decades. Reyer explained that larger group health insurance plans tend to have significantly lower cost increases over time, because they have more negotiating power on behalf of thousands of employees across the state, and there’s more stability.

“When you have so many smaller to mid size groups, they're much more volatile,” Reyer explained. “Think about it: if you have a group of 20 people, and someone gets really sick or has an accident, that drives [insurance] upgrades for everybody. And it's very unpredictable. [But] when you combine everyone into a group of, say, 150,000 like EGIP would have, then you get stability, because now that just becomes a ripple, rather than something that changes the nature of the group.”

Reyer said data will begin to be collected for the study this summer, and a report should be available at the end of the calendar year, ahead of the next year’s legislative session. That’s when Reyer will push to pass the EGIP bill and make a statewide health insurance pool a reality.

The study will be repeated annually, so that the state has access to up-to-date information as to the costs of the program.

New scorecards are out for school districts across the country. Known as the Education Scorecard, the results in Minneapolis Public Schools show large achievement gaps across race and class.

Based on average test scores from 2022-2025 and ranked relative to school districts across the country, the report says:

• Black, Hispanic, Asian students ranked in the 1st, 0th and 1st percentile, respectively, for math while white students are ranked in the 91st percentile.

• Similarly, for reading, Black, Hispanic, Asian students ranked in the 2nd, 0th and 1st percentile, respectively, while white students ranked in the 93rd percentile.

• Low-income students are ranked in the 0th percentile for math while non-low-income students are in the 76th percentile.

• In reading, low-income students are ranked again in the 0th percentile while non-low-income students are in the 82nd percentile.

MPR News host Nina Moini talked with two guests who have worked to address educational disparities in Minneapolis about what to make of these numbers.

Bernadeia Johnson was superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools from 2010 to 2015. She is currently a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Jennifer Stern is CEO of Great MN Schools, a nonprofit that works closely with public and charter schools in Minneapolis.

In a statement, MPS said the district “has reviewed and shared similar student data as what was used in this report, as it helps inform our actions to improve outcomes for our students. We’ve seen negative impacts to outcomes from the pandemic and we expect similar impacts from Operation Metro Surge.”

The district added, “From 2022 to 2025, elementary and middle school math achievement on the MCA/MTAS state assessments increased by three percentage points (33% to 36%).”

MPS stated it is also seeing positive signs in reading measures for elementary school students.

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The Minnesota Senate on Friday voted unanimously to pass a bill to make the sexual grooming of children a felony.

It would require the Minnesota Department of Education to develop new mandatory reporter training to help school staff identify grooming.

The bill has already passed the House. Senate lawmakers on Friday added an amendment that would add additional funding. It will now go back to the House where lawmakers are expected to sign off and send to Gov. Tim Walz.

The measure gained traction following an MPR News investigation last fall that found police had concluded an Eagan High School band teacher had a “pattern of predatory grooming” in two districts for more than a decade.

Hannah LoPresto, the person at the center of that story, testified repeatedly at the Capitol this session about the need to strengthen state laws. Her concerns brought a rare bipartisan response from lawmakers, with several sharing their own stories.

“I was 9 years old the first time a grown man said something sexual about my body,” said state Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL- Apple Valley who sponsored the bill in the Senate.

“When I was 14 years old, my best friend was in a relationship for years with a 24 year old man. It was not uncommon for girls as young as 13 and 14 to have boyfriends who are in their 20s,” she told colleagues on the Senate floor.

“What is happening to young girls and women in this world is truly, truly awful, and our statutory construction often ignores that reality that far too many of us experience,” she added.

Emphasizing how important the measure was to her, House bill sponsor Rep. Peggy Bennett-R Albert Lea, told colleagues her story of being groomed by a band director when she was in 10th grade.

Both lawmakers credited the courage of LoPresto in helping shape the bill.

“Just watching Hannah’s courage and her bravery and speaking out … I don’t know that we would have gotten to this point right now without them,” Bennett said.

Bennett believes the bill will prevent similar abuse from happening to other students and hopes that by telling her story along with Hannah, Maye Quade and others, survivors will find the courage to come forward.

“That’s where victims, I think, are empowered, when they can speak out. That’s when the shame is lifted, and you can say, ‘You know what? This wasn’t my fault. This was that perpetrator’s fault,’” she said.

“I do want this bill to be a statement to those sexual predators that go after our kids, that go into our schools … to just say we’re coming after you, and I mean that,” she added. “We’re watching. Leave our kids alone.”

Bennett and Maye Quade say their work on the bill has led community members and colleagues to share similar stories of abuse.

“It’s notable that so many legislators connected with (Hannah’s) story and had similar stories,” Maye Quade said. “One of the experiences of this bill is having a lot of staff in this building come up to me and say, ‘Oh, let me tell you about a thing that happened to me when I was in school, or like my classmate.’ It is long past time.”

For LoPresto, seeing the bill move forward and hearing lawmakers applaud her effort has been meaningful.

“Something that I’ve learned through this process is just how common it (grooming) is, unfortunately,” LoPresto said in April after the bill passed the House. “But actually learning that made me feel less alone. And I think it can be comforting for other people who've experienced it to know just how many other people have experienced it too.”

Maye Quade said she is working on more legislation to raise the age of consent in Minnesota to 18 and increase penalties for failures in mandatory reporting as well as removing the statute of limitations for victims to pursue civil penalties.

Correction (May 16, 2026): A previous version of this story incorrectly described a portion of the Senate bill. It has been updated.

The Minneapolis school district will provide free meals and snacks to kids this summer.

More than 60 schools, parks, recreation centers, libraries and community sites will provide food, which must be eaten on site. Anyone 18 years of age and younger can access the meals and snacks. They do not need to be enrolled in a district school.

The district is offering the food through the federal summer Food Service Program. There is no need to sign up.

Nonprofits across the Twin Cities and Minnesota also offer summer meal opportunities. The group Every Meal has a partnership with Hennepin County libraries. Second Harvest Heartland maintains a food resources map of sites across Minnesota where people in need can get help.

International student enrollment fell significantly at several of Minnesota’s colleges and universities in the spring semester as the Trump administration’s travel bans, visa restrictions and immigration crackdown chill global education. And many schools are anticipating the number of students coming to study in the U.S. from overseas to drop even more next fall.

In response, the state’s higher education institutions and student advocates say they are ramping up efforts to better support their international students.

More than a hundred members of Minnesota International Educators from across the state convened for a summit at Minnesota State University, Mankato on Tuesday.

Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a national organization, said the last several months have been some of the most challenging in “recent memory,” especially for international students in Minnesota. But she praised how the people of the state responded.

“What Minnesota has demonstrated in recent months has mattered far beyond Minnesota,” Aw told attendees during her keynote speech. “This state showed the nation something powerful: That community is still possible. That courage is still possible. That humanity is still possible.”

International student enrollment at U.S. universities for this spring semester plummeted nearly 20 percent from last spring, according to a new report published this week by NAFSA.

The organization surveyed 149 schools and found that about 62 percent of those colleges and universities reported a significant decline in international student enrollment within both undergraduate and graduate programs from last year.

“We anticipate fall of 2026 to have a larger decline in overall international enrollment than fall of 2025,” Aw said.

In addition to citing the Trump administration’s travel and visa restrictions on students from certain counties, Aw said many prospective students say they no longer want to study in a country in which they don’t think they’d feel welcomed, and some fear for their safety.

“Because of so many policy changes last year, you already had a smaller number of students who applied to U.S. universities. There was a decline in interest in the U.S. to begin with,” Aw said. ”And then you now have to add the [war in Iran] and the cost of flights. All of that is gonna have an impact on enrollment for the fall.”

But Aw said it’s vitally important for schools to continue to bolster their support for international students, both before they arrive in the U.S. and once they’re on campus.

“We know it’s going to be a challenging fall,” she said. “What we know is people are not just sitting idly. They’re moving and they’re making some really key and important decisions that hopefully will help weather some of the storm.”

Hope and resiliency

Not all colleges and universities are experiencing the same declines in international student enrollment. Bethany Lutheran College, a small private school in Mankato, experienced historic levels of new international student enrollment last fall while also retaining currently enrolled students.

But at MSU Mankato, both graduate and undergraduate international student enrollment dropped 10 percent, said William Coghill-Behrends, dean of global studies at MSU Mankato. About half of the school’s international students come from countries in Africa, which he added have “seen a disproportionate number of visa and travel bans.”

But Coghill-Behrends disputed the claim by some that international students drain resources that could be used to support other students, saying that they more than pay their own way.

“This notion that they’re somehow taking away places is just — that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Coghill-Behrends told MPR News, noting that international students are not eligible for federal financial aid. “Our funding structures for support resources are paid for and by international students as a part of their tuition structure. International students add quite a bit of resources to this campus that domestic students also benefit from.”

And It’s not just those on campus who benefit from the presence of international students. MSU Mankato’s international student population contributed $52.5 million to the local economy and supported 211 jobs, according to a 2024 NAFSA report.

NAFSA projects a potential $7 billion loss and over 60,000 fewer jobs in the U.S. if there were more drastic declines in new international student numbers. Though, the actual impact from declines in enrollment won’t be known until the fall semester starts in August.

Despite these troubling trends, there is reason to be optimistic about the future of global education, according to DeBrenna Agbényiga, provost of International University of Grand Bassam in the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire. Her own child is a recent University of Minnesota graduate, and she says global education enriches all students.

“It has been challenging, and there will be more challenges.” Agbényiga said. “But we have far more opportunities that are going to grow out of this, and this is going to transform higher education overall, not just global education.”

Minnesota’s local school boards have long held the power to decide how kids are taught about a variety of health education topics, including human development, nutrition, sex, child abuse prevention and other issues. That power, though, is about to shift.

New statewide standards set to phase in over the next three years will put health education benchmarks in place across all public K-12 schools. Beyond the basics, the new standards will take on topics including sexual abuse prevention.

“We need our young people to know these things,” said Steve Chapin, who teaches first aid, nutrition, sex education and human development to middle and high school students in the St. James district, two hours southwest of the Twin Cities.

“A healthy student is a better reader, and a healthy student is a better math kid,” said Chapin, who helped draft new statewide health standards meant to guide educators.

“There's so much in it that provides so much good stuff. I want this to be something that everybody grabs on to,” he added. “It's here for us.”

Consent, abuse prevention and media literacy

In 2024, with DFLers in control of the Legislature and the governor’s office, lawmakers passed a bill requiring standards to be developed. A committee formed in early 2025 spent nearly a year working on a series of drafts, the third of which was approved last year by Minnesota Education Commissioner Willie Jett.

The standards have been through several rounds of scrutiny. Public hearings were held last month. They’re now under judicial review. If adopted, they could roll out completely as soon as the 2028-29 school year.

Chapin and dozens of other educators, students and experts spent months putting together the new standards. The third commissioner-approved draft includes guidance on teaching CPR, nutrition, consent, media literacy and puberty as well as preventing abuse, pregnancy and suicide.

Rasana Mamdani, a student at St. Paul Central High School who helped craft the standards, said she was particularly excited about the language requiring teachers to help students with media literacy.

“Our lives (as students) happen on the internet, for better or for worse, and I think that because the internet is inherently a little bit fake, I think that having a really good understanding of what is real and what is not real on the internet is extremely important when it comes to young people's health,” Rasana said.

She said she was also pleased with the parts of the standards that address consent and abuse prevention education.

“I've looked at a lot of consent lessons, and they are vastly different,” she added. “Having consent lessons taught in a uniform way allows for students to all have the same definition of what consent looks like … is really important.”

One benchmark would require educators to teach kindergartners to identify the correct names for all body parts, something research indicates can help prevent abuse. Other benchmarks introduce students to concepts regarding healthy relationships, kindness and active listening skills.

“Every young person in Minnesota is going to get access to the same basic level of health information, no matter where they live, no matter who their teacher is,” said Jill Farris, a standards committee member and director for training and education at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Healthy Youth Development.

‘Government bureaucrats or local control?’

Not everyone thinks the new standards are a good idea. Rep. Peggy Bennett, R-Albert Lea, is concerned they are too “ideological” and too much of a burden on teachers.

“Comprehensive sex ed … sounds really good on the outside, but when you delve down into it, there are a lot of issues that are very much ideological and, I believe, belong in the hands of locals to decide what to teach,” Bennett told MPR News.

In a recent post online, Bennett raised concerns about health textbooks some other states have recommended that include discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation.

“These sensitive subject areas cannot be taught in a valueless void,” Bennett wrote. “Who gets to decide whose values go into your child? Government bureaucrats or local control with parental, educator and community input?”

The new standards do not contain requirements to teach gender identity or sexual orientation. Districts are allowed to choose their own health textbooks. And parents are allowed to opt their children out of health education and find alternatives.

Earlier this year, Bennett introduced legislation that would have made the K-12 health education standards, including comprehensive sex education and abuse prevention education, optional for Minnesota districts to teach. The bill did not make it out of committee.

Still, Bennett said she thought every student in Minnesota should learn abuse prevention concepts and skills. The subject is personal to her. During a recent hearing on a bill to prevent sexual grooming of children, she said she was groomed as a child by a school band teacher.

Still, she worries the standards will introduce too much of a burden to K-12 educators.

Chapin understands the concern.

“This is a lot to ask of an elementary classroom teacher, and I personally would rather see districts find funding to hire another educator that could help with this health education push. I just don't know if that's realistic in most districts,” Chapin said.

In St. James, a small district of about 1,000 students, Chapin said educators will need to be creative about implementing standards without cutting back on the active aspects of traditional physical education, but he believes it’s important enough to try.

He believes the standards leave plenty of room for local control and parental input and that parental input will remain a part of health education.

“Districts still have the potential to select curriculum that fits their community,” Chapin said, pointing to the input he seeks from families in St. James and the letters he sends to communicate what he’s doing in the classroom.

“I have huge support from parents,” Chapin said. “I have some that come in and ask some clarifying questions about identity and orientation and things like that. But other than that, we have full support.”

Minneapolis Public Schools says a budgeting error that stretches back to 2022 led to tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue and staffing cuts. Now that the budget error has been caught, it means that the district’s $50 million deficit is now shrinking to about $38 million.

But as first reported by Minnesota Reformer, this isn’t the first big budget blunder in the district. Education reporter Melissa Whitler has looked at several issues within the district's finances. She joined Minnesota Now with more on her reporting.

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Minnesota lawmakers are lined up for the final sprint of the legislative session with several priority issues left unresolved.

By next Monday, it’ll all be over.

Legislative leaders have yet to make a big-picture agreement that will usher the session to a tidy close. Some priorities from fraud to infrastructure financing to school safety remain top of mind. Lawmakers are also racing to ink a deal to keep a critical safety-net hospital — HCMC — afloat.

Despite that, some of the details and political dynamics in the narrowly split Legislature have made compromise hard to come by.

Local projects around the state, funds for schools and recourse for people adversely affected by the federal government’s immigration surge in Minnesota are in the balance with just days left.

Here’s a rundown of where key items stand with one week left.

Fraud

A new investigative unit is one step closer to being established.

The bill for an independent watchdog office finally won approval from the House with broad support last week. On Monday, the Senate approved the bill unanimously, sending it on to the governor’s desk.

The office would have power to probe public and private entities that receive state and federal funds in Minnesota. If potential fraud or misuse of money is suspected, the office could refer cases to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

GOP Sen. Michael Kreun, R-Blaine, said the bill is a big step forward in gaining back trust.

"This independent agency will be the watchdog for the taxpayers. And state government here in Minnesota needs to regain the trust of Minnesotans. And this bill will hopefully go a long way to do that,” he said before the vote Monday. “Mr. President this bill is a seismic change in state government."

DFL Sen. Heather Gustafson, of Vadnais Heights, described it as a giant step in addressing vulnerabilities.

“This is not a message bill. We did not pass it to have something to say about a problem. We passed it to have something to solve the problem,” she said.

Gov. Tim Walz advocated for the bill’s passage and is expected to sign it. The process to select an inspector general would start this summer.

Several other proposals related to reining in fraud and misuse are also in the works. They include heightened penalties for defrauding state programs, authority for agencies to withhold payments if they suspect fraud and an expansion of the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.

School safety

Following the August shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School, lawmakers have been united in a desire to adopt additional school safety measures.

But they’ve split politically on the best path forward.

The Senate voted along party lines to ban the sale and transfer of assault style weapons and high capacity magazines, along with ghost guns. That measure would also fund school safety and mental health grants and prod schools to adopt anonymous threat reporting mechanisms.

The House is more stuck. Republicans are big on mental health and school safety funding measures, but they don't want new firearms restrictions.

“These bipartisan solutions can move forward without gun control when Democrats are conditioning things we should be able to agree on about keeping our kids safe in school, because Republicans won't agree to ban guns,” House Republican Leader Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, said last week.

House Democrats insist firearms restrictions would also contribute to ensuring schools are safer.

“This isn't about just addressing the issue in our classrooms. This is about our communities. This is about firearms everywhere,” Rep. Cheryl Youakim, DFL-Hopkins said. “Kids deserve to feel safe everywhere. There is an entire generation that is living in fear of gun violence.”

Democrats say they'll keep pressing for an up-or-down vote.

“We'll continue to push our colleagues in the house to take some action,” DFL Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy said. “I think for those who choose not to take it up and take a vote, that will send a really clear signal to the people of Minnesota that they're putting their politics ahead of the well being and safety of people across the state, including our children”

It could all get wrapped into an ongoing push to strengthen Capitol and state official security. The House approved a proposal to keep weapons screening in place and allow for police security services for lawmakers who face credible threats to their lives or safety, which have been more frequent in recent months. The Senate has advanced a similar plan.

Bonding bill

Lawmakers are working to assemble a public construction projects bill, although time to wrap it up is drawing short.

Legislative leaders and heads of the capital investment committees in both chambers have emphasized a need for money toward wastewater treatment, roads and bridges and building repairs.

Requests from state agencies and local communities exceeded $7 billion. Lawmakers are likely to stick to a package closer to $1 billion, even though the maximum the state could borrow and still maintain its credit rating is more than that.

The state takes on debt to fund larger projects that can benefit multiple generations of people. The bill requires a higher threshold of support, 60 percent, to pass each chamber. That gives the minority party in the Senate — Republicans — rare leverage.

Given the outstanding needs around the state, House Capital Investment Committee Co-Chair Mary Franson has proposed a separate funding mechanism for water treatment around the state.

“Communities come to us with their millions and millions of dollars in requests,” Franson, R-Alexandria said. “We just don't have that capacity anymore to do that. And so these communities are getting little chunks here and there.”

Without more, she warns, “We aren't getting ahead. We're just continually falling behind.”

She is part of a push to get more money toward lead water line replacement efforts.

An estimated 90,000 or more lead water lines remain in the ground. Replacing all of them could cost $1 billion. The Legislature has been trying to pick off a chunk at a time as well as tap into federal dollars.

"The need is too great. It is too urgent, and it is too important to drop the ball and let up now,” Franson said.

Committee leaders are waiting for guidance from legislative leaders about how much they can spend on a broader bill.

"I have to say, I'm a really Nervous Nelly about the whole thing,” said Sen. Sandy Pappas, the DFL chair of the Senate Capital Investment Committee. “It's really important to all of Minnesota that we get this infrastructure bill passed."

Leaders said they were less enthusiastic about bonding to fund upgrades to the Minnesota Wild stadium in St. Paul.

HCMC

The rescue plan for a vital Minnesota hospital is still being hashed out.

Lawmakers say they’re confident they can reach a deal.

The hospital has a high level of uncompensated care, which has led to staff cuts and a reduction in open hospital beds. Without help, HCMC officials say they'll have to take drastic actions, including possible closure.

Proposals are at play that would expand on an existing sales tax in Hennepin County, repurpose local transportation funds or tap into general fund dollars to fill the hospital’s budget hole.

There has been bipartisan support for taking steps to keep the hospital system afloat, but there is still no clear agreement on a funding mechanism. Other hospitals are also under strain so this could turn into a broader health system stabilization plan.

Immigration enforcement

The DFL-led Senate and tied House have split on a response to the weekslong federal immigration enforcement surge this winter.

The Senate voted Monday in favor of a package of bills restricting the power of immigration agents in Minnesota. Among other provisions, it blocks agents from sensitive spaces like courthouses, schools, daycare centers and healthcare facilities without a judicial warrant.

It also allows people to sue if their constitutional rights are violated or someone fails to render aid after someone else is shot.

The bill 34-33 passed along party lines without Republican support.

“We should not be playing to people who simply don't want immigration law enforced,” said Sen. Michael Kreun, R-Blaine. “And we should not be pushing a bill that has no chance of becoming law and has serious constitutional issues.”

Sen. Matt Klein, DFL-Mendota Heights, said the need for this kind of legislation is unprecedented. He said in his career as a physician, he never had a difficult interaction with law enforcement.

That changed during the immigration agent surge.

“Federal law enforcement agents invaded our patient spaces and disrupted our ability to do our work,” Klein said to his colleagues on the Senate floor. “Patients, terrified of this disruption, refused or avoided care and the health of Minnesotans suffered

“It is a signal of the poison of our time and the poison of our federal leadership that we are required to see a law like this and vote on it today, but I will do it,” Klein added. “It is the right thing to do.”

The Senate also voted to repurpose housing funds to help those adversely impacted — namely rental assistance. But a companion bill is stuck in the House.

Odds are also against business loans related to the surge. We'll see if Republicans give ground in negotiations. But GOP House Speaker Lisa Demuth is running for governor, so immigration proposals could be a red line she and her caucus won't cross.

Canvas, a system used by thousands of schools and universities — including the University of Minnesota — went offline Thursday during a cyberattack. It created chaos as students tried to study for finals. The situation underscored education’s dependence on technology.

A hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment or questions about whether the system was taken down as a precaution or because the hackers knocked it offline.

In an update posted to its website late Thursday, Instructure said Canvas “is now available for most users” — though some parts of the system were still undergoing maintenance.

Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.

Students quickly took to social media to ask if others were unable to access Canvas, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.

Effects at Minnesota universities

The Canvas outage happened on the first day of final exams at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.

In a statement Thursday — before Instructure reported that Canvas was again available to most users — the University of Minnesota said it had been notified of the cybersecurity incident by the company.

“University administrators are awaiting updates from the vendor and taking additional measures to protect university information,” the U of M said. “The university’s focus is the protection of our students, faculty and staff information and we are closely monitoring the situation.”

In an update Friday morning, the university said that while Instructure had restored service, “our administrators are currently verifying the platform’s stability. We expect to restore full access to the university community early this afternoon.”

“We recognize the significant disruption this has caused for students and faculty, particularly as the semester concludes. Our primary focus remains the security of our community’s data, and we continue to monitor the situation closely,” the U said Friday.

In a message sent to students, faculty and staff on Thursday, university officials urged them to “exercise caution — avoid interacting with or clicking on suspicious links, messages, or unexpected content that may appear during this event.”

The U instructed students to watch for guidance from instructors for any potential changes to classes and exams. And the university told instructors that it was “exploring additional secure technology options for testing and coursework continuity, including alternative methods for submitting assignments and managing assessments.”

The University of St. Thomas was among the other Minnesota schools affected by the outage.

Threats to leak data

Screen shots Connolly provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing.

Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Connolly said the Canvas attack is strikingly similar to a breach at PowerSchool, which also offers learning management tools. In that case a Massachusetts college student was charged.

Connolly described ShinyHunters as a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The group also has been tied to a other attacks, including one aimed at Live Nation’s Ticketmaster subsidiary.

Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents.

“This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident,” the director of information technology at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health wrote in announcing that the school's online system was down. “Hopefully we will have a resolution soon.”

Virginia Tech acknowledged in a notice to students that the administration was aware of the effect on final exams and other end-of-semester activities. The University of New Mexico sent a similar message to the campus community, and the University of Florida urged students to stay alert for any phishing messages that appear to be from Canvas.

Teachers said they had to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments.

Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a post on the social media platform X that his students had been relying on Canvas to access every reading from the semester and all of his lecture slides before their Monday final exams. The outage leaves students and faculty “dead in the water here in academia right now,” he said.

The student newspaper at Harvard reported that the system there was down as well. Students at Johns Hopkins University simply got an error message when trying to view their final grades on the platform Thursday. And public school districts also sought to reassure parents, with officials in Spokane, Washington, writing that they aren't “aware of any sensitive data contained in this breach.”

Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.

Students and staff in the Columbia Heights schools faced unimaginable challenges this year as federal immigration agents flooded the Twin Cities region.

ICE detained seven kids in the north suburban district along with dozens of parents and loved ones. Hundreds of students stopped coming to school because they were too afraid to leave their homes.

While the surge is over and most kids are back in school, district leaders say they’re now facing a new concern — one coming from the state Capitol that could cut millions of dollars in funding from Columbia Heights and other school systems that teach large numbers of kids from low-income families.

“People are feeling, you know, pretty beat down after ‘Operation Metro Surge,’ to say the least,” said Zena Stenvik, the Columbia Heights superintendent. “It definitely took a toll, and so this almost feels like kicking someone when they're already down.”

The problem stems from a 2023 decision by the DFL-controlled Legislature and DFL Gov. Tim Walz to make school meals free to all students. While school leaders cheered the effort, the law led to changes in the way the state calculated what’s known as compensatory revenue. That’s money districts get to support students from economically disadvantaged families.

Instead of counting the kids who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, districts were now only able to count kids who qualified for federal programs like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The math would mean a loss of $3.6 million for Columbia Heights if state lawmakers don’t continue a stop-gap, hold-harmless measure that’s set to expire soon. Stenvik says the funding loss would be like cutting some 80 percent of the staff in one of her elementary schools.

“The federal government has reduced access to these federal programs such as SNAP and Medicaid,” she said. “So, children in Minnesota who are living in poverty are no longer accessing those programs at the same rate, and therefore using those to determine Minnesota's poverty is inaccurate.”

‘Can’t afford to take a step back’

More than half of the districts in the Twin Cities region say they are expecting a combined budget shortfall of more than $220 million for the 2026-27 school year, according to a recent survey from the Association of Metropolitan School Districts.

The expected deficits are due to several factors, including an increase in the cost of providing special education services and the state’s new earned sick and safe time law, said AMSD executive director Scott Croonquist.

But a big portion of the deficits are also a result of Minnesota’s issue with compensatory revenue.

“They will need to develop budgets that will address those gaps, and unfortunately, of course, it will mean cuts,” Croonquist said.

Last year, state lawmakers established a task force to evaluate the compensatory revenue system to better understand which students are best served with this revenue and which data should be used to establish compensatory revenue eligibility. Task members are expected to report to the Legislature by October.

Stenvik, who serves on the task force, wants the Legislature to continue the hold-harmless measure until the task force can come up with a better solution.

A recent task force survey of nearly 600 school staff and community members across the state found between 80-90 percent of respondents believed the state should continue the hold-harmless measure until it could transition to a new compensatory revenue formula.

Brian Zambreno, superintendent of the South St. Paul Public School District, says without a fix, his budget faces a $1.5 million loss, the equivalent of about four teachers per school.

He said his district has used that money to hire school social workers, math and reading interventionists and enough staff to keep class sizes small.

“We've been getting great outcomes,” Zambreno said, noting improved state math scores. “We're getting results, but now I'm concerned I'm gonna lose all the things we built to get these results.”

It’s a concern that extends to districts outside the Twin Cities region with large populations of kids from low-income homes.

In Willmar, west of Minneapolis, superintendent Bill Adams said his district would have to lay off more than 15 staff members if the Legislature can’t find a solution.

“This is a big deal,” Adams said. “It needs to be fixed.”

The surge of federal immigration agents in Minnesota sent 1,000 Willmar district students into hiding earlier this year. Adams said cutting staff would harm his community’s fragile recovery.

“We can't afford to take a step back in providing these educational services,” Adams said. “That's a lot of staff that we’ll have to eliminate if they don't fix the comp(ensatory) aid, or at least hold us harmless for another year.”

‘Winners and losers’

Lawmakers in the state Senate have proposed a hold-harmless measure sponsored by Sen. Doron Clark, DFL-Minneapolis.

“We passed it off the Senate floor. Every Republican that I've talked to in the Senate is for it and likes it. Every Democrat that I've talked to on the Senate floor is for it and likes it. And we just need to make sure that we keep talking with our colleagues over in the House,” Clark said.

In the House, lawmakers have also put forward a measure that would temporarily address compensatory revenue.

But Rep. Ben Bakeberg, R-Jordan, isn’t sure that the hold-harmless measure is the right step. He’s concerned that at least one version of the legislation would mean lost revenue for two districts he represents.

“There have been multiple versions of this bill moving through, and, you know, with each version, there are different winners and losers with it,” said Bakeberg, who’s also principal of Jordan Middle School.

He believes lawmakers need to look at cutting growth in state government and changing Minnesota’s universal meals program.

“We're in this situation because of the change with universal meals during the 2023-2024 session under the DFL trifecta,” Bakeberg said. “School districts across the state expressed concerns at that time. I expressed concerns at that time.”

For districts worried about their budgets, many are hoping state lawmakers can find a way forward before the end of session.

“Why should we be harmed as school districts? Why are we balancing the state's budget on kids in poverty?” Zambreno said. “We’re doing this to kids in poverty. Saying it out loud, I just don't know how anyone could sleep at night with that.”

A federal judge on Wednesday denied a request for a preliminary injunction that would have immediately stopped U.S. Immigration and Enforcement agents from operating near or on school grounds.

Two Minnesota school districts along with the state teachers union had filed a lawsuit asking courts to require the Department of Homeland Security to treat schools as protected areas, free of immigration enforcement.

While the request for an immediate end was denied, the case continues.

The districts, Fridley and Duluth, brought their lawsuit earlier this year as ICE agents flooded the Twin Cities in February.

School leaders argued immigration enforcement conducted near schools had damaged student attendance and enrollment. During “Operation Metro Surge,” Minnesota districts with widespread federal activity saw as many as 20 to 40 percent of students staying home from school.

Since the 1990s, the U.S. government has declared schools, hospitals and churches as safe zones, off-limits to immigration enforcement. The Trump administration rescinded that policy last year.

Lawyers for the Fridley and Duluth school systems argued the decision violated the federal Administrative Procedures Act and asked a federal court to put a temporary stay on the policy change while deciding on the merits of the case.

In her ruling, Judge Laura Provinzino, a Biden appointee, found that the plaintiffs didn’t meet the requirements necessary for the court to issue a temporary stay ahead of the final court decision.

The Fridley and Duluth school districts — along with Education Minnesota, the teachers union — said their case would continue despite losing on the immediate injunction. “This is not the end of our fight,” they said in a statement.

Park Spanish Immersion Elementary’s music teacher, David Davis, has been named Minnesota's Teacher of the Year.

Davis is the 62nd recipient and the second teacher from St. Louis Park Public Schools to receive the award. He teaches music to students in kindergarten through fifth grade.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Davis about his passion for teaching.

For more with David Davis, click play on the audio player.

High school seniors across Minnesota just locked in their plans for higher education next year on College Decision Day, May 1. Thousands of those students will have the opportunity for free tuition at Minnesota state and tribal colleges through the state program called North Star Promise. Students with yearly family incomes less than $80,000 are applying now for the third year of the program. It’s made to help them access an education that may not have been financially feasible before.

The program is believed to be a factor in boosting enrollment at Minnesota state schools, who have seen the largest single-year enrollment increase since 2010.

Meghan Flores, the director of state financial aid programs, spoke to Minnesota Now host Nina Moini about how the program has grown over the last three years.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

When federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived in Minnesota, Century Elementary School principal Mike LeMier said fear spread through his community in Park Rapids, Minn., three-and-a-half hours north of the Twin Cities.

But the students who seemed the most worried weren’t immigrants.

“Many Native American students directly asked me whether they were safe,” LeMier told state lawmakers during a hearing in April. “The fear was real.”

LeMier said students in his district started missing class because families were afraid to leave their homes. Other families missed school and work to travel long distances to obtain tribal identification cards.

The impact of Operation Metro Surge on his community in Greater Minnesota was “unexpected” and “significant,” he said.

That was the case for the vast majority of Minnesota school principals, according to a recently released survey from the University of Minnesota.

Hundreds of school leaders — at least one in five — responded to the survey, which was conducted in mid-March. More than 80 percent said the surge negatively impacted their students’ ability to learn.

About 75 percent said the surge led to thousands of students missing school with some 1,400 dropping out or unenrolling.

“These counts are likely underestimates,” Sara Kemper, a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, told Minnesota senators recently, adding that not all survey respondents included numbers with their answers.

It wasn’t just about missing school. Principals said that dozens of students were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; 849 had a parent or guardian detained.

In the White Bear Lake School district, Birch Lake Elementary principal Julian Stanke said bus stops were especially frightening for students and their families.

At one stop in January, Stanke said a “heavy presence” of federal agents frightened families and staff so much they sent a school bus of children back to the elementary school building for 45 minutes until agents left.

“As a principal, this time has been trying. Focus inevitably shifted from instructional leadership to what could be best described as crisis management,” Stanke said. “Responding to this operation was not a chapter in my principal playbook.”

Student mental health remains a top concern

The surge is not the only difficulty Minnesota school leaders say they are responding to. The third installation in a yearslong project to survey school principals statewide finds many such educational leaders remain overwhelmed, concerned about students’ mental health and struggling to find time to lead instruction.

Part of the issue, according to a 2025 survey of more than 1,000 Minnesota principals, is that school leaders are spending more time on administrative tasks and less time on instructional leadership.

Another issue is that student needs continue to overwhelm school staff.

“I became a principal because I have passion for being an instructional leader, working alongside teachers to improve learning for students,“ said LeMier, the Park Rapids principal. “Yet the Minnesota principal survey consistently shows that principals lack the time to lead instruction.”

He said in his 11 years working in school administration he has consistently seen an increase in the “frequency, intensity and duration of students who are disregulated” in his pre-K through sixth grade classrooms.

“It is common for multiple adults, administrators, special education staff, para professionals and even our school resource officer to spend hours working with a single student in crisis,” LeMier said.

Many of LeMier’s colleagues echoed his concerns. When asked to name their greatest challenge, the highest number of survey respondents pointed to addressing student mental health challenges.

They also reported spending an average of 43 percent of their workday on student behavior and 80 percent said responding to student behavior interferes with their ability to carry out other leadership responsibilities.

Challenging student behavior has “become more prevalent in the last few years” and is “a significant barrier to student learning and it’s having a pretty negative impact on staff morale,” said Katie Pekel, executive director of educational leadership at the University of Minnesota.

The next most challenging issue principals named was addressing chronic absenteeism — an issue schools have described as especially acute since the pandemic.

Principals surveyed said they believed the top reason students were absent was related to student mental health, closely followed by a lack of concern from parents about attendance and by students not wanting to be at school.

“This has become an increasingly concerning area in the state of Minnesota,” Pekel told lawmakers.

Aditi Gandhi spends a lot of time in the pool. The 17-year old started swimming when she was four, and she now swims competitively for her high school, the Blake School in Minneapolis.

When she’s out of the regular swim season, she also swims for a club team, so she spends at least a couple of hours in the pool almost every day.

And she loves it.

“It’s very calming mentally. It makes me physically feel good, and it's just a great way to keep in shape,” Gandhi said. “I've met some very close friends on the team as well, which has kept me going.”

However, swimming doesn’t always make her feel good.

“Me and my teammates, we would notice after long practices that we would start feeling very sick,” Gandhi told MPR News. “I would notice increased inflammation and pain after swimming, when swimming is actually supposed to take away your pain, because it circulates blood.”

Gandhi has a venous condition. While swimming should provide relief by increasing blood flow, she found, at times, being in the pool was actually making her condition worse.

She said she and her teammates often get other symptoms, too, like coughing or wheezing, eye redness and irritation, and runny noses after spending long periods of time in the pool.

She did some online research and found that chloramines were likely making her and other swimmers sick.

Chloramines cause that distinct and sometimes noxious pool smell that many of us think is chlorine — but it’s not, and it’s not a good sign.

Chloramines are gases that release when chlorine in pool water reacts with substances like urine, sweat and oils from swimmers’ bodies.

Experts say that most swimmers don’t shower before getting into the pool, and many of them urinate in the pool, too. Those substances, along with excess chlorine and poor ventilation around the pool, can cause the harmful gases to build up.

Breathing in chloramines can cause allergy-like symptoms, respiratory problems and even asthma.

Experts say that while those who don’t swim often face little risk, chloramine exposure is a real issue for frequent swimmers like Gandhi and her teammates.

Dr. Avery Michienzi, a toxicologist at the University of Virginia and a former University of Minnesota swimmer, says long term exposure to chloramine gas can be very harmful, especially for athletes who rely heavily on their lungs to get them to the finish line.

“(Chloramines) can lead to a breakdown of your respiratory tract and also lead people to have not only asthma issues, but also just increased susceptibility to viral infections,” said Michienzi.

Dr. Michienzi is a friend of Aditi Gandhi’s high school coach, who put the two in touch with one another to talk about ways to limit her and other swimmers’ exposure to chloramines.

Gandhi’s invention

But to prove they were the cause of her symptoms, Gandhi first needed a way to test for chloramines, which are tricky to measure in the air.

It requires specialized equipment that is hard to find outside of a lab, according to Dr. Ernest “Chip” Blatchley III, an environmental engineering professor at Purdue University.

“There's really no convenient, simple, inexpensive method that allows us to measure these things in real time,” Blatchley said.

That was until Aditi Gandhi sprung into action.

The high school junior invented a device, which is a small, plastic box that sits next to the pool and has sensors that continuously monitor chloramine levels in the air.

A display on the box tells you if levels are higher than normal.

Because it is difficult to measure chloramines in the air directly, her patent-pending prototype device instead measures them by proxy, detecting four variables in the air that are associated with chloramines.

“One sensor measures total volatile organic compounds, which are gas compounds, and equivalent CO2, which is like carbon dioxide, as well as temperature and relative humidity,” Gandhi said.

“If the four variables increase, then it's more likely to have chloramines in the environment,” said Gandhi.

If chloramine levels are too high, swimming pool personnel will know right away and can then take steps to lower them.

“The development of a tool that would allow us to measure the chloramines or, in her case, to measure a proxy for the chloramines — I mean, that's filling a need,” said Blatchley, who also advised Gandhi in her development of the device.

As a former competitive swimmer herself, Dr. Michienzi said she was especially excited to learn about Gandhi’s invention.

“I thought it was a very amazing, very impressive endeavor for a high school student to do, and I think something that could potentially have a big health impact as well," said Michienzi. “I was very excited about it.”

After winning a few science fair awards for her invention, Gandhi will next bring her chloramine detector to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) competition in Phoenix, Ariz., the week of May 9.

She will also be the spotlight of a Council for the Model Aquatic Health Code (CMAHC) webinar, a nonprofit that partners with the CDC to prevent injury and illness in public pools.

by Shubhanjana Das, Sahan Journal

This story comes to you from Sahan Journal through a partnership with MPR News. Use the audio player above to listen to a conversation she had with MPR News host Nina Moini on Minnesota Now.

Languages are portals to other countries and communities. They reveal more than how people speak — they’re a window into history, geography, tradition and sometimes forgotten folklore.

In Minnesota, you don’t have to travel far to come across a language that you may not have heard — or even heard about.

While it may come as no surprise that Minnesota’s top three languages, after English, are Spanish, Hmong and Somali, several rarer languages and dialects are also spoken here.

Every four years, the U.S. Census Bureau releases state-specific language data, which highlights languages spoken at home. Last year, Sahan Journal reported on how this linguistic diversity reflects a changing state. But beyond numbers, the data also reflect Minnesotans’ efforts to preserve some languages spoken by a small group.

We profiled the Minnesota speakers of six rare languages who, in their own ways, are preserving those tongues for the next generation — and by doing so, also keeping alive their cultures, histories and traditions.

Zakaria Amin, Kurdish language teacher at Moorhead High School

In his hometown of Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Zakaria Amin worked as a translator for the U.S. Army after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. That work helped the English-language graduate further sharpen his English-speaking skills. Now a resident of Moorhead, in western Minnesota, Amin works to bolster Kurdish, which is spoken by just over 300 people in Minnesota, according to 2013 U.S. Census language data.

Amin teaches the language to Kurdish American children as part of Moorhead High School’s English Learner program. He is also a project manager with the Kurdish American Development Organization.

“Language is not only the speaking part,” Amin said. “Language carries many things — norms, ethics, traditions, culture, identity.”

Kurds, who live in parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, are one of the world’s largest ethnic minority groups without a state of their own. That makes it all the more important to speak and preserve the language, Amin said.

He said his goal in teaching the language is to better connect Kurdish families, whose elders speak Kurdish while their younger relatives born in America often don’t. “They understand each other, but they are not speaking the same language,” he said.

For Amin, the language is infused with memories of Erbil, where he was born. “Every single corner of the city is part of my memory,” he said. “This cannot be detached from me and from my personality and identity. So for me, practicing language is a must. Now I have to teach people how to do that.”

Amin, who is a father, insists on speaking Kurdish at home with his family and English when out in public. “There are certain people who are probably getting aggravated if they see other people are speaking different languages,” he said. “I know that English is not the only language in America by law, but I still care about other people’s feelings, and we try to speak English as much as we can outside.”

Amina Baha, refugee services director, SEWA-AIFW

When Amina Baha was in high school, she won a presidential award. She was eager to share the news with her parents, who are from Afghanistan but immigrated to America from Pakistan.

She explained to her father, in English, the importance of the award. But he had no reaction. “I got frustrated, and I was upset,” she said.

Baha repeated the news, but still got no response from her father. Then, after her mother prodded her, she realized why. “I had to switch gears, and when I told him in Pashto, he got up and gave me a hug, and said he was very proud of me, and he knew that I could do it,” she said.

Baha’s relationship with languages and literature has been shaped by her father, who, like Baha, speaks Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto, along with English. She is one of about 115 people in Minnesota who speak Pashto, an official language in Afghanistan spoken by the Pashtun people.

“He made sure that I spoke Pashto as well as Farsi at home,” she said. “He would not talk to me or respond unless I spoke in one of those languages. It was really frustrating as a child to go through that, but as I got older, I realized the importance of knowing other languages, especially such rare languages.

“There’s a saying in Pashto that, the more languages you know, that’s how many people you can communicate with,” she said. “I came to appreciate what he was trying to do, or what he did, and how much of an impact that has on my life today.”

As refugee services director at SEWA-AIFW (“sewa” is a Hindi word meaning “to serve,” while AIFW stands for Asian Indian Family Wellness), Baha uses her language skills to reach the people she works with. “It broadens my world and my understanding and just awareness of how close we are,” she said.

Baha described Pashto as “very poetic,” “expressive” and “colorful.” In Pashtun culture, people often express their emotions through poetic, rhyming couplets called “landay,” spoken and sung by women at weddings. Pashtun people also sing “tappay” at weddings as well as in times of grief. “I don’t think something like that exists in any other culture,” she said.

For Baha, it is important that her son and daughter speak Pashto and Urdu — her husband is from Pakistan. Baha said she notices in her work with South Asian immigrant families that parents often push their children to learn English first and put their native language second.

“I wish more people would focus on the preservation of language, regardless of what language you speak,” she said.

Beatrice Jua Wisseh Hinneh, clinical supervisor and Liberian language teacher

In 1989, Beatrice Jua Wisseh Hinneh traveled from Liberia to California to seek medical treatment for her daughter, who had a heart condition. She then visited her sister and a friend in Rhode Island, planning to return soon to her family in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Except, she couldn’t.

A war, one later known as the First Liberian Civil War, tore through the country, and Hinneh found herself stranded in America with her sick daughter. The war lasted 14 years, five years into which Hinneh found a home in Minnesota’s Brooklyn Park where she could “start life all over again.”

“It was heartbreaking,” Hinneh said. “I left my youngest daughter [in Liberia]. My grandmother died. My sister died in the war. I have a lot of family members that died in the war.”

Hinneh comes from the Kru tribe of Grand Kru County in southwest Liberia. “They are tough-headed, very resistive to torture, and to hardship,” Hinneh said.

In Minnesota, where she joined Kru associations and met other immigrants from the region, speaking the Kru dialect helped her feel more at home.

The Kru tribespeople’s dialect is part of the Niger-Congo language family. Traditionally seafarers, hunters and warriors, Kru men were hired by U.S. and European navies to patrol for illegal slave ships after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed.

In Liberia, a former American colony whose official language is English, Hinneh spoke Kru at home and English in school. “When the settlers came to Liberia, our Indigenous languages, like Kru, the Pele, the Basa, were played down,” she said. “You had to speak English to belong.”

Hinneh, who now teaches Kru to adults and children via Zoom classes, said it was essential for her people to know their tribal dialect in Liberia — sometimes for the sake of their lives.

“During the war, they [the rebels] were looking for people from certain tribes to execute,” she said. “And so they would ask you, ‘What tribe are you?’ And they will ask you to speak the dialect, and if you couldn’t speak the dialect, then they knew you were lying. And so a lot of people lost their lives. So you use language to communicate for your life.”

For Hinneh, it is important that her children learn the language, know “where they come from.”

“It gives you a sense of belonging — that I’m a Kru woman,” she said. “I’ve always been a Kru spirit. Whether alone or with people, I’ve always had it in myself.”

Lamar Renville, Dakota language teacher at Bdote Learning Center, descendant of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate

Growing up in Montana, Lamar Renville had no contact with their Dakota identity. They were one of only two Native students in their school, didn’t know their father — who was Dakota — and didn’t even know which tribe they were from.

While supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and reading Black authors, they discovered how systemic racism affected both Black and Indigenous people.

“As a Dakota person, my entire story had been erased, and that was very much a part of what happens with systemic erasure of Native Americans in the United States and Canada,” said Renville, who until recently was unhoused. “It became very apparent that my whole adult life being homeless is directly tied up with all of that.”

Eager to learn more, they delved deeper into their Dakota identity, starting with learning the language, which is spoken by about 750 people in Minnesota. “I’ve reoriented my entire life around it,” said Renville, who now teaches the language to Dakota and Lakota students at the Bdote Learning Center in Minneapolis. Renville is one of just five licensed Dakota language teachers in Minnesota.

Renville’s great-great-great-grandfather, Gabriel Renville, worked with missionaries to create the written form of the Dakota language. Despite that connection, Renville is the first family member in three generations to speak the language after learning it for three years and teaching at the center for two years.

“I’m really grateful for my position in the school, because during the school year, I get the opportunity to speak Dakota every day,” they said.

For Renville, teaching has become a way of remedying the erasure of their own identity in their school years in Montana. “I was the problem because I had brown skin, and so I was treated differently,” they said. “I personally get to undo that for these kids by being a different influence and knowing how it could impact them to not have that in their life. And this is all through the language.”

Access to the language came with extensive research on the tumultuous history of the Dakota people in Minnesota, Renville said. The Dakota consider Minnesota their ancestral home, with origins linked to Bdote in present-day Fort Snelling. The devastating U.S.-Dakota War in 1862 was followed by the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, and the forced removal of most Dakota people from Minnesota.

But the Dakota language is embedded in Minnesota, Renville said. “Minnesota itself is ‘mini shota,’” they said. “‘Mini’ is water and “shota” means smoky. And I’ve been told that it’s the reflection of the clouds in the sky. Everywhere you go in Minnesota, there’s place names that are in the language. And so, it’s really the language of the land here.”

For Renville, the language has been a portal not just to history but also to community. They have reconnected with their family and reservation Dakota communities. They are also creating TikTok videos in the Dakota language to connect with young people. “The language has been a really strong gateway to making connections with other Dakota people and feeling like I’m a part of a community, and it’s a really hard community, because there’s a lot of trauma,” Renville said.

Renville also teaches the language to their 8-year-old daughter, who lives in Florida. “I give my daughter a weekly allowance to learn Dakota, because there’s not really any incentive to speak it in Florida,” they said.

A poet and an author, Renville’s dream is to make Dakota a mainstream language through online classes, TikTok and YouTube videos — with the goal of not only reaching Dakota children, but also their parents. “My goal moving forward as an artist is to incorporate the language into everything,” they said.

Kalsang Dickey, nursing assistant and Tibetan language teacher

Kalsang Dickey’s way of serving Tibet from Minnesota is by preserving the Tibetan language. Dickey, 52, a nursing assistant, has been teaching Tibetan to kids from kindergarten to eighth grade at the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota for 16 years.

Growing up in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, Dickey didn’t realize until she was in her teens that Tibet isn’t synonymous with China, which took it over in 1950.

The Tibet she was born and grew up in had its own culture, language and history, but life under Chinese rule was full of restrictions and forced acceptance of a different culture. “My memory of Lhasa is very beautiful, and some are very sad,” she said. “The beautiful part is that my family is still there, childhood friends and my schoolmates. The sadness is that we lost the country. There’s no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion.”

In Tibet, she spoke Ütsang, the most popular Tibetan language dialect, at home, and Mandarin in public. She learned some Hindi when she moved to India at the age of 21 “to find freedom for myself,” and began learning English when she came to Minnesota in 1997.

“When I came to Minnesota, nobody knew Tibetans,” she said. “When I said Tibetan, they always called me Japanese. Even my lawyer didn’t know where Tibet is. He thought it was in India.”

As of 2013, the U.S. Census reported just under 1,300 Tibetan speakers in Minnesota.

In her early years in Minnesota, Dickey wrote letters to her family in Tibet because phone calls were too expensive. She wrote in Tibetan to her mother and in Mandarin to her siblings. Dickey said it was her way of making sure she didn’t forget either of those languages.

But as phone calls became more accessible, she started to lose touch with the Tibetan language. “Sometimes, when I tried to write something, I felt like, ‘How should I write this?’” she said.

Dickey took her children to the Tibetan school before she was asked to join as a teacher. “Every time my daughter spoke Lhasa dialect very nicely, the older teachers were really happy with that,” she said. “So when I dropped her off at school, one of our principals always asked me to join the school to teach Tibetan. But I didn’t have the confidence to go teach the kids.”

That principal eventually persuaded Dickey, saying, “‘If you want to serve the Tibetan government, and the Dalai Lama, this is how you can.”

“That’s how he convinced me,” she said. “Then I was like, I think I can do that. So I accepted that teacher position.”

Her resolve was further strengthened in 2016, when she visited Tibet for the first time since moving to Minnesota. “I noticed lots of Tibetan kids speaking Chinese rather than Tibetan,” she said. “Just like here, where some parents only speak English at home with kids, over there, parents were speaking only Chinese at home. It’s like erasing all the culture from them, kind of brainwashing.”

Dickey, a cancer patient, took a break from teaching when she was ill, but soon returned to it. “This is my life’s joyful work,” she said. “My family wanted me to rest. I said, ‘I don’t want to leave; I want to do this continually.’”

An admittedly “strict teacher,” Dickey said she worries “the language will vanish in 30 to 40 years” and wants to keep pushing students and their parents to speak it.

“Languages are our roots, the cultures, heritage, everything is our roots,” she said. “If we don’t have languages, culture, then, just like a tree, if you don’t have the roots, then the tree is gonna die.

“I can’t do too much, but this is one of the biggest things, [helping keep] our culture alive.”

Joffre Iban Gonzales Yupangui, Kichwa speaker

The province of Cañar, located in southern Ecuador between the western and central Andes ranges, is home to the Cañari, an Indigenous group with roots in pre-Incan civilizations. That’s where Joffre Iban Gonzales Yupangui was born before his family moved to Minnesota three years ago.

Joffre, now 16, was brought up around the folklore, spiritual and cultural traditions, and Kichwa language of his people. He has always spoken Kichwa and Spanish. Now a student at Lincoln International High School in Minneapolis, Joffre seeks to share his language and culture.

“I dedicate myself to promoting the language, teaching, and also preserving my native culture and trying to preserve other cultures that are currently being persecuted and silenced by the government in Ecuador,” he said in Spanish through a translator.

Speaking their Indigenous language came at a price for his parents, Maria Petrona Yupangui Simbaña and Carlos Fernando Gonzales Grand. “[For] the landowners, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, for the mestizos [mixed-race people of Spanish/Portuguese and Indigenous descent], speaking in Kichwa was like a sin,” Yupangui Simbaña said, also in Spanish and through a translator. “For speaking Kichwa they would mistreat us, beat us, and not pay us for our work.”

Even in Minnesota, she said, Spanish-speaking Ecuadoreans ridicule their language and urge them to speak only in Spanish.

But she passed on her native language and the resolve to preserve it to Joffre. “From my perspective as a mother, I’ve communicated in both languages [Kichwa and Spanish],” she said. “It’s our ancestral language, our own mother tongue, Kichwa. So we have to value it. It’s not because we like it or because we want to, but because it shows who we are, where we come from, what roots we have, what blood flows in our veins.”

Joffre credited his mother with teaching him the language, and for instilling the pride that now drives his advocacy.

While his language is embraced among his teachers and school peers, Joffre sees more reluctance to accept Kichwa among Ecuadoreans in Minnesota from his parents’ generation. He said the trauma of past exploitation continues to shape how families experience the present, creating a lasting sense of fear rooted in what earlier generations — including his own parents — endured under systems of forced or exploited labor.

But with the younger generation, “I do see a great interest in learning, not only about the culture, but also about the history,” Joffre said. “Because history is what keeps us alive.”

His mother agreed. “History touches the heart of knowing, to reopen the history book and see what happened, now, why would you lose it? It’s a history or culture where you open the book and gain strength — where I come from, who I am, and how I am, and where I need to go.”

Starting next fall, Ely Public School students will have a long weekend every weekend.

The school board approved a switch to four-day weeks this month amid budget shortfalls.

Anne Oelke, superintendent and principal, told MPR News it’s the third year of reductions for the district.

“The first year, we tried to keep those reductions as far away from students as possible. Second year, we had to dip in a little bit closer to students. And now we're in the third year, and the four-day week has been on the list because we need to cut $600,000,” Oelke said.

Savings come from reduced busing costs; the district runs its own buses, so money comes from reduced wear and tear and wages. Support staff and cafeteria wages are also going down, she said.

“We came to about $200,000 of annual operating cost savings,” Oelke summarized.

As other nearby districts have made the switch, Oelke said, anecdotally, student and staff attendance have both risen. She’s planning on pre- and post-school year surveys to gather student and staff feedback.

Lawmakers in the Minnesota House voted unanimously on Monday to pass a bill designed to prevent grooming, the process where an adult deliberately gains the trust of a child with the intention of sexually abusing them.

The legislation would make grooming a felony and allow the state Education Department to investigate allegations older than three years. It also calls for more training for teachers and others around children. There’s a companion bill in the Senate.

While experts applaud the bills, they say more systemic changes are needed to prevent grooming and child abuse in schools, daycares, summer camps, sports organizations and other institutions.

As lawmakers finish their work, here are some answers to questions often asked about grooming and how to stop it.

1) What is grooming?

Experts say it’s important to think of grooming as a pattern and process, not a singular event.

“It is a deliberate and intentional pattern of abuse to really exploit that trust,” said Monica Rivera, vice president of education and research at SafeSport, a nonprofit created in the wake of sexual misconduct at USA Gymnastics.

“I think about, like, a VIP pass. For many of the adults in our kids’ lives, we give them a backstage pass to our kids because we trust them. And grooming is when somebody intentionally works very hard to get that backstage pass as a way to then be able to fly under the radar and cause harm,” Rivera told MPR News host Angela Davis.

“It’s a process (that) starts off with seemingly innocent boundary violations” that can build to abuse, she added.

“It often includes special attention, isolated one-on-one time, private communication, bending small rules in ways that seem harmless, giving preteens and teenagers a space to talk about things that are taboo, like sex and relationships. But it’s actually creating an environment where those boundaries are blurred.”

Rivera’s group offers a guide to help parents recognize grooming.

2) How can grooming be identified?

It’s not easy, and that’s a big part of the problem. Numerous studies show how difficult it is to identify grooming while it’s happening.

Rivera points to a list curated by her organization that identifies patterns of manipulation. Among them:

• Engaging parents and children to build trust by offering special treatment

• Isolating a child by setting up ways to be alone with them

• Boundary testing by blurring the lines between appropriate and inappropriate behavior

• Sexualizing interactions by introducing sexual topics and actions

But the process often happens slowly with no “ah-ha” moment when adults know they must take action to protect a child.

“We're just not good at predicting that. We think we are, but we're just not,” said Dr. Mark Hudson, a child abuse pediatrician and medical director of the Midwest Children’s Resource Center at Children’s Minnesota.

“We can identify in hindsight, but we're not very good at identifying it going forward.”

3) How does grooming affect its targets?

The pain created by grooming and abuse is long-lasting, Rivera said.

“It impacts our ability to trust our gut, knowing who to trust and when not, when to let your guard down. It impacts our nervous system,” Rivera said. “Even when I know I'm in a safe relationship, my nervous system might be telling me otherwise. And so yeah, there's absolutely life long material impacts for survivors.”

Hannah LoPresto, a former student at Eagan High School, one of the key voices pushing for the new legislation, spoke of her own experience with a band teacher who, according to a police investigative report, had a “pattern of predatory grooming behaviors” with numerous students going back a decade in two school districts.

“It was half a decade of psychological manipulation that harmed my understanding of healthy relationships, my own value and my ability to trust others,” she told lawmakers in a recent hearing. “Grooming is not just a precursor to abuse, it is abuse all on its own.”

In interviews with MPR News, LoPresto described the experience of grooming as feeling confused, isolated and drawn into a different reality.

“As a teenage girl, I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be told I was pretty and smart and could have this, like, magical fairy tale future with somebody,” she said. “So he crafted that for me and made me believe that that was real and that that was the only future that was going to exist for me.”

4) What can parents do to talk to their kids about safety?

Communication with kids is vital, Hudson said.

“That communication need not necessarily be about sexual abuse, may not necessarily be about grooming” he added. “But we know that kids who have caring adults in their lives just do better overall.”

He also recommends making sure children understand “how they should be interacting with adults” and recognizing behaviors that might make them uncomfortable, such as being alone with an adult.

It's a hard conversation again, because this is a relatively nebulous thing that we're talking about, and there's not necessarily perfect words, in my opinion, but making sure that we're having those conversations.”

For Rivera, talking to kids is about being present in “micro moments.”

“On the ride home from practice, it's asking questions around, you know, ‘So, how was your experience with your coach?’ Or, ‘Hey, I noticed that the coach was giving this kid a ride home. Does that happen often?’ So you're, you almost become kind of a detective, but without interrogating kids.”

5) What can be done to prevent grooming?

Rivera and Hudson say preventing abuse is less about individual education and more about designing safe boundaries around adults and children.

That includes creating “environments around children where one-to-one contact is very rare, it's observable and interruptible when it does happen,” Rivera said.

“Whether we're the auntie or the coaches, it's less about, ‘Would I harm a kid? Would this other person harm a kid?’ It's more that the environment we're creating around us makes it almost impossible for (inappropriate) access (to children),” she added.

Hudson believes the key to prevention is making sure environments like schools are safe.

“One of the things that is just so simple is that one-to-one contact, making sure that we're doing that in ways that are observable, interruptible. “Maybe it's a little bit more inconvenient, but when we get to sort of changing the norm, we can do it.”

6) Where can I learn more about this topic or report abuse?

A 24-hour statewide sexual violence and domestic violence hotline is available in Minnesota. You can call Minnesota Day One at (866) 223-1111 or text (612) 399-9995.

You can also contact the Midwest Children’s Resource Center at 651-220-6750. Emergency phone consultation is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for concerned patients, parents, child protection and law enforcement agencies, physicians, therapists and attorneys.

SafeSport, Rivera’s group, posts information on how to identify, prevent and respond to grooming behaviors.

To report abuse in Minnesota, contact your county’s child protection agency.

Guests:

• Dr. Mark Hudson is a child abuse pediatrician and medical director of the Midwest Children’s Resource Center at Children’s Minnesota, Minnesota’s largest pediatric hospital.

• Monica Rivera is the vice president of education and research at the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit created in the wake of sexual misconduct at USA Gymnastics.

• Elizabeth Shockman is an MPR News reporter who covers K-12 education.

  

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.    

Extra support staff are on hand at Shakopee High School this week after a teacher died in a crash along a Twin Cities freeway over the weekend.

The Shakopee school district said Monday that Ryan Eiler had been a health and physical education teacher at the high school since 2021. He was also an assistant track coach for the past year.

State Patrol said Eiler, 32, of Champlin, drove an SUV north on U.S. Highway 169 near Highway 62 in Edina just after noon Sunday when it collided with a cement barrier in the median.

Road conditions were dry at the time and Eiler was wearing a seat belt. State Patrol said it does not believe alcohol was a factor.

The patrol said no other vehicles were involved and no one else was injured.

In addition to serving as a teacher and coach, the Shakopee school district said Eiler was also a member of the Army National Guard. He was a graduate of the University of Saint Thomas and the University of Minnesota.

“Support staff and members of the District Crisis and Safety Committee will be on-site at the high school throughout the week,” the district said Monday. “Resources will be available for students and families in addition to support provided by school counselors, school psychologists and administration.”

MPR News host Angela Davis and her guests talk about something that affects every one of us, but most of us were never formally taught — how to manage money.

Guests: 

• Kumar Balasubrahmanyan is the vice president of Innovation for Junior Achievement North.

• Sara Dziuk is the president and CEO of Junior Achievement North.

• Isaac Kreis is a 10th grade student at Washington Technology High School in St. Paul.

• Rengsona Yawa is a 9th grade student at Washington Technology High School in St. Paul.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

Seclusion rooms have been used in Minnesota for decades, as a last-resort response to student behavioral issues in special education classrooms. The use of these solitary rooms was banned for some of the youngest learners statewide in 2023, after they were deemed harmful and ineffective. But now, the Minnesota Senate is considering reversing that ban for children in special education classes third grade and under until 2036. That’s because, according to some administrators, schools need more time to plan alternatives to seclusion rooms.

Minnesota School Psychologists Association President-elect Tascha Just told MPR News host Nina Moini that many families and even educators are unaware the practice exists.

“Many Minnesotans would be surprised to realize that these were being used,” Just said.

Seclusion involves placing a student alone in a small, separate room during a behavioral crisis, where they are not allowed to leave. The practice is intended as an emergency safety measure and not as discipline. But Just said that even one experience in a seclusion room can lead to lasting negative impacts.

“It ends up being a very traumatic experience for both the student, and the staff involved, and anyone else that is around,” Just said. “When you are in an empty room by yourself, you hear an echo most of the time. So it is a really sensory disorienting environment.”

Just said seclusion rooms take an emotional toll on everyone involved.

“There’s tears for the kids and for the adults because it’s such a hard thing,” she said.

Afterward, Just said, educators must rebuild trust with students and process what happened.

“It becomes a really big process if you are being trauma informed,” she said. “So it’s hard for everybody.”

Just said she understood why some educators rely on seclusion in extreme situations.

“Teachers and paras feel unsafe. A student may be dysregulated, unable to communicate. And that is the last tool in their tool belt that they can think of in order to keep everybody safe,” she said.

As lawmakers consider delaying the ban until 2036, some administrators argue schools need time to build alternatives. Just disagrees with that timeline.

She pointed to potential alternatives, including sensory-friendly spaces, trained crisis response teams, de-escalation strategies and increased mental health support. She also pointed to staffing gaps, saying recommended ratios for school psychologists are regularly not met in Minnesota schools. Beyond resources, Just emphasized the importance of tailoring classroom design to students’ sensory needs and preventing escalation of harmful behaviors.

“It’s not about funding the last resort,” she said. “It’s about learning how to build systems that enforce positive regulation, and belonging, and learning so that we can target those concerns before they end up to be a crisis.”

The bill to push back the ban on seclusion rooms is making its way through the state Senate. It does not yet have a companion bill in the house.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

When Brianna Lawrence and her husband Devon found out they were expecting their first child, they were overjoyed, but they also knew it would force them to make a significant change: One of them will likely have to quit teaching and find a job with better benefits, so they can afford health care coverage for the family.

Brianna, 30, and Devon, 31, work at schools in Waseca — a city of about 9,000 in southern Minnesota. Brianna is a school counselor and Devon is the high school’s band director. When their family grows from two to three in June, they’ll be forced to move on to the substantially more expensive family health insurance plan.

“It's the kind of jump [in cost] that takes your breath away because you don't know how you're going to afford it,” Brianna Lawrence said.

Their premium for the new family coverage plan could nearly quadruple to $2,200 a month. Even the cheapest option, the high deductible plan, would more than double their premium costs, and it comes with high out-of-pocket expenses. With many pre-natal care visits, the Lawrences have already met their deductible just a few months into 2026, and now they’ll have to start over from scratch on the new plan in June. And this all comes just two years after a pregnancy loss that cost the couple nearly $11,000 in out of pocket expenses.

It’s forcing an unwelcome reckoning for the young family.

“Devon is so good at his job as a band director, and I love what I do as a school counselor,” Lawrence said. “I don't want to change. I don't want to leave this district. They've embraced us. They love us, and we love them. It would be heart wrenching to make that decision to leave, but it no longer is just us wanting to stay that's not enough. We have to see some changes happen for us to be able to stay.”

Health insurance costs have long been a problem for smaller, rural school districts because their smaller staff sizes give them less bargaining power in the marketplace. But, in recent years, school districts of all sizes are getting hit by huge health insurance price increases. MPR News reported last year that even Anoka-Hennepin Schools, the largest district in Minnesota, saw premiums go up 22 percent in 2025. Other districts saw even bigger spikes.

There’s a mix of reasons for the higher insurance costs, including inflation, an aging population with greater medical needs, and expensive new pharmaceuticals like GLP-1s. So educators are rallying around new legislation that could offer some relief. The proposed Educator Group Insurance Program, known as the EGIP bill, would create a statewide health coverage plan — one huge health insurance pool for all public school employees.

Eric Teders, The Lawrences’ coworker in Waseca Schools, said this is a long time coming. The junior high school math teacher and union president for the district said the majority of states in the U.S. already have statewide health plans for teachers.

“As good as Minnesota is in education, we are behind the eight ball on this,” Teders said.

He explained that because his district is so small, just a few serious accidents or illnesses in a year can significantly drive up premiums. He said it can also make some colleagues feel ostracized. Not only are they dealing with, often serious, health issues, they tell him that they feel guilty that their health care is increasing costs for their colleagues.

But, the new model proposed would fix that.

The plan is modeled off SEGIP — the state employee group insurance program that has covered legislators and state government workers for decades. Minnesota DFL Rep. Liz Reyer, lead author of the bill, explained that larger group health insurance plans tend to have significantly lower cost increases over time, because they have more negotiating power on behalf of thousands of employees across the state, and there’s more stability.

“When you have so many smaller to mid size groups, they're much more volatile,” Reyer explained. “Think about it: if you have a group of 20 people, and someone gets really sick or has an accident, that drives [insurance] upgrades for everybody. And it's very unpredictable. [But] when you combine everyone into a group of, say, 150,000 like EGIP would have, then you get stability, because now that just becomes a ripple, rather than something that changes the nature of the group.”

The bill, which has bipartisan support and 40 co-sponsors, is written to be “hold harmless,” meaning the new plan wouldn’t cost school districts any more than what they’re already paying. Instead, the state would be expected to supplement any gaps in coverage.

But Reyer said that some of her colleagues at the state capitol are apprehensive because of the uncertain cost to the state and where the money will come from. So this year, Reyer is also pushing for passage of a companion bill, which allows the state to gather data from all school districts, to get a more accurate read on the cost.

The hope is that the data bill will pass this year and then supporters can push for the new health plan next year, which is a budget year in the Minnesota legislature.

Rising health insurance costs aren’t isolated to the education field, but Reyer says they deserve extra attention.

“These are public employees,” Reyer said. “They're doing a lot for our community. They're supporting our society, and that we should be investing back in them.”

So far, most educators seem to support the bill. The statewide teachers union is running a massive campaign in support, which includes running large ads on its main website. Waseca’s Brianna Lawrence was among several school workers that testified in front of the legislature.

Another educator that testified is Aaron Wilke. He teaches middle school about 40 minutes west of Waseca in Kasson. Wilke said he’s hearing about colleagues — like Lawrence — that are considering leaving the profession, due to health insurance costs. Even his own son decided to halt his pursuit of a career in education and enter law enforcement because of the poor benefits offered.

Wilke, 51, says he’s passionate about the fact that the legislation will offer better coverage for all school workers — not just teachers. Many of whom have even worse coverage right now.

“If you're a secretary or a paraprofessional at Kasson-Manorville, right now, your premiums are likely going to be more than $2,000 a month instead of the $1,200 a month that our teachers see,” Wilke said. “This would have everybody with the same premiums and the same benefit — whether you're a superintendent, a custodian, a teacher, or a bus driver.”

Wilke said he testified before lawmakers because he wants to protect the future of his profession. He worries that Minnesota could lose out on a pool of very talented educators simply because they can't afford health insurance.

“I'm trying to look five, 10, 20, even 40 years down the road and advocate for EGIP so that we might be able to supply our demand for teachers in the many years to come,” Wilke said.

In fall of 2026, a St. Paul elementary school will transform itself with a new learning model. Benjamin E. Mays, which currently runs under the International Baccalaureate — or IB — program, will instead be centered around an Afrocentric program and curriculum.

It's been years in the making and it’s historic as Benjamin E. Mays will become one of the only Afrocentric schools in the state.

Danielle Hughes, principal of Benjamin E. Mays, and Stacie Stanley, superintendent of St. Paul Public Schools, spoke to Minnesota Now about the program.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Historically Black colleges and universities — known as HBCUs — are schools that were created to educate Black students at a time when most colleges would not admit them.

While “HBCU” might not be a household name in Minnesota, students and graduates of these 107 schools represent a thriving culture and network, especially in the southern United States.

And, their impact is significant. A recent report by Forbes magazine reveals that HBCUs have produced about 80 percent of Black judges, 70 percent of Black doctors and dentists, 50 percent of Black engineers, and 40 percent of Black lawyers. And about half of the nation’s Black teachers graduated from an HBCU.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with several graduates of HBCUs and a leader from an organization that supports these schools. They’ll talk about the history of these institutions and why they still matter today.

Guests:

• Laverne McCartney Knighton is an area development director for the United Negro College Fund. She oversees fundraising and scholarship programs in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

• James Burroughs is the senior vice president of government and community relations and the chief equity and inclusion officer at Children’s Minnesota — Minnesota’s largest pediatric hospital. He also attended Morehouse College, an HBCU in Atlanta, Ga.

• Zarina Sementelli is a recent law school graduate who grew up in Minnesota. She graduated from Spelman College, an HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia, and California Western School of Law.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

The growing conflicts in the Middle East continue to evolve almost every hour, making it hard for anybody to keep up with — let alone kids.

Some of the burden of helping children make sense of those wars and other fraught international relations falls onto teachers. But how do you teach history as it's unfolding?

Scott Glew is a social studies teacher at Sauk Middle School in Elk River and an Iraq war veteran. Glew was also named a Bush Fellow in 2017 and has served on the board of directors for the Minnesota councils for social studies and history education.

Glew told Morning Edition the most important thing in the classroom is to emphasize the humanity of war.

“We need to be talking more than just about battles and strategies, more than just the economic impact, but really how what's going on in Iran right now is impacting people,” Glew said. “Most of the people there, they're just regular people who are going to feel the consequences more than anybody else.”

Glew spoke to MPR News in February 2024 about the same topic, as the world marked two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Recognizing that many of his current students are consuming news via social media feeds, which “are really difficult to turn off,” Glew has changed his approach in 2026 in one key way.

“I'm really trying to find that balance with them and encouraging them to find the balance of both paying attention and also taking a step back and taking care of themselves,” Glew said, while still ensuring students have a “deep understanding of the consequences of war.”

Listen to the full conversation by clicking the player button above.

In a notice on its website, the district says its technology team discovered on Sunday that an outside actor had accessed internal school systems. Staff shut down those systems to prevent any further access, and some are still down. The district says those systems are “needed to safely have school.”

Classes are canceled for the north Metro district’s 6,000 students. Child care, after-school activities and community education programs are also canceled.

The hack came a week after a similar incident in Winona County, where a cyberattack led to a shutdown of the county’s main IT system. It was the latest in a growing number of attacks against local governments’ technology systems.

The district is working with a third-party cybersecurity team and law enforcement to fix the problem and said it plans to update students and families Monday.

Red Lake Nation College announced Thursday that it received a $7 million unrestricted donation. It says the gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s foundation, Yield Giving, is the largest in the college’s history.

The tribal college has two campus locations — one in northern Minnesota and another in Minneapolis.

The school’s board and president say the school will invest the money into a permanent endowment fund, which they say will guarantee the school's financial stability well into the future — following Ojibwe teachings to visualize how today's decisions will impact the next seven generations.

“This is historic and this fund will end the poverty cycle for our college. The key is to put it all in a new fund, and let it grow and build, so we can get it to a point where we can use it to support us for anything we need,” said RLNC board chairman Delwyn Holthusen Jr.

Holthusen says the money in the endowment will only be used in “extreme emergencies.” If money were to be taken out, school leaders say it will be paid back with interest, to allow the fund to continuously grow over the next several decades.

Tight internal restrictions have also been placed on withdrawals. According to a press release, college board members must all agree to taking out funds from the endowment.

Chief Dan King is RLNC’s president. He says the endowment is the start to “ending poverty” for the college, which receives a quarter of its funding from private donations annually.

“I am so proud of our RLNC Board for having the courage and vision to look out for the long-term financial sustainability of our current and all future RLNC students,” King said.

After 35 years, the school estimates the endowment will reach $224 million.

Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.

The fire was started in a bathroom at Westwood Elementary on March 31. Students and staff had to evacuate the building.

The school has been closed since the fire for extensive cleaning and safety testing, and won't re-open until Monday. St. Cloud Superintendent Laurie Putnam said repairing the damage will cost an estimated $2 million.

Minnesota state law prohibits children under age 10 from being prosecuted in juvenile court. Police have forwarded the investigation to the Stearns County Attorney's Office to review and consider other alternatives for the student.

Westwood students are learning remotely this week. The district also is partnering with the Boys & Girls Club of Central Minnesota to provide emergency child care to families.

Some community organizations, such as the Great River Children’s Museum and the St. Cloud YMCA, are offering free admission and activities.

“The level of care and coordination from our community has been extraordinary,” Putnam said.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office announced charges on Wednesday against the man who attended White Bear Lake Area High School under a different identity last fall.

Kelvin Luekbe, 23, faces three felony counts of forgery.

Authorities said Luebke was 22 when he registered for school in the fall of 2025 as a 17-year-old named “Kelvin Perry, Jr,” according to court documents. He attended classes for about a month before White Bear Lake police received reports about Luebke from a concerned citizen on Sept. 29.

That week, the White Bear Lake superintendent said Luebke had registered as an unaccompanied minor, raising concerns about a process meant to ensure education access for unhoused youth.

In court documents, prosecutors report Luebke enrolled with a Liberian birth certificate with a different date of birth than that listed on his U.S. birth certificate, U.S. passport, Minnesota driver’s license and Minnesota birth certificate — all of which indicated he was age 22 last fall.

Luebke was adopted from Liberia in 2009 at age six, according to his adoptive father. His father told investigators Luebke was homeschooled for the most part and attended Forest Lake Area High School for a period of time at age 18 before he was expelled due to behavioral issues.

Investigators said Luebke acknowledged possessing both U.S. and Liberian birth certificates. He claimed his biological family members told him his true age is 18 and, per court documents, “his biological father recently helped him obtain a Liberian birth certificate listing the name he ‘goes by in Africa,’ Kelvin Ciatte Perry, Jr., with a birth date of May 28, 2007.”

Luebke left his adoptive family home about four years ago to live with a couple in Lino Lakes willing to take him in, according to court records. They were reportedly unaware that Luebke had enrolled at White Bear Lake Area High School.

Luebke is listed as not having a permanent address in other court records.

Luebke is facing other legal issues. Since the discovery, multiple teen girls have reported concerns about the man to White Bear Lake police. At least two parents have filed restraining orders against the man on behalf of their 17-year-old daughters. Washington County charged Luebke with harassment and violating a restraining order in January after police say he made contact with a 17-year-old girl.

Police say they are investigating his contact with a number of minors.

Luebke is currently under court supervision for a 2023 incident where he sent a nude photo to a 15-year-old girl.

A federal judge in Minnesota heard arguments Wednesday on whether the Department of Homeland Security should be required to treat schools as protected areas free of immigration enforcement.

As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents flooded the Twin Cities in February, the Fridley and Duluth school districts, along with the state teachers union, asked the court to compel Homeland Security to restore its former policy that recognized schools as off-limits.

They argued immigration enforcement conducted near schools had damaged student attendance and enrollment. During Operation Metro Surge, Minnesota districts with widespread federal activity saw as many as 20 to 40 percent of students staying home from school.

In Wednesday’s hearing, lawyers for the districts offered examples of ICE staging operations in school parking lots, pulling people from their cars on their way to school and targeting people for detainment in school parking lots or near bus stops.

One testimony alleged ICE agents drove near an elementary school blaring the song “Ice Ice Baby” in what schools say was an attempt to create fear and intimidation.

In one example, a testifier said that even well after Operation Metro Surge had ended in the middle of March, ICE was still making arrests affecting students. Another said ICE agents made a violent arrest on a property by a school bus stop in a move that frightened children and parents who were waiting to go to school.

Although ICE agents were no longer a daily presence near Fridley schools, students and staff were still affected by what had happened in January and February, said Brenda Lewis, superintendent of the Fridley Public Schools.

“Our educators are still in a constant state of standing up emotional support, not only for their children, but for their families and each other,” Lewis said.

“We also still have families that are not with us, that are in detention facilities,” she added. “So the impact is not just that we haven't had ICE agents on our property in eight weeks, which is good, however, the impact is longstanding and will be seen for many years.”

In January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded its 32-year safe-harbor policy for schools, hospitals and churches, saying that “criminals” would no longer be able to “hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.”

Lawyers for the Fridley and Duluth schools argued the move violated the federal Administrative Procedures Act.

In arguing to keep the current policy, a government lawyer Wednesday said immigration enforcement officers already apply discretion around when and where they conduct operations and it’s not necessary to create “bright line rules” around where they operate.

She said the Trump administration’s changes last year just eliminated bureaucracy.

Judge Laura Provinzino said at the end of the hearing that this was an important case to her personally as the daughter and granddaughter of educators. She did not indicate when she planned to rule on the matter.