Education Policy Panel Approves MN Bill Letting Schools Opt Out of Mandates

A Minnesota House education policy panel has approved a bill to let schools opt out of mandates.

Republican Rep. Ron Kresha from Little Falls is the bill’s sponsor in the House. The legislation would allow a school board to opt out of compliance with laws enacted in 2023 or 2023 relating to earned sick and safe time, paid family and medical leave, education policy, education finance, and children.

“We need to allow for flexibility for our school districts or we will continue to struggle and we will continue to have budget reductions across their schools,” stated Republican Rep. Ben Bakeberg of Jordan, one of the bill’s sponsors, during the panel meeting.

“How is this constitutional?” asked DFL Rep. Sydney Jordan of Minneapolis. “Schools have an obligation to have a uniform – it’s in our Minnesota Constitution to have a uniform standard of education. If schools are deciding, picking, and choosing which laws to follow and which laws not to follow, how is that constitutional?”

“There are a lot of differences in programing options and different, you know, implementation curriculum,” Rep. Bakeberg answered. “There is a wide variety of local control that districts already have. This allows the districts to implement the different mandates that were passed, over 65 different mandates passed in the last legislative session that frankly are hamstringing districts. So the consistent piece that I’ve heard, as I’ve looked in to your question, Rep. Jordan, is that we have unity, but we don’t have uniformity over our, over what happens in our schools. So there’s some consistency that happens, but it is not exactly different in every single school district.”

The bill was approved on a split-voice vote by the House Education Policy Committee on Tuesday and was sent to the House Education Finance Committee.