Star Tribune
Minnesota Education Department fails to provide charter schools data
The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has refused to turn over more than 2,000 files involving complaints and state oversight of charter schools to the Minnesota Star Tribune, despite publicly acknowledging that the complaints are a matter of public record.
The Star Tribune requested the charter school records Feb. 1, when it was in the early stages of reporting on Minnesota’s groundbreaking experiment with charter schools. The Star Tribune published a three-part series detailing oversight problems and widespread failures among Minnesota’s charter schools last week.
Though MDE routinely has provided records to the Star Tribune within weeks or months in prior requests for public records, the department hasn’t provided the bulk of the material covered in the newspaper’s Feb. 1 request. Within seven months, MDE has turned over just seven of the requested records.
Sam Snuggerud, the spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement that it is a complicated issue, spanning decades of data, and the agency “plans to produce another portion” of the request by the end of this month.
She added that the department receives hundreds of data requests each year and must review data to protect the privacy of students, families and teachers.
“MDE does not delay responding to data requests – in fact, the agency continues to work on the thousands of pages of data that may be responsive to this specific request,” she said in a statement. “The more complicated the request, the longer a response can take. Several months is not an unreasonable amount of time to respond to a complicated request.”
Attorney Leita Walker, who represents the Star Tribune, asked the department to turn over the records by the end of September or face a lawsuit over what she called the department’s “constructive denial” of the request, which she said constituted a violation of the Minnesota Data Practices Act.
“Star Tribune is deeply disappointed in MDE’s lack of transparency over the past year and what appears to be a strategy of delay in disclosing data of significant public interest and concern,” Walker said in a Sept. 11 letter to MDE Staff Attorney Adam Heuett, who previously identified himself as MDE’s “data practices compliance official.”
Joined by Minnesota affordable housing groups, Democrats Sen. Tina Smith and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled a bill Wednesday that they say would create more affordable housing across the country.
The “Homes Act” would establish a housing development authority within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that would build and maintain a stock of permanent affordable housing. Smith said housing supply is far behind demand.
“Our proposal would serve renters, and homebuyers alike, providing millions of Americans in rural and urban communities with more options for a quality, affordable place to call home—with the sense of stability, security, comfort and pride that should come with it,” Smith said in a statement.
Her bill would authorize $30 billion in federal spending a year, with 5% of that set aside for tribal communities and at least 10% for rural communities, along with a revolving loan fund. Noah Hobbs, the strategy and policy director of One Roof Community Housing in Duluth, said that rural requirement will especially help in greater Minnesota.
“Oftentimes when bills get made either in St. Paul or D.C., they leave out greater Minnesota or greater America,” he said. “This rural set aside is really huge in helping us do more work than what we’re already doing. So we’re doing about, on average, 20 homes a year, either acquisition rehab or new construction. And so we’re hoping that this will help accelerate that.”
He said he thinks the bill will help not only in Duluth but also in places like Floodwood, Grand Marais, Grand Rapids and smaller municipalities between Duluth and larger cities.
Research from New York University, University of California at Berkley and the Climate and Community Institute estimates that the bill could build and preserve 1.25 million housing units, which would include 876,000 units for low income households, according to a joint memo from Smith and Ocasio-Cortez’ offices on the bill.
The bill would also help local communities address housing needs by helping to finance real estate acquisition or conveying property to public housing authorities, nonprofits, local governments, community land trusts and tenant or resident owned cooperatives, the memo continues.
One of Minnesota’s favorite spring flowers are blooming again in late summer, a sign of stress from the extreme swings in Minnesota’s weather over the past several years.
Many lilacs across the Twin Cities have sprouted out their purple and pink flowers for a second time this year during an unseasonably warm September. The re-blooming is unusual for lilacs and can be unsettling to see, said Julie Weisenhorn, a professor and the horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota Extension.
“It’s not something we’d call ‘normal’ but it’s something we’ve been seeing now over the past few years,” Weisenhorn said.
When trees and plants suffer from blights or pests, or are stressed by droughts, floods or other phenomena, they sometimes produce an overabundance of seed. It’s a way that they’ve evolved to ensure that, if they do succumb, their progeny has a chance to live, Weisenhorn said.
So during droughts, oak trees may produce a super-crop of acorns. And lilacs will sometimes produce a second bloom in the fall.
Minnesota is not experiencing a drought right now. The summer of 2024, warm September aside, has actually been the most typical weather season the state has experienced in years.
“Sometimes it takes a a little while for plants to react,” Weisenhorn said. “So you have to think back to last year and even the year before last, and realize how stressed these plants were doing those extreme dry summers, and then going through a strange winter with no snow and very little cold.”
That drought was followed by one of the wettest three-month stretches ever recorded in Minnesota from April to June, she said.
DULUTH — An Edina man died following a single-car crash along the North Shore of Lake Superior on Tuesday night, according to a news release from Cook County.
Douglas Paul Junker was dead at the scene of the accident on Hwy. 61 and Joanne Marie Bergstadt, also of Edina, was transported to a hospital in Duluth. Her condition is not known. According to WTIP, the car went off the road and crashed through a fence alongside a bike path and into a wooded area.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Department and Minnesota State Patrol are investigating the accident.
