STMA Levy Voters Have No Idea What We're Buying

Voters in the St. Michael-Albertville school district will decide on Tuesday, November 2nd whether to significantly increase property taxes to fund the continued operation of our schools. The levy would commit homeowners to ten years of increases which average $60 per month on a $250,000 home.

Parents, taxpayers, and residents may hope to sustain the top-tier educational product which has been provided by STMA schools to date. Unfortunately, we cannot rest assured that our legacy of excellence will remain as it has been. Over the past two years, we have witnessed disturbing precedents which threaten our control over both curriculum and environment.

In 2020, Governor Tim Walz claimed dictatorial control over every man, woman, and child in the state. He told us whether we could work, whether we could open for business, and whether we could send our children to school.

Earlier this year in our neighboring school district, a judge forced Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose to pay $218,500 and implement policies forcing students, teachers, and staff to affirm lies about gender identity and tolerate the intrusion of members of the opposite sex in private spaces. This followed a similar case months earlier in Anoka-Hennepin.

Not to be outdone, radical activists working within government at the state and federal level seek to implement curriculum standards which will indoctrinate children into overtly racist critical theory. STMA staff and members of the school board have already entertained materials which promote a “race conscious” worldview which judges people according to their skin rather than their character.

These contemporaneous developments each signal that the quality of STMA's educational product may change radically on short notice without the input or consent of taxpayers, residents, and parents. Any one of these developments would prove unacceptable. Yet they seem not merely likely, but imminent.

Only the STMA school board can provide voters with assurance that these threats to the educational product will not manifest. They must say in clear and unequivocal terms that they will not comply with abuse or neglect imposed from higher levels of government. Absent such assurance, our answer on Tuesday, November 2nd must be no.

Note: The proceeding was submitted as a letter to the editor of the Crow River News on October 6th. It was accepted pending edits for word count, promptly revised, and verified for publication in the October 14th edition. For reasons unknown, it was never actually published.