Minnesota’s largest school district could swing to the right or left in this fall’s school board election.
The six-member Anoka-Hennepin school board, which represents 13 suburban communities in the north metro, faces frequent gridlock over issues with a 3-3 political split. This election could tilt the balance of power, with implications for the district’s budget, curriculum, and top leadership. Three of the six seats, which represent distinct geographic areas within the district, are up for election this year.
The district made headlines in April 2024 when school board member Matt Audette, who is up for reelection this fall, said he and other conservatives would block the district from passing a budget unless the board complied with a list of his demands.
This list included eliminating the use of concepts of “equity” or “anti-racism” with staff or students; culturally responsive teaching; land acknowledgments; several staff positions focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion; requiring or asking students to share their gender and pronouns; restorative justice practices; and any display of a flag other than the American flag.
After students protested, and the threat of a budget shutdown imperiled the district’s financial relationships, the school board ultimately narrowly passed a budget that left the status quo in place on many of these questions.
But the 3-3 gridlock remained, leaving the board at an impasse over issues like whether to purchase new physics textbooks, when — and even whether — to adopt the state’s new social studies standards, and whether the district should overhaul its social-emotional learning curriculum.
Now, Audette hopes to gain a majority on the board. He has endorsed two other candidates — Lorraine Coan, a longtime probation officer and district grandparent, and Tiffany Strabala, a district substitute teacher — who are hoping to unseat incumbents Kacy Deschene and Jeff Simon. Coan and Strabala have both pledged to prioritize academic excellence, school safety and parental rights if elected. They have also both spoken against transgender student athletes playing girls’ sports.
“In order to achieve academic excellence, we must get back to teaching the basics: reading, writing, math, real science, and factual history,” Coan’s website reads. The website also says she hopes to increase school safety by “holding students accountable for their behavior.”
Strabala sounded a similar note in videos posted online.
“Teachers do not feel safe or respected when they cannot discipline their students,” Strabala said in a video posted on her website. “I want to make sure that parents are aware of what’s happening in their child’s classroom and are welcomed into that conversation. I want to make sure that teachers are focusing on core academics and keeping controversial issues out of the classroom and left for the parents to discuss with their children.”
On the other side of the political divide, literacy education professor Abbey Payeur is challenging Audette. If she wins, she could shift the balance of power toward the board’s liberals. Payeur hopes to help the district implement its literacy plan and better identify students who need special education services.
“I’m running to help ensure that our public schools stay strong,” Payeur said in an interview with Sahan Journal. “It’s important to me to strengthen partnerships between our schools and parents. I’d like to make sure schools are inclusive for all students, engaging happy places to be, where kids feel joy.”
The election comes as the district faces $8 million in budget cuts; Superintendent Cory McIntyre’s contract is up for renewal next year; and the deadline to implement Minnesota’s new social studies standards approaches next fall.
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The race has attracted attention — and money — from outside political groups. Audette, Coan, and Strabala are all running with the endorsement of the Anoka-Hennepin Parents Alliance, the Minnesota Parents Alliance and the 1776 Project PAC. Deschene, Payeur, and Simon all have the endorsement of Education Minnesota, the state’s largest educator union. Deschene and Payeur also took the School Board Integrity Project’s candidate pledge. Though Simon did not take the pledge, campaign finance reports show the School Board Integrity PAC paid for an independent expenditure supporting his candidacy.
Simon, who has often voted with the board’s liberals, has decried the influence of party politics in school board races and described himself as nonpartisan. In a League of Women Voters candidate forum, he said he hoped to “act as a model that a regular person can serve our community without partisan politics or affiliating with political groups, which is the true spirit of school board service.”
“I am very confident that my experience and passionate belief in serving as nonpartisan is the only way to truly serve all people and all students,” he said. “In this election, we have a choice. Do we want political parties to fight each other over control of our local school district every two years and provide candidates that always lead with partisan blinders? Or do we want people like me, and the many before me, that started out by volunteering in our schools as PTO members?”
Strabala declined to speak with Sahan Journal for this story. Coan said she did not have time. Audette and Simon did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Social studies standards
When Audette threatened to block the district budget in 2024, one of his targets was the state’s new social studies standards.
“Halt the process,” he wrote, referring to the social studies standards, in an April 2024 Facebook post in which he declared his intention to block the district from passing a budget that included items he disagreed with. “We cannot adopt a curriculum that is obviously slanted and biased toward a single world view that is decidedly negative in what it teaches about our country.”
Minnesota’s new social studies standards, which take effect in the 2026-2027 school year, include ethnic studies for the first time. Advocates hailed this development as an important step to better reflect Minnesota’s diverse students by teaching more robust histories of different racial and ethnic groups, and connecting historical struggles to the present.
Strabala spoke in favor of Audette’s proposed budget revision during an April 2024 school board meeting.
“I’m here to encourage the board to stop the spreading of divisive, one-sided views, training and learning that goes against the values and beliefs of many families, students and staff in our community,” she said during public comment. “The three board members who are in favor of this are doing what their constituents elected them to do. I want to encourage the board to come together and find common ground, keep the social justice issues out of the classroom and focus on academics.”
Ultimately, the school board voted on a budget that spring without blocking the new social studies standards. But they later deadlocked on whether to adopt textbooks and curriculum that comply with the new standards, eventually adopting new textbooks while delaying an update of the curriculum.
“We have paused any implementation of the state standards based on the inability for the board to come to a majority agreement of what that would look like,” Deschene said in an interview with Sahan Journal. So far, she said, the board had complied with state law but had not made progress toward implementing the new standards next year. She noted that the state follows a rigorous process for updating its academic standards.
“I do think that we have a responsibility as a board to follow the rules and implement the standards as set by the state,” she said.
“I think how we’ve been implementing them so far is a joke and a waste of teachers’ time and a slap in the face to all of the people who worked on those standards,” Payeur said. “We need our students to graduate, and in order to graduate, we need to comply with these standards.”
The uncertainty has left teachers in limbo, not knowing whether they need to learn the new standards or change their curriculum next year, Payeur said.
Social-emotional learning
Another flashpoint in Audette’s 2024 list of items to purge from the budget was social-emotional learning. He wanted the district to end the use of its “Leader in Me” and “CharacterStrong” programs, which he has called “poison for our kids.”
The concept of social-emotional learning became controversial nationally after conservative groups described it as a Trojan horse for teaching about race and gender issues.
Payeur, who previously taught elementary and middle school, said that for a classroom teacher, “social-emotional learning is just common sense.” The lessons focus on how kids can learn to take turns and talk to each other with respect, even if they don’t agree, she said. In a classroom she worked in last year, students learned about traits like creativity and perseverance, and teachers honored them for showing those traits.
Deschene hoped this could be an area where school board members could work together to find common ground. The board reviewed various recommendations for how to move forward with a different approach to social-emotional learning. But they could not reach an agreement.
“We continued to just remain without a compromise, and so nothing would change,” she said. “That felt very unsatisfying, because we asked a lot of people to give time and energy to the review.”
Simon told ABC Newspapers that national conversations around social-emotional learning had set the tone for the gridlock in Anoka-Hennepin, and that the idea that anything controversial was in the character development lessons was “misinformation.”
“I have reviewed every elementary lesson and found nothing controversial,” he said of social-emotional learning. “All board members have access to these lessons, and no one has brought anything specific forward as concerning.”
A point of agreement
Despite the frequent gridlock, candidates from both sides of the political divide pointed to literacy as an area where they have found common ground.
“The board was aligned in focusing on literacy improvements in the district,” Deschene said. “We adopted a new curriculum, allocated resources in order to support that curriculum and training for our staff, and we’re starting to see the results of that play out in our schools every day.”
Strabala also pointed to the board’s collaborative work on literacy in an interview with the conservative AM radio station The Patriot.
“I think our reading program, which the school board just agreed on, is going well and improving our reading scores,” she said. “We came to agreement with that, so that’s very encouraging.”
Payeur, a literacy education professor, also praised the board’s actions on reading.
“The board did do a nice job in coming together on the science of reading and accepting the recommendations from the curriculum team and the district’s experts,” she said.
Voters will elect three of the candidates on November 4.
