The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a Minneapolis taxpayer does not have standing to challenge a provision in the district’s teacher union contract aimed at protecting teachers of color.
“Minneapolis Public Schools is pleased with the Court’s decision in this matter and we thank the partners who joined us in the appeal,” the district said in a statement.
Marcia Howard, teacher chapter president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Education Support Professionals, said she felt “relief” at the court’s decision. She said the union worked “tirelessly” to improve the quality of education for Minneapolis Public Schools students. “Part of that is giving them access to teachers with a rich wealth of life experiences,” she said. “And that means shielding teachers from underrepresented groups from layoffs caused by budget cuts.”
But Tom Fitton, the president of Washington, D.C.-based conservative legal group Judicial Watch, which represented the taxpayer in this case, blasted the “woke, racially discriminatory contract” and said his group would ask President-elect Donald Trump to investigate it as a “blatant civil rights violation.”
“The Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the Court of Appeals ruling is beyond the pale,” he said. “Minneapolis Public Schools is unabashedly discriminating against teachers based on their race, and the school district is using taxpayer dollars to do so. The Minnesota Supreme Court’s disgraceful decision not only threatens teachers’ jobs but also prevents Minnesota taxpayers (present and future) from holding their government to account.”
Judicial Watch sued the school district in August 2022 on behalf of Minneapolis homeowner Deborah Clapp. In the lawsuit, Clapp alleged that the contract’s provision to protect underrepresented teachers during Minneapolis Public Schools’ layoff process was illegal, and that her taxpayer dollars were helping to pay for it.
A district court judge reversed Clapp’s claim due to lack of standing, dismissing the case. But the Minnesota Court of Appeals reversed that decision, citing Minnesota’s taxpayer standing doctrine, and reinstated the case. The Minnesota Supreme Court, in turn, reversed the Court of Appeals’ ruling — upholding the district court judge’s dismissal of the case.
“Clapp does not have taxpayer standing because an unlawful disbursement of government funds is not the central dispute in this case,” Justice Karl Procaccini wrote in his decision. He noted that the contract was not immune from judicial review and that someone else could well have standing to sue. He added that the Supreme Court expressed no opinion on the merit of Clapp’s claims — merely that she did not have standing to challenge the contract. Justice Theodora Gaïtas, who authored the Court of Appeals decision while a judge on that bench, took no part in the Supreme Court’s decision.
In his opinion, Procaccini relied on the Minnesota Supreme Court’s August decision in a case about voter re-enfranchisement. In that case, Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Hunt, three taxpayers argued that a new statute reinstating the right to vote to people with previous felony convictions was illegal, and that because it was illegal, the state should not spend public funds to educate people about the law. As in that case, he said, the use of taxpayer funds was incidental to the “central dispute.”
Procaccini also noted previous examples of when a taxpayer did have standing to challenge the illegal use of tax dollars — for example, when a government entity entered into a contract without a legally required competitive bidding process.
During oral arguments in October, Minnesota Supreme Court justices previewed their decision, repeatedly drawing comparisons to the August voting rights decision.
“If we agree with you,” Justice Anne McKeig said to Michael Bekesha, the Judicial Watch attorney arguing for Clapp, “I’m trying to think of a circumstance where the taxpayer wouldn’t have standing.”
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The contract provision in question was ratified after a three-week teacher strike in 2022. At the time, district leadership and teachers hailed it as an important protection for teachers of color.
Typically, teacher layoffs happen on the basis of seniority; the most recently hired teachers are first to be cut. Since teachers of color are more likely to be recently hired, these cuts disproportionately affect them.
The language in the district’s contract with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers says that during a process of staff reductions or layoffs, the district can go out of seniority order to retain an “underrepresented” teacher over the “next least senior teacher.”
But Clapp’s complaint alleged that Minnesota law prohibits the use of public funds for laying off or reassigning teachers on the basis of race or ethnicity. During oral arguments in October, Bekesha argued that the provision was illegal under Minnesota law.
“The Minnesota equal protection guarantee prohibits governments from making decisions, from taking actions, exclusively, only, based on race,” he said.
Chief Justice Natalie Hudson suggested that Clapp’s disagreements with the school district focused on policy, not funds.
“I think it’s a valid concern, but it does seem to me that that’s a policy issue,” she said. “That’s the very thing that we said in our recent decision in Hunt: That doesn’t get you there for taxpayer standing.”
In practice, the contract provision has yet to come into play because Minneapolis Public Schools has not laid off any teachers since 2010. Attorney Tim Sullivan, arguing for Minneapolis Public Schools, told the Minnesota Supreme Court during October oral arguments that the district had not spent any funds to implement this provision of the contract. Attorneys for Clapp did not identify any specific expenditure the district had made to implement the contract either.
Under the collective bargaining agreement, the district must first cut teachers who are not tenured or who lack full professional licenses before laying off tenured teachers.
Last year, facing a massive budget deficit, Minneapolis Public Schools “excessed” 452 teachers, removing them from their positions with the right to apply for other jobs in the district.
In the end, 50 were “discharged” from the district altogether.
Thirty-six percent of the teachers who lost their jobs were people of color — higher than the district’s overall percentage of teachers of color, 22%.
But none of those teachers were tenured. And therefore, Minneapolis Public Schools told Sahan Journal last fall, the layoff provisions in the contract did not apply during last year’s budget cuts.
