If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent very few moments of your life caring much about local school board elections. After all, nothing on a school board could ever be political, right?
Wrong.
Public documents filed on Oct. 29 reveal a political action committee called Excellence Minnesota collected a $157,000 war chest to spend in support of extremist school board candidates across four Minnesota school districts. Donors to the fund include Freedom Club, a network of wealthy Minnesota conservatives that pushes to elect far-right candidates to public office.
The Excellence Minnesota signatory on these documents is Christine Snell, a political operative who has worked on campaigns for Republicans Jason Lewis, Jim Schultz and Joe Teirab. Snell currently serves as the executive director of the Minnesota Parents Alliance, a Wayzata-based nonprofit that backs right-wing candidates for school board positions.
One such candidate is Matt Audette. Audette ran as an incumbent on the Anoka-Hennepin School Board on Nov. 4 and he has made a name for himself as a staunch advocate for the far-right political agenda.
In 2024, he attempted to block passage of the district’s budget unless the rest of the board met a list of demands that included eliminating teaching equity and anti-racism, halting restorative justice practices, disallowing asking students their preferred pronouns, and banning the display of any flag other than the U.S. flag.
His reelection campaign website stated that he opposes critical race theory and that he will fight against “the radical political agendas of Education Minnesota, the MN Department of Education, and others who aim to indoctrinate children.”
The 3-3 split between liberals and conservatives on the Anoka-Hennepin school board, which oversees Minnesota’s largest school district, meant that the 2024 budget narrowly passed without meeting Audette’s outlandish demands. That also meant that Audette saw November’s election as an opportunity to flip the balance of the board with like-minded colleagues whom he endorsed during his campaign.
And then came the money.
According to the documents filed with local school districts, Excellence Minnesota racked up over $11,000 in advertising expenses to support Audette alone. It spent nearly $32,000 more to advertise for the other far-right extremists in the race, and another $37,000 on negative ads for their opponents.
But the slush fund didn’t stop in the north suburbs. Excellence Minnesota also spent north of $10,000 each on candidates for school boards in Lakeville, Prior Lake-Savage, and Duluth.
To understand the objective behind this infusion of money into local school board elections, we need only look as far as Wisconsin, where a Waukesha school board recently voted to remove the word “gender” from its harassment and discrimination policy and replace it with “sex,” a move that has LGBTQ advocates concerned — especially after the same school board banned Pride flags in its schools just a year ago.
And make no mistake: This is a national extremist movement. In Texas, Patriot Mobile PAC — a far-right political offshoot of a Christian cell phone service — poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board elections in Dallas-Fort Worth. The result was an array of book-banning policies, eliminating materials concerning gender and equity, and prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in the classroom.
Just this year in Maryland, the board of Calvert County Public Schools unanimously voted to rescind its anti-racism policy. School boards in Virginia, Arizona, and Florida have all voted to roll back initiatives that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their districts.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the good news: Of the six candidates backed by Excellence Minnesota, only one — Audette — won election earlier this month. Minnesota Parent Alliance-endorsed candidates went just 1 for 11. But only 21 of Minnesota’s 331 school districts held elections this year, and you can bet the extremists won’t be bowing out anytime soon.
The agenda is clear: By taking over school boards, far-right extremists believe they can build discriminatory anti-education policies from the ground up. There is a belief that elections are won with money, and organizations like Excellence Minnesota are trying to ensure that extremist school board candidates are backed by plenty of it. In 2025, $157,000 may not have been enough to buy Minnesota school boards, but 2026 brings a new slate of races and with it, more opportunities to try and buy local school board seats.
What once may have been innocent administrative positions are now hotly contested culture-war battles — in Minnesota and around the country — that carry the fate of the public education system in their hands.
