Tim Kiser
After years of defeated referendums, Worthington, Minnesota, finally approved much-needed funding for its public schools this week.
Good news for public school advocates flowed through Minnesota on November 6, the day after the 2019 election. Although there were no high-profile, statewide races on the ballot this year, like the closely watched contests in Kentucky, Virginia, and Mississippi, there were plenty of important ground-level decisions being made.
Chief among them were school referendum votes—a matter of basic survival for many school districts. Early morning election recaps included interviews with buoyant school superintendents, mostly from outlying or exurban districts, who expressed relief that their local funding campaigns had largely been successful.
Even in the Worthington school district in far southwestern Minnesota, residents narrowly agreed to pump more money into local schools—after six previous referendum requests failed.
This is no small feat.
Worthington is a city of just over 13,000 people, including many recent immigrants and refugees from primarily Spanish-speaking countries. For years now, it has been going through an existential crisis of sorts, as the old, Scandinavian, farmer-immigrant culture has had to make way for today’s newcomers.
In September, Michael E. Miller of The Washington Post profiled Worthington, casting it in a mostly unflattering—though not unfair—light. For the centerpiece of his story, Miller found a grumpy school bus driver to portray, whose ornery nature is not just the classic get-off-my-lawn behavior of an aging white man.
The driver, Don Brink, is a retired farmer who collects a paycheck for driving Worthington kids to school. Meanwhile, Brink has actively worked to discourage his fellow residents from supporting the numerous school referendums that have been on the ballot in recent years.
The reason for his opposition is clearly spelled out in Miller’s article: He doesn’t want to support “those” kids. Brink makes no bones about it, snidely referring to a certain Worthington neighborhood as “Little Mexico,” according to Miller’s report. It’s important to point out, as I did in a recent column, that Brink and his fellow anti-referendum folks have been helped along by education reform activist Paul Dorr.
Dorr has spent years traveling the Midwest and firing up local residents, with the goal of defeating school funding requests while undermining pluralism and public schools.
But Brink and his ilk were defeated on November 5. Worthington voters approved a $34 million levy; all but one million of that will go towards the construction of a new middle school. That school will house white, black, Latino, and Native American kids, whether they are documented or not.
On November 6, John Landgaard, Worthington’s superintendent, told Minnesota Public Radio’s Dan Gunderson that he was “relieved and happy” that his district’s referendum had finally passed. Worthington can at last move forward and begin converting their long-awaited plans into action, he noted.
Many rural and outstate regions in Minnesota voted for Trump in 2016, nearly handing him a victory in this notoriously blue state. Will that happen in 2020, too?
Even the Associated Press spun out a short piece on this story, likely because of the attention Worthington has gotten lately. But there were close to seventy other local school funding questions on ballot boxes around the state, and early results indicate that the majority of them passed.
Of course, this is not all good news. Public schools in Minnesota, and many other states, now have to pass property tax levies more and more frequently, just to cover basic operating and expansion costs.
This was documented in a 2017 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which noted that, as of 2015, twenty-nine states were providing less total school funding per student than they were in 2008.
This starvation diet has garnered protests, walkouts, and teacher strikes from Oklahoma to West Virginia, not to mention Puerto Rico and—most recently—Chicago.
However, the fact that many local school funding requests passed in 2019 could be a harbinger of change in 2020. Many rural and outstate regions in Minnesota voted for Trump in 2016, nearly handing him a victory in this notoriously blue state. Will that happen in 2020, too?
It’s too soon to tell, although recent polls show Trump trailing several potential Democratic presidential candidates. And this year’s round of mostly successful school referendum votes could indicate that the tide is shifting away from austerity measures and immigrant-blaming, and toward a collective desire to live in strong communities with vibrant public schools.