Anoka-Hennepin students pack meeting following school board member’s threat to cut equity programs

An Anoka-Hennepin school board member’s Facebook post threatening to block the district’s budget unless it cut a list of equity programs led to an outpouring of student frustration Monday at a packed school board meeting.

The hearing followed a rally outside the district administration building that drew more than 300 students, teachers and parents.

“What these members are proposing will destroy this district,” Coon Rapids High School junior Coral Weber said at the school board meeting. “You want to propose removing learning about social justice? Is this because you do not want us to be able to stand up for ourselves like we did today?”

Valerie Holthus, president of the Anoka-Hennepin teachers union, reminded board members that anti-equity measures in Anoka-Hennepin had previously led to harm to students and expensive settlements. “We have come too far and learned too much as a community to allow that same series of events to happen again,” she said.

But the hearing also drew some who spoke in support of board member Matt Audette’s proposal to eliminate a long list of equity efforts, from the use of gendered pronouns to Minnesota’s new social studies standards.

Attorney Kofi Montzka, who testified at the Legislature last year against a proposal to add  ethnic studies to the state’s social studies standards, said the district’s current curriculum deprived Black students of agency and led white students to feel guilty and resentful.

“Black kids need to know what our ancestors have endured through slavery and Jim Crow, that they can thrive, too,” she said. “The budget, as it currently stands, has hopeless, divisive messages, and I’m thankful for the school board members for standing against them.”

A petition, a video, and a protest toolkit

Students, teachers, and district staff told Sahan Journal they could not recall another issue in Anoka-Hennepin Schools that sparked this level of student organizing and engagement.

Monday’s protest was sparked by an April 12 Facebook post from school board member Audette, who said he and two other school board members, Zach Arco and Linda Hoekman, would not vote for any budget unless the district eliminated a lengthy list of racial and gender equity measures.

In response, district staff released a document citing more than 30 state and federal laws that it said required many of its equity programs. For example, if Anoka-Hennepin Schools failed to implement the state’s newly revised social studies standards, it could imperil state funding and students’ ability to graduate.

Anoka-Hennepin high school students caught wind of the news via social media, news articles , word of mouth, and group chats. In a matter of days, students started a petition , made an online video to educate each other on the proposed budget cuts, and sent around a protest toolkit . They encouraged each other to meet at the Anoka County Government Center and to wear black. Word spread from high school to high school.

Across the district’s five high schools, student affinity groups like the Black Student Union, Gay Straight Alliance, Hmong Club, and Muslim Student Alliance interpreted Audette’s Facebook post as a direct threat. They worried the clubs that had made them feel comfortable in school would be eliminated.

Carson Johnson, a co-leader of Champlin Park High School’s Gay Straight Alliance, said he knew that many LGBTQ+ students were out in their school GSA but not at home. He worried that Audette’s proposal, which would prohibit teachers from referring students to any names or genders without parental consent, would result in outing transgender students.

“I find it pretty disturbing that that safe space could be violated,” he said.

The student affinity groups don’t even cost the district money, said Jasmin Higginbotham, leader of the Champlin Park High School Hmong Club.

“From my understanding, I believe that all these clubs come up with their own money,” she said.

Students also worried that Audette’s proposal would affect the way they were taught history. His proposal would stop the district from implementing Minnesota’s new social studies standards, which all public schools are required to put in place starting in 2026. These new standards will include ethnic studies for the first time.

Naima Farah, a Champlin Park High School senior, said her honors African American history class was “one of my favorite classes ever.” In that class, she learned about Black entrepreneurship and the wage gap between white families and Black families, she said. With Audette’s proposal, she worried those kinds of lessons might not be taught.

But a more recent history weighed on students, too. They knew the history of their own district. In 2011, six students sued the school district claiming it had failed to protect them from anti-LGBTQ harassment. That year, state designated the district as a “suicide contagion area” after nine student deaths in two years. The 2011 lawsuits resulted in a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. Then, in 2019, a transgender student sued the school district to obtain equal access to changing facilities. That lawsuit resulted in a settlement agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

At Monday’s rally, students worried that getting rid of the changes the district had made since 2011 would mean reversing progress — and could cost lives.

For Paul Scott, a senior at Champlin Park High School who organized his friends to attend the rally, the stakes were clear.

“My friends might die,” he said.

State Representatives Leigh Finke, DFL-St. Paul, and Brion Curran, DFL-White Bear Lake, both members of the Minnesota Queer Legislators Caucus, also attended the rally in support of students.

“The school board can’t just decide not to enforce state law,” Finke said. “We have local control, but we also have state laws, and those state laws keep people safe.”

Finke described Audette’s proposal as “brazenly against the law.” She said she had been speaking with the governor’s office and the Minnesota Department of Education about the need to enforce existing laws, including the Minnesota Safe and Supportive Schools Act, which provides protections against bullying, and the new social studies standards, which go into effect in 2026.

“It is not optional for trans and queer and BIPOC students to be part of the fabric of our schools,” she said.

After 300 students and parents had gathered by the Anoka County Government Center, students gathered together for a brief program. Their coordinated outfits formed a wall of black across the parking lot. Many held signs with messages like “Being racist is not hot,” “What does my identity have to do with your budget,” and “Stop trying to whitewash our history.”

Amelia Eric, the treasurer of the Coon Rapids High School Black Student Union, said that Audette’s proposal amounted to discrimination against minority students, and called for an expansion of the programs he wanted to cut.

Ishmael Kamara, a student at Blaine High School, said that the Muslim Student Association, the Black Student Union, and a men’s group at his school had helped him form a sense of family at school.

After the rally, Meng Yang, an English teacher at Champlin Park High School, called the student gathering “unprecedented.”

“What’s amazing is that what was meant to separate us has actually united us,” he said. “They’re learning more in this moment than in a month’s worth of classes.”

Following the rally, students led a short march, chanting through the suburban streets of Anoka to the Sandburg Education Center. Hundreds of students filed onto the hill outside the school board meeting room. One student held a Pride flag underneath the district’s U.S. and Minnesota flags.

“I belong!” they chanted. “You belong! We belong!”

Overflow crowd

About a third of the commenters at Monday’s school board meeting, which drew an overflow crowd, spoke in support of Audette’s proposal, while the other two-thirds opposed it.

Kendall Qualls, a former Republican Congressional candidate, said that the school district was focused on the wrong priorities. Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Tubman would be “appalled” to learn that many Black students in Anoka-Hennepin School District cannot read at grade level, he said.

Evan Whipple, a student at Champlin Park High School who had received honors earlier in the meeting for his International Baccalaureate coursework, said he attributed his academic success to participating in student clubs. As an Indigenous student, he felt different from his peers and uncertain about his identity. But then he met his school’s American Indian education adviser, and was able to start an Indigenous student club.

“These clubs gave me a chance to see who I was as a person,” he said.

After more than two hours of public comment, the school board resumed the rest of its agenda, which did not focus on the 2024-2025 budget. The board will focus on that item in a Tuesday night work session. But Kacy Deschene, the school board co-chair, brought it up toward the end of the meeting.

“We have some hard discussions ahead of us tomorrow,” she said. “Our goal up here is shared leadership, as we’ve all agreed to. Our goal should not be to create chaos.”

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