How board power actually works
The Board Platform tells you what a board can vote on. The governance manual explains how a Minnesota board turns an objective into lawful action through agenda process, policy, superintendent oversight, contracts, adoptions, spending, and follow-up.
DRAFT 1.1 • BOARD PLATFORM • Audience: Minnesota school board members and district leaders
What a school board can do now
A school board does not need to wait for a statewide rewrite to govern more clearly.
Minnesota and federal law still control where they apply. Within those boundaries, a local board can require transparency, protect instructional time, establish neutral academic grading rules, review new programs for evidence and cost, and make curriculum decisions in public.
Local purpose: put learning first, make curriculum visible, and require the district to explain what a new program accomplishes before it consumes student time or public money.
Five votes a board can take
1. Curriculum transparency before adoption
Motion: The district shall make proposed major instructional units, recurring instructional materials, significant digital lesson packages, and vendor contracts reasonably available for board and public review before final adoption, subject to applicable law, student privacy, security, and legitimate copyright restrictions.
2. Make the parental curriculum-review process usable
Motion: The district shall maintain and publish a clear process for parental curriculum review and alternative instruction consistent with Minn. Stat. §120B.20, including procedures that apply to required digital lessons, slide presentations, recurring online instructional materials, and other required instructional content.
3. Grade knowledge and reasoning, not political participation
Motion: Student academic grades shall be based on knowledge, skill, evidence, reasoning, communication, and completion of legitimate academic tasks. No student shall be required for academic credit to organize for a political or social cause, affirm or renounce a contested political belief, adopt a prescribed ideological identity, or provide unnecessary sensitive personal disclosure when the intended competency can be measured without it.
4. Protect elementary instructional time
Motion: Elementary schedules shall protect substantial daily instructional time for structured reading instruction and mathematics, consistent with Minnesota law and district obligations, before the district adds new recurring instructional requirements that materially reduce those foundations.
5. Teach social studies as knowledge, evidence, and civic competence
Motion: District social studies curriculum shall provide substantial instruction in history, geography, economics, government, civic mechanics, and histories that have been omitted or insufficiently taught. Students shall examine difficult history and competing interpretations using evidence. Academic mastery shall not require adoption of a prescribed liberation methodology or participation in real-world political organizing for credit.
Five things the board will not require or grade
- A student’s agreement with a contested political, ideological, religious, or moral conclusion.
- Real-world organizing, campaigning, lobbying, or advocacy for a political or social cause.
- Unnecessary disclosure of sexuality, gender identity, religion, political beliefs, family beliefs, trauma, or similar sensitive personal information.
- Different academic standards or grading expectations because of a student’s race or political viewpoint.
- A new instructional method that materially displaces foundational learning without identifying the competency gained, evidence, time, cost, and instruction displaced.
How a new program gets approved
Before approving a substantial new curriculum, initiative, outside program, or recurring instructional mandate, require the district to answer:
- Competency: What specific knowledge or skill should improve?
- Evidence: What evidence supports the program?
- Grades: Which students are affected, and why does the content belong at those ages?
- Time: How many instructional hours will it use?
- Cost: What are the curriculum, licensing, training, staffing, and administrative costs?
- Displacement: What existing instruction gets smaller?
- Result: What will students produce or demonstrate, and when will the board review whether it worked?
For major proposals, use the full Instructional Mandate Review.
Orderly and safe classrooms are a condition of learning. Students and teachers should be able to work without persistent disruption, intimidation, or violence.
Equal academic rules apply to every student. Standards and grading should measure the same knowledge and competence without a racial or political grading key.
Parents are a child’s first educators. Schools have important educational and safety responsibilities, but the school is not the child’s doctor or political officer and should not assume a medical or ideological role that belongs outside ordinary classroom instruction.
Local first. Statewide later.
These board votes can be considered without waiting for the Legislature, so long as the district continues to comply with binding Minnesota and federal law. The broader standards-and-statutes reset is the later state track, not a prerequisite for local board action.
Five model resolutions
Each resolution is written for copying into a board packet and is also available as a Draft 1.1 PDF.
Resolution Establishing Curriculum and Instructional-Material Transparency
BE IT RESOLVED that the Board directs the district to provide reasonable advance public access to proposed major instructional units, recurring instructional materials, significant digital lesson packages, and vendor contracts before final board adoption, subject to applicable law, student privacy, security, and legitimate copyright restrictions.
The district should identify the grade levels affected, intended student competencies, major texts or media, expected student tasks, grading approach, estimated annual instructional time, and expected cost. When copyright limits redistribution, the district should provide a lawful review method. Emergency, pilot, or short-term materials may use an expedited process when delay would materially interfere with instruction, with the reason reported to the board.
Resolution Establishing a Parental Curriculum Review and Alternative-Instruction Process
BE IT RESOLVED that the Board directs the district to maintain and publish a clear process for parental curriculum review and alternative instruction consistent with Minn. Stat. §120B.20, including procedures that apply to required digital lessons, slide presentations, recurring online instructional materials, and other required instructional content.
The process should identify where a parent submits a request, who responds, how the district identifies the specific material at issue, and how any lawful alternative instruction is arranged. A parent should be able to identify a unit, lesson, text, slide deck, benchmark, project, or assignment rather than objecting to an entire subject area.
Resolution Protecting Academic Neutrality and Student Intellectual Freedom
BE IT RESOLVED that student academic grades shall be based on knowledge, skill, evidence, reasoning, communication, and completion of legitimate academic tasks. No student shall be required for academic credit to affirm or renounce a contested political, ideological, religious, moral, or identity proposition as a personal belief; to participate in real-world political organizing or advocacy; or to provide unnecessary sensitive personal disclosure when the intended competency can be measured without it.
Students may still be required to accurately describe, compare, analyze, criticize, defend, or evaluate contested ideas. The rule applies symmetrically across viewpoints.
Resolution Protecting Foundational Elementary Instructional Time
BE IT RESOLVED that elementary schedules shall protect substantial daily instructional time for structured reading instruction and mathematics, consistent with Minnesota law and district obligations, before the district adds new recurring instructional requirements that materially reduce those foundations.
Before approving a new recurring elementary program, the district should identify competency, evidence, affected grades, instructional minutes, cost, assessment, and displaced instruction. This does not eliminate science, history, geography, art, music, physical activity, play, or making.
Resolution Establishing Knowledge-Based Social Studies and Civic Instruction
BE IT RESOLVED that district social studies curriculum shall provide substantial instruction in history, geography, economics, government, civic mechanics, and histories that have been omitted or insufficiently taught. Students shall study slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, civil rights, treaties, Tribal sovereignty, Indigenous history, discrimination, reform movements, and the consequences of government policy accurately and proportionately.
Students should learn who has authority, who pays, and how public decisions are made. Academic mastery should be based on knowledge, evidence, reasoning, and civic understanding rather than required adoption of a prescribed political methodology or real-world organizing for credit.
Status: Draft framework and model language; not adopted law. Local counsel should review any final board action for district-specific legal requirements.
The Minnesota Learning Project 