There wasn’t a primary in this race, because only two people filed. Here’s who’s on the ballot:
Abdul Abdi (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Ben Lattimore
Some resources on the race worth looking at:
- There’s a Voter Guide with a questionnaire that each candidate responded to. One of the questions was about “rightsizing” the school budget. (I hate that particular buzzword, it makes my skin crawl, but since it’s in the question I can’t really hold it against the candidates who used it in their answer.)
- There was a LWV forum on October 5th that included all the people running for School Board Districts 1, 3, and 5. So Abdul and Ben for District 1; Shannon Gibney for District 3 (she is running unopposed); and Molly Chase and Becca Dryden for District 5.
Abdul is running for re-election and I think has been on the board for just one term. (If someone has had opponents, I can look at my old posts, but I usually don’t write about people when they’re unopposed.) In addition to serving on the school board, he’s a software architect and a father. He has been the Treasurer on the current school board.
Ben Lattimore is a Business Ed teacher. The issues he’s running on include more effective financial oversight (“It is clear MPS needs better finance and accounting processes and governance. The same district office that has been losing track of millions in special education expenses (that could have been reimbursed by the state), is saying there is no way to stabilize the district’s budget besides this school closure plan? I am not buying it” and less technology (“My primary tech-related initiatives are: (1) Transition away from ‘one-to-one’ student laptops in favor of shared laptop carts; (2) Stop the current policy of issuing iPads to students in PreK – 2nd grade; and (3) Adopt a stricter, phone-free school environment policy from bell-to-bell.”)
During the LWV forum, Ben said he was not opposed to school closings in principle but he was appalled by the plan that’s been presented; it contains no evidence and no data and is saturated in corporate jargon. His website has a long, detailed, passionate case against the plan that was presented. I will note that at one point he says, “We have ~55,000 school aged youth living in the MPS district boundaries. MPS currently enrolls ~55% of those students. Getting that number up to 78% (~43,000 students) would put MPS buildings at full capacity.” That would require 13,000 kids to move back to the Minneapolis Public Schools from charters, private schools, etc. During the Great Recession, a lot of kids did move back to MPS from private (because dropping your private school tuition and moving your kid over was an extremely easy expense to cut for many families) but I’m not sure how those numbers compare.
Ben has no endorsements and one of my concerns about candidates with no endorsements (especially when they’re running for School Board) is that they’re secret Republicans, but watching the LWV forum was very reassuring on that point. He was very clearly a DFLer.
As I mentioned on my post about the At-Large race, I generally have a pro-incumbency bias with the Minneapolis School Board because this is a terrible job, and decision-making has suffered over the years in part because of a lack of institutional memory.
I think my biggest question is whether it’s fair to blame Abdul Abdi, as Treasurer and person who’s served on the finance committee, for MPS’s worst financial fuckups in the last few years. (To name a couple: the district lost out on tens of millions of dollars of reimbursement from the state for special education expenses because they screwed up coding. They screwed up their taxes and had to pay a $5 million penalty to the IRS. Several Finance department employees were fired or forced to resign after diverting money from a health care trust fund to an investment account. This wasn’t embezzlement, to be clear, they thought that it made sense to temporarily invest that money, and they may have been correct, but this also looked shady enough that the district spent a bunch of money on a forensic audit.) The thing is, these were not errors made by the School Board; they were made by district staff. The Board does oversee stuff like whether the Finance department has adequate staff, so this reflects poorly on their past decisions, but there’s also tremendous pressure to cut “overhead” and “administrative stuff” and not all the things (teachers, counselors, etc.) that have direct contact with kids.
Fundamentally, part of why I approach school board races with a pro-incumbent bias is that it’s really easy to blame the Board for everything that went wrong and assume that replacing them will solve the problems, when in fact it removes the people who know why the stuff went wrong in the first place. I think I would vote for Abdul Abdi, but this is a hard one, because Ben Lattimore seems smart and knowledgeable, and I also like his anti-tech stance. ETA: one of my Bluesky friends lives by Abdul Abdi and says “Abdul Abdi is my neighbor, his kids all went to MPS schools, and he is against the current school transformation plans. He’s also just a really nice neighbor so I will be enthusiastically voting for him again.” (I thought that was worth adding.)
This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.
I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.
