There wasn’t a primary in this race, because only two people filed. Here’s who’s on the ballot:
Becca Dryden (DFL-endorsed)
Molly Chase
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.
Becca is an organizer with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools and was heavily involved in organizing her school community (to provide monitors, mutual aid, etc.) during Metro Surge. In addition to the DFL endorsement, she’s endorsed by a ton of individual elected officials. A couple of things I particularly appreciate on her website: she’s not as anti-tech as me but she’s in favor of a lot of limits and in particular barring contracts with “techno-fascist” companies. Her response to the school closure plan includes a demand that they actually call it what it is and drop the pretense that this is about “transformation.” She talks on her website about strengthening the Gender Inclusion policy, and training school staff to keep students safe from ICE.
Molly Chase is a nonprofit consultant and has served on the boards of a number of arts organizations. She’s also the mother of a first grader. I appreciate that she’s vehemently anti-tech-in-schools and brings finance experience (in both the corporate and non-profit worlds).
(It’s interesting to me that so many people are running on a “GET TECHNOLOGY OUT OF THE CLASSROOMS” platform this year — it feels like a very abrupt shift, and I’m not sure what drove it. Was it having AI forced on us from every direction? studies on social media and kids? Molly, in her Voter Guide questionnaire response, comments that “an enrollment issue that deserves more attention is parental concern about the gamification of early learning. Momentum against big tech in the classroom is building fast among families, and I believe it’s already shaping enrollment decisions in ways MPS hasn’t caught up to yet.” This may be correct.)
Molly has no endorsements from politicians, although she has a funny page where she acknowledges that one purpose of endorsements is to make sure someone isn’t a secret Republican and says, “I’m a Warren variety of Democrat. I’ve voted Dem/DFL in every election since I first qualified to vote. […] I’m not financed by a corporation or a PAC. I’m not secretly a Republican. Or MAGA. Or a book-burner. Or someone who claims to love public schools but undermines them with voucher schemes and other nonsense.” All of which is good to know. She also has a number of enthusiastic community endorsements from people who’ve worked with her on nonprofit boards and so on.
I would vote for Becca. The thing I actually found most helpful in terms of making up my mind was the LWV forum. There were some questions where Molly seemed very out of her depth; at some point she talked about how a cheap thing to change would be school hours, which … no, that’s really not cheap, that’s incredibly complicated because of transportation factors. Later in a discussion of the achievement gap, she talked about wanting to lower class sizes to 13-18 kids and talked about how we needed “the financial will to make it happen,” and that just seemed divorced from the financial realities of the Minneapolis school district, honestly.
ETA: I got an e-mail from Molly saying that she felt she’d struggled in the forum to communicate her ideas in the allotted time, and she had expanded her website to include more information on what she wants to do. I am linking to the page.
Looking at these school board races really does make me appreciate Minneapolis, though. Intra-party disagreements still matter, there are real differences among the candidates, and also: no one here is a secret Republican, no one’s trying to ban books, no one’s trying to terrorize our LGBTQ+ students or our immigrant students. I appreciate that so much.
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.
I wonder if the anti-tech in schools has anything to do with this congressional testimony. It’s where I first learned of the push against tech.
Molly kept a nonprofit all-improv theatre running for years. She’s definitely a n00b but I have absolutely no doubt she’d be up to speed and dealing staidly with reality in no time.
If I was in this district, I would vote for Molly. I love MFPS and the work they’ve done (and so does Molly, who at the city convention credited them with “radicalizing” her), but I get the distinct impression that Becca is in the race because she was conveniently adjacent to the right MFPS organizers during the surge and was willing. Molly seems more deeply committed to the boring work of the school board. I think if she’d been in the right social circle during the surge, she’d have would have easily been the MFPS candidate (and subsequently would have been more polished during the forum). I’m glad I get to vote for Shannon, but the winner of this race will represent the district where my kid’s school is (weird that district boundaries don’t line up with school attendance zones).
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