At the Sept 10, 2024 special meeting of the school board, members submitted a proposed resolution to the Minnesota School Board Association (MSBA) to petition the legislature to amend “Minnesota Government Data Practices Act Section 13.05 Subd. 12 to authorize the responsible authority in a school district to require a person to identify themselves by full legal name.”
The resolution is a request for MSBA to lobby state legislature on behalf of local school boards for “issues and changes they would like to see in the legislature,” said School Board Chair Carrie Tate.
Data requests have increasingly become an issue within the district in recent years after the once-bureaucratic function became an avenue for community members to express their dissatisfaction with district policies and functions. In 2022 former schoolboard member Mike Reis was censured by the board in part due to excessive data requests which eventually led to his resignation from the school board entirely. In July 2024, an anonymous data request received by the district regarding the policy committee returned over 115,000 emails in addition to other notes and printouts.
The costs associated with data requests including compiling, deduplicating, and the legal fees for redacting sensitive information are often entirely funded by the district unless the requester asks for hard copies of the information. These bills, especially given the expanded scope and frequency of requests can lead to thousands of dollars of extra fees for the district, not to mention the hours and hours of work for employees in compiling them
The district’s proposed resolution estimates that cost of compiling, deduplicating, and the legal fees for redacting the request regarding the policy committee will be “several thousand dollars and many hours of time.” The proposed resolution also mentions a separate anonymous data request that cost the district $6,000 where the requestor never showed up to view the data that they themselves requested.
The scope of these fees is especially concerning in the age of slim budgets and unfunded state mandates. According to the proposed resolution, the increased volume and frequency of requests “has the potential to bankrupt a district, should legal review/redaction be required and when the request is large enough.”
The section mentioned in the resolution, Minnesota Government Data Practices Act Section 13.05 Subd. 12, forbids government entities to “require persons to identify themselves, state a reason for, or justify a request to gain access to public government data. A person may be asked to provide certain identifying or clarifying information for the sole purpose of facilitating access to the data.”
While it is important for the public to have access to the data of public institutions, in this case, it is those public institutions that want more access to the public.

Homecoming
A letter went out to high school students and their parents on Monday, Sept. 9 detailing the changes to 2024 Hastings High School Homecoming. While the week of celebration proceeding the game, this year themed around the Olympics, remains largely unchanged, the homecoming royalty will no longer be selected by gender or paired into couples. According to the letter, “They will be presented as individuals, and a single student will receive the final crown.”
This change to the longtime tradition is not isolated to Hastings. Separating the homecoming tradition from gendered terms like “king” and “queen” to simply “royalty” or “royals” can been seen in schools across the county from high school to universities including the same change in 2017 at the University of Minnesota.
This change occurring only a week before the 2025 homecoming week is built upon a multi-year review of homecoming practices as well as research from the student council dating back to 2021. The school board at the Sept. 10 special meeting discussed not these changes themselves, but the timing and practice of implementing them as school board members “got slammed with texts and emails,” from parents over the last-minute change, said Tate.