St. Louis Park school board offers a model, but the Legislature should do more to ensure such requests aren’t based solely on avoiding instruction that represents protected groups.

By Catherine Ahlin-Halverson

March 24, 2024 at 11:00PM

"In response to these calls to ban books and silence the voices of the LGBTQ+ community, the St. Louis Park school board has come up with a model policy that should become a road map for school boards throughout Minnesota," the writer says. (Rick Bowmer/The Associated Press)

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School boards in Minnesota and across the country face rising pressure from parents objecting to school policies that support LGBTQ+ community members. This pressure includes requests to ban books and Pride flags, and broad demands to “opt out” of materials by or about members of the LGBTQ+ community.

This pressure has been felt locally, including in St. Louis Park.

In response to these calls to ban books and silence the voices of the LGBTQ+ community, the St. Louis Park school board has come up with a model policy that should become a road map for school boards throughout Minnesota.

In recent months, in the name of religion, a group of parents in St. Louis Park attempted to use Minnesota’s “opt-out law” to excuse their children from reading books, participating in class discussions and learning from materials referencing the LGBTQ+ community. This law allows parents a limited right to, for any reason, remove their children from specific instruction and make reasonable arrangements for alternative instruction.

In a Feb. 28 resolution, the St. Louis Park school board thoughtfully balanced parents’ requests and Minnesota’s legal requirements. This resolution confirms that students can be excused from specific school materials at their parents’ request. Meanwhile, it also upholds the Minnesota Human Rights Act’s (MHRA) obligation not to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and the district’s “core values of creating safe and inclusive learning and working environments in [its] schools.”

St. Louis Park is not the only school district to receive pressure from parents regarding LGBTQ+ representation at school. In September 2023, Ham Lake parents objected to their school’s use of books with LGBTQ+ characters. In January, the Worthington school board upheld its superintendent’s direction that a teacher must remove Pride and Puerto Rican flags from his classroom walls.

In responding to requests like these, school districts must be careful not to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and employees under the MHRA. The state law prohibits discrimination in education based on protected class, including race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, age, marital status, familial status, status with regard to public assistance and sexual orientation.

The St. Louis Park resolution meets this high bar by allowing parents to review instructional materials such as textbooks and related core materials developed for educational purposes to decide whether they want to remove their child from a lesson. The resolution clarifies that instructional materials do not include teacher lesson plans, notes, classroom discussions, seat assignments, classroom or school décor, library materials not being used for instruction, classroom book collections, and the demographics/identity of school staff, students and families.

Blanket “opt outs” are disallowed, including content relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. Instead, the school board requires parents to ask to review specific instructional materials and seek alternative instruction for lessons within those reviewed materials.

The school board’s resolution means that while a parent may seek to review a textbook and remove their child from a specific lesson for any reason, the parent cannot seek to “opt out” a child from all books in a library or banners on a classroom wall that represent a community or identity offensive to the parent, especially a community or identity protected by the MHRA.

Every family in the St. Louis Park school district — including the families pushing for their children to be excused from interacting with any LGBTQ+ representation in books or other content — benefit from St. Louis Park’s recognition of MHRA protections and the decision that no one can object to representation of a protected class in anything other than specifically identified instructional materials.

They benefit because no St. Louis Park student has to worry that a family can ban books or limit classroom discussion about her race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, age, marital status, familial status, status with regard to public assistance, or sexual orientation.

The St. Louis Park school board is a model for school districts under current Minnesota law. And the board wants to go further in ensuring students’ rights: It called on the Minnesota Legislature and Gov. Tim Walz to adopt legislation that would clearly limit the “opt out” law so parents could not remove their children from school instruction based solely on the representation of protected classes in instructional materials.

This change would advance the pursuit of equal protections and equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Minnesotans.

Minnesota legislation should change the “opt-out” law to further protect the LGBTQ+ community and other protected classes. Until then, St. Louis Park’s carefully considered application of Minnesota’s legal requirements should be a model for other districts facing similar pressure from parents.

Catherine Ahlin-Halverson is a staff attorney for the ACLU of Minnesota. Previous Star Tribune Opinion coverage of this topic included “St. Louis Park case affirms: Religious freedom is for all Minnesotans,” Feb. 27.