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GRANADA - State Representative Bjorn Olson visited the Granada-Huntley-East Chain (GHEC) School Board on Thursday to talk about an upcoming vote and the next legislative session.
Olson said this is a part of his yearly tour around his district, going to city, county and school board meetings to touch base and exchange information. While this did not occur last year, he said it was because he was on deployment from June to December of 2025 in Kuwait.
The first piece Olson discussed is the constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, which would open up more funding from the Minnesota School Trust Lands to be released to each school district in Minnesota.
"When Minnesota became a state, the way they did all the states is they would put aside a portion of each area for the school district," he said. "You had your little school, and every part of that school was owned collectively by the school trust land. As we were consolidating that land, it started to generate income for us. You’ve got forest land in the state and up north. You’ve got mining property that’s paying dividends."
Over time, Olson said this fund has been growing non-stop because they have only been able to use a small portion of it.
"Now our actuaries and individuals who know more than I knew about this fund have looked at it, and they’ve said this fund can easily sustain and maintain a higher amount that we can distribute to the students," he said. "That’s what this constitutional amendment is going to ask individuals: Should we change the constitution to say more of this trust fund money can be distributed to the students? It’s going to look like a 40 percent increase per student. It’s big. We’re talking real money."
Speaking on this, Olson said it is important that he share this information with the GHEC School Board. That way, they can share it with their constituents so they can make their informed decision on this come November.
"They’re going to have that press conference coming up here in a couple weeks," Olson said. "They’re going to have information. We’ll make sure we push it out to you all, so you can push it to your constituents."
The second piece came as a result of other educators in the house retiring, including Peggy Bennett, who ran for Governor. As long as he is elected, Olson said it is likely that he will probably be drafted onto the Education Committee this year.
"If that occurs, Representative Olson is going to desperately need your guidance on how we can continue to fight for rural students because we’re losing a lot of our rural educators on the committee, and we can’t just let education be led by different cities," Olson said.
In this vein, Olson said he will want to ramp up dialog opportunities with school districts in his state congressional district beyond the once-a-year visits.
Superintendent Doug Storbeck told Olson that he is on the Minnesota Rural Educational Association Board, so that will assist as they begin to chat regularly.
In other news:
--A change was made regarding homecoming, student council, class offices and academic clubs. Now, if a student receives a chemical violation, such as for illegal substances, their first violation will render said student ineligible to participate in that activity until the next event or for one year, whichever is longer.
-- Substitute teachers will now receive $200 per day for one to four consecutive days of teaching, and $220 for five consecutive days or more. Storbeck said they wanted to make this change as Fairmont Schools had recently raised their substitute teacher rates to this level.