The ISD 200 School Board met on Wednesday, Nov. 20 to discuss a number of topics ranging from the results of the second School Perceptions survey, approving the contract for a second school resource officer (SRO) for the district, a district-wide audit, and the bills from data requests from previous months.

School Perceptions Survey
Project Manager at School Perceptions Daren Sievers presented the second annual school perception survey. While last year’s numbers were the first for the district and therefore were generally compared to percentiles of other school districts, this year the survey was able to build on last year’s data to begin to see trends within the district itself.
The data, which came from parents, district staff and the students themselves from grades 4-12, posed statements asking for a 1-5 scale of agreement with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree. Sievers was clear about how to interpret even small changes within data: “When we see 2-3% change, we are excited. When we 5% change, that is significant. When you see something higher than that in the 10% range, that is exemplary.”
Sievers began with the parents. Of the 658 parents surveyed, which is a 16% response rate, respondents were mostly parents of high school students by a small margin and overwhelmingly identified as white at 86%. Parents identified school safety and security, student behavior/discipline and recruitment and retention of high-quality staff as the top three areas to focus planning efforts.
The largest areas of growth for the parents were agreement to the statements “There is a healthy culture at our school,” up 7.71%, “I am satisfied with our school’s efforts to address bullying,” up 7.59%, and “The district is heading in the right direction,” up 7.49%. Sievers also shared the statements with the largest decline, but for parents, there weren’t any. Overall, there were no categories in which parents thought worse of the district than they did in 2023.
For the 2,147 students surveyed, a 76% response rate, across all grades said that the biggest issue that made learning hard was “distracting students or distracting behaviors in my class,” at 58% for grades 4-8, and 59% for grades 9-12. While 71% of parents believed their children received the right amount of homework, perhaps unsurprising, students didn’t agree. To the statement “the homework and projects I’m assigned help me learn and are more than busywork,” only 16% of students grades 9-12 definitely agreed.
Top areas of improvement for students were to the statement “most kids at school follow the rules,” up 3.81%, “If I were bullied, I would feel comfortable talking to someone about it,” up 2.05%, and “My parents/guardians help me with school as much as they can if I ask,” up 1.10%. The largest area of decline for students was agreement to the statement “I can go online or use a device at school when I need,” where agreement was down 11.49%. That trend comes alongside the district’s unveiling of the new cell phone policy which strictly limits cell phone usage in schools. The stat illicited the quip from Chair Carrie Tate: “I think we need a definition for the students on ‘need.’”
Of the 324 staff respondents, a 56% participation rate, almost half were classroom teachers at 48% and 41% had only been with the district 3-5 years, a “rather young staff compared to some districts I work with,” said Sievers. Exactly half of staff respondents agreed with the statement, “the district’s pay practices are fair,” up 3.16% from 2023.
Areas of the highest growth for staff were to the statements “Our school’s discipline practices and policies are effective,” up 47.77%, “Our staff handles student discipline in a consistent manner,” up 31.42%, and “District administration is doing what it takes to make our district successful,” up 21.27%. The only area of decline for staff was to the statement “The school board is doing what it takes to make our district successful,” down 3.24% to just below half of respondents agreeing with the statement for a score of 2.99 out of 5.
Sievers offered the ability to parse this data further, separating out elementary and middle school students from high schoolers or staff from each building in order to better identify trends. Comparing not only changes within the district but Hastings’ percentile as compared to other districts could also provide a fuller picture.
For example, while 89% of Hastings students agreed to the statement “I feel safe at school,” the district falls at the 54th percentile for other districts surveyed by School Perceptions. While 89% of students saying they feel safe at school appears quite high, as compared to other districts, that number is closer to average.
Another point of complexity was the view of the school board itself from parents and from district staff. While teachers dropped in their confidence of the school board, at the same time parents went in the opposite direction. To the same statement posed to teachers: “the school board is doing what it takes to make our district successful,” 68% of parents agreed, a 5.31% change from 2023.
“The parents think the school board is doing the right thing. The staff not so much,” said Tate.
Overall, Sievers considered the results of the survey a glowing report: “I know districts have bounced back nicely from COVID, but not like this.” More explicitly, Sievers called the report among “the best I’ve ever given.”

SRO
The school board again heard from Hastings Police Chief Dave Wilske about the adoption of the contract for a second school resource officer. Much of the discussion surrounding SROs has had to do with the purpose of the role. While SROs are technically classified as investigators because they investigate incidents within the schools, the purpose of the role is for proactive relationship building with students and prevention of crime.
According to Wilske, after the COVID-19 Pandemic, there was an increase in calls throughout the district to the SRO. For 2024 year-to-date, at the high school there has seen 364 calls for service with 37 of those turned into case files where investigations were completed. At the middle school, there have been 223 calls for service, 23 of which resulted in cases.
The previous SRO for the district, Officer Jacob Willers, also worked with the issue of an overburdened workload prohibiting the proactive work the role is designed for: “We could just see throughout the weeks and the years the amount of workload that he had and the reactive nature of the work instead of the proactive nature and that has continued with Officer Freeman as well.”
The school board unanimously voted to approve the contract of the second SRO for the district.

District audit
Aaron Nielsen, a CPA with MMKR Certified Public Accounts presented before the board about the district’s finances. Nielsen provided the district with an unmodified or “clean” opinion on basic financial statements, the best response for the audit.
“That’s exactly what you are looking for in terms of the financial statements stating accurately the financial positions as of June 2024,” said Nielsen.
Across the board Nielsen provided ISD 200 with a clean bill of financial health.

Data requests
Director of Human Resources Cathy Moen provided the board with a summary of the data requests the district has received and is working on since the last board meeting. As promised at the previous meeting, the costs of ongoing data requests are starting to come into focus highlighting the district’s troubles with the once-mundane bureaucratic function.
Since the last board meeting, the district has received three new requests, two of which have already been completed. The costs associated with solely staff time for compiling and deduplicating data requests is $3,602. Of that total, $3,227 “was specifically related to one data request,” said Moen, underscoring the colossal data requests repeatedly levied against the district concerning such broad terms as “policy.”
The numbers provided by Moen, however, are not representative of the whole cost to the district. Per Minnesota State law, what the district is able to charge to requesters for staff time for data requests is only the lowest rate for workers, meaning that even if district workers with a higher hourly rate are working on compiling the data request, the district can only charge the requester the lowest rate per worker.
More significantly, these costs do not include legal fees for redaction. District 200 uses the law firm Kennedy and Graven as of January of this year. Their legal rates, which are not included in the amounts Moen disclosed to the board and according to Moen are not internally tracked for overall cost to the district, range from $210 per hour for associate attorneys to $250 for main attorneys.
“It's significantly more money that has been put into the legal redaction process on top of all of this. We are talking about many, many thousands of dollars’ worth of time and energy and services provided for someone to abandon the request,” said Chair Tate.
Moen has continued to be reticent to provide any estimate to the amount of legal costs associated with data requests because of how much that amount can vary request to request. Some requests do not include the names of teachers or students and therefore do not need legal redaction, while others can require extensive legal work.
For example, Moen was unable to provide any estimate of cost for the single largest data request discussed at the meeting, a request concerning the acronym “CRT” which could either refer to “critical race theory” or “culturally responsible teaching” which the requester did not clarify, meaning the district had to compile both of these terms for the data request. Upon gathering the information for the request and informing the anonymous requester of the staff cost, $6,014, again a number not representative of the total cost to the district, the request was withdrawn. Withdrawing the request means that the requester did not pay for the staff time that went into the composition of the request, nor viewed the data that they themselves forced the district to collect.
While the focus for data requests has recently been on the large anonymous data requests received by the district, new details provided by Moen showcased how even smaller data requests are going unanswered, unread, and unpaid for by the requester after being completed by the district. “We have three data requests that were completed, and the requester was notified of the cost. We are still waiting on those three to see if they are going to obtain the information,” said Moen. Staff costs associated with those three data requests are $703, $14.56, and $32.93 respectively.
Due to the deluge of data requests, in September the school board submitted a resolution to the Minnesota School Board Association (MSBA) for the delegate assembly. Submitted resolutions are topics which local school boards ask the MSBA to lobby the legislature for on their behalf. This resolution would bar anonymous data requests, forcing requests to provide their name and install protocols “to try to recover costs for requests that are abandoned or if they just never show up and review the data,” said Chair Tate.
Several of the recent data requests received the district including the request concerning the term “CRT” are from the same anonymous source.
For more information about the Nov. 20 meeting visit the district’s website at https://www.hastings.k12.mn.us/page/school-board
To watch the entire meeting visit Hastings Community TV’s YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/@HastingsCommunityTV