Shakopee is a suburb of the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. That’s a region that likes to pride itself on being “Midwestern nice.” However, according to a Minnesota state representative, Shakopee school board member Kristi Peterson and Superintendent Mike Redmond weren’t Midwestern nice at all. Instead, he alleges that they tried to get a single mom fired from her job for daring to call Peterson out for her rudeness. If this story is true, those two seem to be the living embodiment of Mark Twain’s statement that, “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

The Shakopee School District has seven board members, one of whom is a woman named Kristi Peterson. She seems to be the quintessential Minnesotan, a woman who was raised in, educated in, and now works in Minnesota. She has a nice smile and is an almost a compulsive volunteer.

And then there’s Superintendent Mike Redmond, who has a Jill Biden degree; that is, an Ed.D. If Ph.D.’s were bikes, Ed.D.’s would be tricycles. He too is a native Minnesotan who’s spent his entire life in the field of public education. For some reason, he was willing to team with Peterson as they tried to destroy a woman’s life and family.

So what did the woman, known only as Tara, do to put her in Peterson’s and Redmond’s crosshairs? According to State Representative Erik Mortensen, who posted about the incident on Facebook, Tara, having attended a public board meeting, then posted a public comment on social media saying that Peterson was rude when a mother was speaking about trying to mask a child with a disability.

According to Rep. Mortensen in his own Facebook post, what happened next was nothing less than vicious:

...what Kristi and Superintendent Mike Redmond did the next day in response to this harmless post (picture below) is appalling! In retaliation of this pictured post they called the employer of the poster and strong-armed the employer to PUNISH the single mom of 2 for her criticism of Board Chair Kristi Peterson.

That’s an abuse of power and straight up bullying!! Both Superintendent Mike Redmond and Board Chari, Kristi Peterson should resign effective immediately.

[snip]

This poster, Tara, has since been put on a 2 week unpaid suspension and she believes she’s going to be fired for a simple Facebook post. So I’ve started a GoFundMe account for her. Please pitch in if you can.

Mortensen is correct—assuming his version is the entire story and there’s no back story saying, for example, that Tara sent dead rats to Peterson’s home—what Peterson and Redmond did was entirely inappropriate and, frankly, actionable.

If you’re wondering why a story out of a small Midwestern town deserves this kind of attention, it’s because it seems perfectly representative of what’s going on in school districts across America. Shakopee’s district, like so many in America, is desperate to assert its leftist bona fides. It’s got its ritual “Diversity and Opportunity” statement on its website and says it’s been working with Equity Alliance MN. Equity Alliance, in turn, is a leftist organization that charges districts $80,000 to investigate “racial inequalities” under a Critical Race Theory rubric.

In a sea of White Faces, the leftist school district has a Black man whose job is “equity.” I don’t care if he’s the best, most wonderful employee in the world. He looks like tokenism.

Ironically enough, the school also has an absolute “Bullying Prohibition.” If Mortensen’s report is true, both Peterson and Redmond forgot to acquaint themselves with that aspect of their school district.

There’s a saying that academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. In terms of Peterson’s ego (assuming the story is accurate), that’s certainly true. Unless Tara and her children starve to death in Victorian fashion, no one will die because of Peterson’s and Redmond’s (alleged) choices.

However, as we look at the transformations that school board activists are forcing on American education, the stakes could not be higher. Conservatives with American values (the Constitution, the rule of law, strong borders, individual liberty, equality not equity) need to get themselves on boards and need to do it soon.

Otherwise, our schools will all be like Shakopee’s: Thin-skinned people who are either hard-left or weak-minded and school districts that sink into racial division and academic decay.

Image: Tara’s message about Peterson. Facebook screen grab.

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