Superintendent: Teachers union mailing shares blame for referendum defeat
The blame game always cranks up following a loss at the polls, whether it’s at the presidential level or a $4.3 million levy referendum for Moorhead Public Schools. The reckoning in Moorhead started out with the superintendent expressing surprise in Forum at the electorate’s rejection of what added up to a $43 million tax hike over ten years.
Superintendent Brandon Lunak said wherever he went, no one told him they were “adamantly against” the referendum.
“You were always cautiously optimistic that it would go the way that you’d like it to,” he said.
Instead, the levy failed with 51.43% or 11,090 people voting no, and 48.57% voting yes, needing a simple majority to pass.
Lunak ticked off a handful of factors that, in hindsight, led to the referendum’s loss. For one thing, many Moorhead residents had already gotten to the polls and voted before the school district got its act together.
He said he underestimated how many people voted early. The district was still trying to get the word out about the levy while those people were casting ballots.
“We’ve got to make the decision even sooner. We really have to be out in front of those people who vote early, vote absentee,” he said.
Not surprisingly, so-called “misinformation” got a share of the blame for the referendum going down to defeat. Yet Lulak also zinged another scapegoat for playing a damaging role in what he views as a disappointing outcome. None other than the teachers union.
He also cited the “postcard debacle,” where the teachers union mistakenly sent postcards to residents endorsing two school board candidates, falsely attributed to the school district.
“Some people said, ‘I didn’t vote for that because we felt the school district was endorsing candidates,’ and that, of course, is not true either,” Lunak said.
At the time, an alert Moorhead resident notified American Experiment of the union mailing, leading to pressure on the school district to provide answers.
As a neutral public entity, Moorhead Area Public Schools does not endorse or support any candidate running for the school board. This is a deeply troubling situation, and we are currently exploring legal and law enforcement options to identify and hold accountable those responsible for this fraudulent activity.
We encourage all members of the community to disregard this mailer. It does not reflect the district’s views, and its contents were neither authorized nor sanctioned by the school district.
But as American Experiment’s Bill Walsh noted, there was a big omission in the school district’s response.
It’s too bad the district didn’t name the teachers’ union as the party behind the mailer. Stay tuned – this is an evolving story.
No one really knows how big of a spoiler role, if any, the teachers union mailing played in the outcome. But one thing for sure. It clearly didn’t help.