It’s been 3½ months since Luke Hagglund resigned from the Forest Lake Area School Board, leaving it deadlocked 3-3.
Despite multiple attempts to appoint a new member, the remaining six board members have not been able to come to consensus.
How long can the school board go without appointing a seventh member?
According to state statute, any vacancy on the board “must be filled by board appointment at a regular or special meeting,” but the statute does not provide a timetable regarding when that appointment must be made. Hagglund’s term is set to expire at the end of this year.
“Generally speaking, if there’s less than two years left in the term, then an appointment can be made until the end of that term,” said Terry Morrow, general counsel for the Minnesota School Boards Association. “If there’s more than two years left in the term, then there has to be a special election for that position.”
At the board’s last meeting, on Jan. 22, the board again failed to reach a majority on three candidates — Andi Courneya, Princesa VanBuren Hansen and Paul Pease — who had each applied to fill the vacant school board seat.
School Board Chairman Curt Rebelein said he doesn’t know when or how the issue will be resolved.
“I wish I could answer that question because the state statute says we must appoint somebody,” he said. “But the state statute does not give us a timetable for a ‘must appoint.’”
Previous efforts
When Hagglund resigned on Oct. 23, Rebelein planned for the board to vote on a resolution appointing Forest Lake resident Scot Doboszenski to fill the remainder of Hagglund’s term. Hagglund told the Pioneer Press that he planned to vote on Doboszenski’s appointment himself. An attorney for Education Minnesota, however, sent a letter to Rebelein stating that the vote would be illegal. Doboszenski was not appointed.
The board voted to go out for applications for the vacant seat, and 11 people applied before the Nov. 20 deadline. The board interviewed seven candidates on Dec. 3, and five finalists were named.
But board members were unable to reach consensus during a nearly eight-hour meeting the following night. The lack of a majority vote in favor of any of the candidates meant that all of the agenda items that followed were not resolved either.
The roadblock resulted from a “special order” resolution, crafted by Rebelein, that effectively required the vacancy to be resolved before any other business could be conducted.
That meant bills were not paid, the levy was not certified, and the audit was not accepted.
The next week, the board conducted its unresolved business and agreed to proceed with three finalists: Courneya, Hansen and Pease. Board members also decided to delay the appointment until January, but neither of the three finalists received a majority vote on Jan. 22.
“Where that leaves us, I really don’t know,” Rebelein said. “I do know we still have an obligation, per statute, to appoint somebody, but without a timetable in the statute, I don’t know if there’s an increased legal risk for not doing it.”
‘Start all over’
The board is deadlocked 3-3 with Rebelein and board members Tessa Antonsen and Mark Kasel, all endorsed by the Minnesota Parents Alliance, forming one voting bloc. The MPA is a conservative group formed in 2022 to push back against K-12 initiatives that promote racial equity and support for LGBTQ students.
Board members Jill Christenson, Julie Corcoran and Gail Theisen form the other voting bloc.
Christenson said last week that she doesn’t know how the appointment of a new school board member will be resolved. “There is just a total breakdown in trust,” she said, citing the Dec. 4 meeting, which lasted until Christenson, Corcoran and Theisen finally left, breaking quorum, at 2 a.m.
“On a board, you have to be collaborative. You have to work together, you have to compromise. You have to at least have some basic levels of trust and decency and respect,” Christenson said. “But with that meeting that went until 2 in the morning, all that is gone.”
Christenson blames Rebelein for the Dec. 4 marathon meeting and subsequent breakdown in trust.
“Actions have repercussions,” she said. “I frankly don’t know how this will be resolved. He’s the chair. The buck stops with him. He needs to figure this out.”
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Superintendent Steve Massey, who announced in October that he plans to resign June 30, said he expects the board to initiate another round of applicants and “start all over again.”
“Because the statute states that they must fill the vacancy, they don’t simply declare, ‘Well, we gave it a try, and that’s as good as we can do, so we’re just going to live with the six-member board,” he said.
Massey, who has worked for the district for the past 27 years, said this is the first time he can remember a board vacancy not being filled within a few weeks of the vacancy. “In the past,” he said, “the board was able to establish a process to fill the vacancy and then proceed with filling the vacancy in a timely fashion.”
Some progress
The board has reached resolution in a few areas lately.
A disagreement over legal representation meant that two law firms used by the district for decades were excluded from a list originally proposed for legal services in 2026.
On Jan. 22, the board approved the hiring of four individual attorneys from those two firms to help handle cases related to special education: Alex Ivan of Kennedy & Graven, and Laura Tubbs Booth, Adam Frudden and Joseph Langel of Ratwik, Roszak and Maloney.
On Thursday, the board will vote on whether to hire the following attorneys and firms to provide school district legal counsel: Margaret Skelton of Ratwik, Roszak & Malony; Peter Martin and Greg Madsen of Kennedy & Graven; Beck Law Group, and Pemberton Law.
A debate over whether the Forest Lake Times or the Pioneer Press would be the district’s official newspaper of record also was resolved Jan. 22 when the board voted to approve the designation of both. The Pioneer Press will be the official school newspaper for “legal notifications concerning bids, employment matters, and anything deemed urgent by administration,” district officials said. The Forest Lake Times will be the official district newspaper for “all other matters necessitating notice.”
The board plans to undergo the Minnesota School Boards Association’s School Board Self-Evaluation, which assesses a board’s conduct and ethics, vision, structure, accountability and advocacy and communication.
“Bills are getting paid,” Rebelein said. “Routine action items are being handled. We’re still working through policies.”
Rebelein is hoping the board can move forward with another important job, making committee assignments, even if they’re still deadlocked 3-3.
“I hope that that gets settled at (Thursday’s) board meeting. I’m going to bring a proposal back to the board,” he said. “Now that I know we won’t be appointing somebody, maybe we can work through that, perhaps with some amendments and some horse trading there, to get committees assigned.”
Superintendent search
One major issue on the table is the board’s search for a new superintendent. Applications were due Dec. 3.
On Thursday night, the board will hear presentations from three search firms vying to be hired to lead the search. The firms being considered are the Minnesota School Board Association, Ray & Associates and School Exec Connect.
The board has no choice but to come to resolution regarding the hiring of a superintendent, Rebelein said.
“That one is very clear in statute that we must have a superintendent before the school year can start,” he said. “There is no wiggle room on that one, and I strongly suspect that lawsuits will be filed on Day 1 if we haven’t done that work.”
Still, he said, he has major concerns about whether that will happen.
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“Being how we split on who we can appoint as a board member, I don’t know how we’re going to come to a consensus on who we hire as a superintendent,” he said. “But, at the end of the day, all six of us want what’s best for the schools and what’s best for the district. I still honestly believe that.”
Christenson said she is worried about who would want the superintendent position given the board’s dysfunction. She said she has the same concerns about people interested in filling the board vacancy.
“I mean, literally, who wants to apply to be on the board?” she said. “Frankly, I think that is sort of (their) point. I mean, if you just make this ugly, if it’s difficult, if it’s time consuming, if it’s frustrating, you’re really only going to get people on the very edges who want to do it.”
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