Voters in the Mahtomedi school district will be asked to approve two referendum questions during a special election in November.

In April, the school board set a referendum for a series of facilities improvements. Now it has voted to approve another referendum question that will ask taxpayers to increase the school district’s existing operating levy of $1,570 per student to a larger levy of $2,145 per student.

The additional $575 per pupil, which would start in the 2026-27 school year, will help maintain class sizes, sustain academic programming and strengthen financial stability, said Superintendent Barbara Duffrin.

“Like most school districts in Minnesota, we are facing challenging budget times due to multiple budget pressures and inflation,” Duffrin said.

Among the increases in costs the district is facing: health insurance premiums for staff have increased by more than 11 percent and bus transportation costs have increased by 25 percent.

Other factors: State funding has not addressed increased inflationary costs and partially funded legislative mandates put a demand on already limited funds, district officials said.

Staffing, which is about 75 percent of the district’s budget, is another budget pressure. “With the current workforce shortage, we need to remain competitive in retention and hiring,” Duffrin said.

Substitute teacher costs also have increased in both inflation and usage, she said. Finally, enrollment in the district has been generally flat, and birth rates in Washington County have decreased, she said.

Facilities improvements

The board in April approved placing a $28 million referendum question on the Nov. 4 ballot. The money would be used to fund facilities improvements that district officials say will benefit safety and security, academics, performing arts and athletics.

Mahtomedi Middle School (Courtesy of Mahtomedi Public Schools)

Among the proposed improvements are a new front entrance at Mahtomedi Middle School and other safety and security improvements.

Mahtomedi High School would get a “hallway circulation” remodel, choir and band classroom improvements, new mechanicals, a weight room addition and safety and security improvements. Athletic Field 1 would get new turf and lights.

The referendum also would pay for safety and security improvements to Wildwood and O.H. Anderson elementary schools and disability access and seating improvements at the Chautauqua Fine Arts Center, among other projects.

“Our priority is to ensure that the excellent opportunities in academics, activities, arts and athletics continue,” School Board Chairwoman Stacey Stout said Wednesday. “We want our students to achieve strong learning outcomes and are well-prepared for success after graduation.”

The tax impact will be $200 a year, or $16.66 per month, for Question 1 (operating revenue) and $182 a year, or $15.16 per month, for Question 2 (facility improvements), based on a house valued at $500,000, the average price of a home in the district, according to district estimates. If both measures are approved, property taxes on a $500,000 house would rise about $382 a year.

The district, which has about 3,200 students, serves Willernie, Mahtomedi, Dellwood, Pine Springs and portions of Hugo, Lake Elmo, Grant, Oakdale and White Bear Lake.

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Mahtomedi school referendum information sessions

Mahtomedi Public Schools officials plan to host six community referendum learning sessions this summer and fall for district residents to learn more about the two-question referendum on the Nov. 4 ballot.

The sessions will be at 5:30 p.m. at the Mahtomedi High School Media Center on July 16, Aug. 6, Sept. 9, Sept. 23, Oct. 7 and Oct. 29.

For more information, go to www.mahtomedi.k12.mn.us/elections.

The technology revolution has come to this: Should diaper-changing pads have touchscreens and artificial intelligence?

Enter the Woddle. It’s a cradle-like home diaper station with a difference: Sprouting from one of its longer edges is a smartphone-like display. But who the heck wants to deal with a screen while also contending with fecal explosions and assorted tinkles?

Ah, that is exactly the point, says Shaker Rawan, founder of Silicon Valley-based Woddle Baby.

The $300 Woddle is designed to make data input easy. A scale is built in. Urination and bowel movements are logged with a few touchscreen taps, as are feeding and sleep timers. Over time, parents build a hyper-accurate record of baby vitals that they can pull up on their smartphones and share with their pediatricians.

The Woddle has limited AI. A bot built into the Woddle’s smartphone app can take questions and, sometimes grudgingly, dispense answers. The Woddle also has an adjustable warmer, a multi-hued nightlight, a white-noise generator and lullaby and classical-music streaming, all at the tap of a button.

Woddle Baby sent the Pioneer Press a review unit, and we turned it over to a St. Paul couple with a newborn for a tryout. See their report later in this article.

A ‘failure to thrive’

Rawan was inspired by his own fatherhood to create the Woddle.

His second child experienced a “failure to thrive” situation while very young because he was unable to feed normally and therefore lost weight catastrophically. He is a “healthy little dude” now, but Rawan remembers as a technology worker a great hunger to gather data about his faltering kiddo and feed that information to the doctors.

“And so I built this kind of 3D-printed box, put some sensors in there, took a phone that I hacked for the brains to tell me if he’s, like, trending up, trending down or is he kind of stable?” Rawan said.

That was one of the first Woddle-like setups.

The touchscreen control panel for a Woddle. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The problem? Where to plug in so doctors can play along.

“The health care system, the way it works is that these systems are very old, databases,” Rawan said. “They’re not designed to really create proper trends in short bursts, meaning that, like, they don’t do trends over a week or a month. They do trends over years.”

So, Woddle Baby went about building relationships. This year, it will be working with more than two dozen health systems in the United States so that customers can opt in to share their babies’ vitals via their Woddle devices. (None are in Minnesota.)

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Meanwhile, the Woddle itself will continue to improve.

“We’ve started to introduce new functionality that wasn’t there out of the box. There had been a basic music file that would play white noise, but now you can stream lullabies and classical music,” Rawan said. “The warmer had been set to a specific temperature. Now you can adjust it.”

But Rawan cautions: “Woddle is a new category of product, (and) not something that already exists. ‘Smart Changing Pad’ does not exist and we are building it. The goal is to have devices that connect to health care and use AI to monitor a child’s health.”

Rawan believes that “parenting trends show a strong adoption for baby tracking with over 6 million families using some kind of a data tracker for their kids.”

A St. Paul couple

So, will parents go for the Woddle? We asked a St. Paul couple to try it out.

For their baby Grey three years ago, Amalia and Drake Prohofsky kept their diaper-changing scenario simple: They procured one of those rubbery, peanut-shaped Keekaroo changing pads from their neighborhood Buy Nothing group.

Baby Tavy this year got “the world’s smartest changing pad” for a time. Amalia, though nerdy to her core, was skeptical of the Woddle.

Amalia Prohofsky and three-month-old Tavy test out a Woddle in their St. Paul home. The Woddle has a built in scale, a warmer and an adjustable night light, in addition to apps to help you track diaper changes, naps and feedings. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“So as you know, my first reaction when I saw this changing pad was, ‘That’s the most ridiculous piece of baby gear I have ever seen,’” she said.

“To start with, I’ve never felt the need to track my baby’s diaper changes, and also I’m not the type of person who is going to drop $300 on a changing pad,” Amalia said. “But I was prepared to be won over by the Woddle.”

Here are some of Amalia’s thoughts:

Yay for the integrated warmer! “My first kid detested being cold and sobbed during diaper changes,” she said. “My current kid doesn’t seem to care, but it’s still such a great feature.”
The Woddle “definitely makes tracking diaper changes and weight easy,” she said. “The tiny screen is super basic; just a couple buttons while you’re already standing there and it’s done.”
The nightlight feature is nice for a nursery, “but the placement of the light is not effective for lighting up a butt for a midnight diaper change,” so you need an additional light anyway.
“We also felt that the changing pad didn’t have enough cushioning,” Amalia said. “Getting a onesie over a newborn’s head is not an easy process; I don’t want to worry about banging his head on the hard surface of the pad while I’m doing it.”
“We found the placement of the screen on the Woddle really annoying,” she said. “It’s between parent and baby — and even though it’s small, stuff catches on it. Also, my baby keeps pushing buttons on the screen. He’s 2 months old, so this is far from intentional. Often he clicks buttons we can’t unclick (no back button), and then the screen is useless until we can finish what he started (recalibrating the scale, reconnecting to the phone app, other time-consuming inconvenient things).”

Like so many gadgets and apps these days, the Woddle has AI built in. That is, users can tap to ask the phone app questions, and often get useful replies.

Tavy and his mom, Amalia Prohofsky, test out a Woddle in their St. Paul home. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

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“I was a little relieved to find that the pad itself isn’t actually AI,” Amalia said. “You need the phone app for that. The bot seems solid — reassuringly worded and accurate responses. It refused to give me the dosage info for Tylenol and directed me to talk to my child’s doctor.”

Questions the Woddle did answer: “How often is normal for a baby to poop?” “What are the two-month milestones?” “Why are the whites of his eyes blue?”

The Woddle potentially comes into its own, Amalia and Drake agree, with babies who have problems that need to be reported accurately and often to doctors.

“But for a standard healthy baby, I don’t see it having as much use because you don’t really care” as much, Drake said. He and Amalia give it a thumbs down for their average household.

“The Keekaroo died a rubbery death, so now I’m using an ancient foam thing that came out of my parents’ basement,” Amalia said.

Spring flowers are everywhere now, and with them come “Eliza and the Flower Fairies,” first in Megan McDonald’s new series of chapter books about a girl whose love for magic and fairy folk takes her on enchanting adventures in the Fairy Door Diaries series.

McDonald, who lives in California, is the beloved author of the popular Judy Moody & Stink series for older readers, the Judy Moody and Friends series for beginning readers, and the first chapter book “Bunny and Clyde.”

In “Eliza and the Flower Fairies” (Candlewick Press), there is a low door in Eliza’s bedroom that leads to the Land of the UnderStair, a secret hideout festooned with twinkling lights where Eliza keeps her favorite book, her collections of precious items, and her new diary. Best of all, the space transports her to a world of flower fairies perched on every bloom. But when Eliza tries to pick one especially beautiful flower, things go awry. Can Eliza’s friend Poppy rescue Eliza before the Demon Wind steals all the flowers? In this gentle plot, McDonald brings her flair for wordplay to villains like the witches Wolfsbane and Belladonna. It’s all enhanced by Lenny Wen’s richly colored artwork.

McDonald will introduce Eliza and her fairy friends at 1 p.m. Saturday at Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul. The program is free but registration is appreciated at redballoonbookshop.com/event.

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Literary calendar for week of May 18: ‘Weird, Sad and Silent’

Today is Sunday, June 1, the 152nd day of 2025. There are 213 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On June 1, 2008, a fire at Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed 3 acres of the studio’s property, including a vault that held as many as 175,000 irreplaceable master audio recordings from hundreds of musicians including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, Elton John and Nirvana.

Also on this date:

In 1813, the mortally wounded commander of the USS Chesapeake, Capt. James Lawrence, gave the order, “Don’t give up the ship,” during a losing battle with the British frigate HMS Shannon during the War of 1812.

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In 1916, the Senate voted 47-22 to confirm Louis Brandeis as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the first Jewish American to serve on the nation’s highest bench.

In 1943, a civilian flight from Portugal to England was shot down by German bombers during World War II, killing all 17 people aboard, including actor Leslie Howard.

In 1957, Don Bowden, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, became the first American to break the four-minute mile during a meet in Stockton, California, with a time of 3:58.7.

In 1962, former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was executed after being found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his actions during World War II.

In 1980, Cable News Network, the first 24-hour television news channel, made its debut.

In 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed an agreement to stop producing and reduce existing stockpiles of chemical weapons held by the two Cold War superpowers.

In 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shot and killed nine members of the Nepalese royal family, including his parents, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, before mortally wounding himself.

In 2009, General Motors filed for Chapter 11 reorganization, becoming the largest U.S. industrial company to enter bankruptcy protection.

In 2020, police violently broke up a protest by thousands of people in Lafayette Park across from the White House, using chemical agents, clubs and punches to send protesters fleeing; the protesters had gathered following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a week earlier. Later that day, President Donald Trump, after declaring himself “the president of law and order” and threatening to deploy the U.S. military in a speech, walked across the empty park to be photographed holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church, which had been damaged a night earlier.

Today’s Birthdays:

Singer Pat Boone is 91.
Actor Morgan Freeman is 88.
Actor Brian Cox is 79.
Actor Jonathan Pryce is 78.
Rock musician Ronnie Wood (The Rolling Stones) is 78.
Country singer-songwriter Ronnie Dunn is 72.
Actor Lisa Hartman Black is 69.
Actor Teri Polo is 56.
Model-TV personality Heidi Klum is 52.
Singer Alanis Morissette is 51.
Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile is 44.
Actor-comedian Amy Schumer is 44.
Tennis Hall of Famer Justine Henin is 43.
Comedian Nikki Glaser is 41.
Actor Zazie Beetz is 34.
Actor Tom Holland is 29.
Actor Willow Shields is 25.