ANGLE INLET, Minn. — After concerns about the future of Angle Inlet Elementary School, the last one-room schoolhouse in Minnesota, Warroad Public Schools’ Superintendent Shawn Yates said a solution to keep the schoolhouse open has been found.

The school, which is expecting four students next year between kindergarten and sixth grade, will have a new teacher.

“I think we’ve got a sort of a temporary fix that will become a long-term solution,” Yates said.

The teacher lives in the Northwest Angle and has experience at the schoolhouse as a paraprofessional. She will begin working at the school next year with a tier one license given to her by the state, Yates said. Minnesota teachers licenses have four tiers, and she will work her way up those tiers through her time at the school, Yates said.

There will be a public meeting about the school at the Northwest Angle at 6 p.m., April 11. Yates said it’s an opportunity for the ISD 690 School Board to visit the facility and discuss its future.

Keeping the school open has been a frequent topic of discussion, he said, and there are still questions about the cost related to its operation, as it only has 10 students who attend. On the other hand, Yates said it’s important the facility remains open so the young students don’t have to be bussed long distances to larger schools.

A school bus that goes up the Angle every day to collect seventh- through 12th-graders already crosses the Canada-U.S. border eight times a day.

“It’s something we have to evaluate every year,” he said. “It’s quite a distance for those kids to come down and whatnot. It also becomes cost prohibitive if we don’t have enough students.”

The school operates as traditional one-room schoolhouses do, Yates said, with one teacher giving lessons to students from kindergarten through sixth grade. There are four students enrolled this year. Without the building there, the students would have to travel an hour and a half to the nearest school and the same time back home, Yates said.

“Obviously, we want to be smart with our spending, but we also have to recognize the human element of sending a kindergartener on a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride one way,” he said. “That becomes a lot of time for little people to be on a bus. This is the best solution, we believe, for those kids.”

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Katie Walsh | (TNS) Tribune News Service

On Friday, April 5, the documentary “Girls State” premieres on Apple TV+, the much-anticipated sequel to the lauded 2020 documentary “Boys State,” also on Apple TV+. Directed by accomplished documentarians Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the film takes an anthropological approach to studying the inner workings of the weeklong political camps for American high schoolers sponsored by the American Legion. During each session the teenagers are required to create a fully working government through a series of elections, a microcosm of our own system.

While structured in the same way, with fly-on-the-wall cameras following a select few students during their experience, “Girls State” is naturally a very different film. Filmed at a Missouri university just weeks before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, women’s rights and reproductive issues are a hot-button issue for the girls, among the other teenage troubles such as social anxieties, future worries and other personal issues that are thrown into stark relief in such a setting. But once again, it’s a fascinating documentary that argues that while the kids might be alright, there are certain aspects of the system that need an overhaul.

It’s yet another fascinating film from the duo of Moss and McBaine, who have collaborated on many documentaries, which intersect at the juncture of the political and personal.

Directors and producers Amanda McBaine, left, and Jesse Moss behind the scenes of “Girls State,” premiering Friday, April 5, 2024, on Apple TV+. (Whitney Curtis/Apple TV+/TNS)

Their most recent film was last year’s “The Mission,” a complicated portrait of the young American missionary John Chau, who was killed in 2018 when he attempted to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe on North Sentinel Island. Using interviews with loved ones and John’s diaries and letters, the filmmakers offered a look at why Chau set out on such a dangerous trip, diving in headfirst to examine his complex motivation. Released by NatGeo, “The Mission” is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

McBaine has been a longtime producer for Moss, and before they collaborated as co-directors on “Boys State” and “The Mission,” she produced several films he directed including 2021’s “Mayor Pete,” a campaign trail doc about the presidential run of current Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Stream it on Prime Video.

Moss’ breakout documentary was the 2014 Sundance hit “The Overnighters” (also produced by McBaine), about a North Dakota pastor offering shelter in his church to nomadic workers arriving in his oil boomtown looking for work. Once again a complex portrait of a complicated person whose life reflected a specific political reality, “The Overnighters” is a moving, surprising film that captures this moment in time in such granular detail because Moss immersed himself in the culture of this town. Stream it on Kanopy or rent it elsewhere online.

Moss also directed all five episodes of the 2019 Netflix documentary miniseries “The Family,” following the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet, who has written about a secretive conservative Christian group known as “The Family” and their influence on American politics. It’s a chilling and sobering uncovering of one of the shadowy organizations that has an outsize influence on our country. He also directed an episode of the 2018 Netflix miniseries“Dirty Money,” which looks at scandal and corruption in business, with Moss’ episode (Season 1, Episode 2) examining payday lenders. Stream both on Netflix.

Moss has an upcoming film called “War Game” on the way, but check out “Girls State” and “Boys State” on Apple TV+, and the rest of he and McBaine’s political docs, covering a wide array of fascinating topics.

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(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

By MORGAN LEE (Associated Press)

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico election officials violated public disclosure provisions of the National Voter Registration Act by refusing to provide voter rolls to a conservative group and its public online database, a federal judge has ruled.

The opinion and order Friday from Albuquerque-based U.S. District Court Judge James Browning mostly sided with the Voter Reference Foundation and its efforts to expand a free database of registered voters so that groups and individuals can take it upon themselves to try to find potential irregularities or fraud.

Election officials in several states and privacy advocates have raised alarms about a push by several conservative groups to gain access to state voter rolls, saying the lists could find their way into the hands of malicious actors and that voters could be disenfranchised through intimidation, possibly by canceling their registrations to avoid public disclosure of their home addresses and party affiliation.

New Mexico election law bans the publication of voter registration data. It restricts the use of the data to political campaigning and noncommercial government purposes. But Browning ruled that system “severely burdens the circulation of voter data among the public” and violates federal disclosure requirements.

“The data sharing ban largely deprives individuals and entities of the ability to engage with disclosed records in such a way that facilitates identification of voter registration-related irregularities,” Browning wrote.

His ruling builds on a federal appeals court ruling in February that Maine must release its voter list to another conservative-backed group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, that’s conducting independent audits by comparing voter rolls in one state against those in another.

The Voter Reference Foundation’s VoteRef.com database so far includes information from 32 states and the District of Columbia. It is run by Gina Swoboda, an organizer of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign in Arizona who was chosen in January as chair of the Arizona Republican Party.

“We are very gratified that the court has upheld the right of the public to have meaningful access to vote rolls,” Swoboda said in a statement by email. “The intent of the public disclosure provision of the National Voter Registration Act is clear: namely, to allow the public to view the voter lists and associated list maintenance records to ensure proper voter list maintenance is being conducted. With this opinion the citizens of New Mexico can be assured of transparency in this key part of our elections process.”

Swoboda did not say how soon New Mexico voter list might be posted online. The foundation obtained New Mexico voter rolls through a vendor and first posted the records online in 2021, leading to a referral for potential prosecution. The foundation took the information offline and sued.

The New Mexico secretary of state’s office will appeal the order, said agency spokesman Alex Curtas.

Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, “will continue to do everything in her power to advocate for the protection of voters’ personal information and ultimately encourage voter participation,” Curtas said in an email.

Curtas praised portions of the judge’s order that dismissed the foundation’s allegations that New Mexico engaged in free speech violations under its restrictions on the use of voter information.

Baseless claims of widespread voter fraud largely fueled by Trump’s insistence the 2020 presidential election was stolen are part of what’s driving conservative groups’ efforts to obtain the voter rolls, leading to lawsuits seeking voter registration data in several states, including Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records has refused to hand over voter information to the Voter Reference Foundation, saying that publishing it would put every registered voter at greater risk of identity theft or misuse of their information.

Pennsylvania officials prevailed in state court, and the foundation in February sued in federal court to obtain the voter rolls, citing provisions of the National Voter Registration Act.