Daily Reformer: Minneapolis Schools accounting error cost district $4.1 million

Good morning, Reformers. 

Melissa Whitler is out today with another bombshell report about financial mismanagement in Minneapolis Public Schools. 

The district lost out on $4.1 million in state and federal special education aid during the 2025-26 school year due to an accounting error, which Melissa learned about through a public records request. 

The accounting error is the third, multi-million dollar blunder reported by the Reformer since the abrupt departure of the district’s three top finance leaders in January. 

The error could have been even worse. The Minnesota Department of Education notified the district it had underreported its special education expenses by at least $25 million in November last year, according to district emails. The underreporting was so significant that the district would have violated a federal regulation. 

Read Melissa’s story. 

By Madison McVan

A court filing Tuesday morning in the federal case against 15 anti-ICE protesters contained more than 200 pages of undercover agents’ notes and photos from the Department of Homeland Security’s widespread surveillance operation during Operation Metro Surge. 

The documents reveal new information about groups and events targeted by the agents — and contain dozens of photos of cars of people who trailed immigration agents in their cars.

The files further underscore the feds’ use of intelligence tactics — including the use of undercover agents and electronic surveillance — as a frustrated Trump administration sought to tamp down the widespread resistance to the immigration crackdown, which wound up ensnaring many legal residents and led to the killings of two Americans. 

President Donald Trump and Gov. Tim Walz ordered flags flown at half-staff to honor country superstar and philanthropist Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday. She was 80. 

The daughter of a sharecropper and farmer, Parton asked that she be buried in plush cotton, our Tennessee colleague reported. 

“After a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest,” her nephew Bryan Seaver said. 

I’m a big Dolly fan, like most everybody else. Her wit and positivity made her one of the most universally beloved celebrities. It’s impossible not to smile while watching her charm Johnny Carson with a song she wrote for him or admire her grace in responding to questions from Barbara Walters that most people would find insulting.  

She largely avoided talking about politics, which helped her maintain broad appeal. As more than one remembrance noted, Parton is one of the few things Americans can all agree on in our deeply divided times. 

Like many celebrities, she faced criticism for not using her platform to explicitly endorse this or condemn that. That was her right and by remaining outside the political fray, she reached a larger audience with her songs celebrating love, honoring her hardscrabble roots and embracing the joys and heartaches of life. This is perhaps best encapsulated in her song “Coat of Many Colors.” 

Even while she eschewed partisanship, she did not refrain from extolling the dignity of all people: the poor, the LGBT community, immigrants. I was perusing her catalogue this morning, and was struck by her cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” that appears on her 1980 album “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs”  focused on working class themes. The song is about a plane crash in 1948 that killed 32 people, including 28 farm workers who were being deported from California. The press largely referred to them merely as deportees. 

The lyrics go: 

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

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