Since his days on the Eden Prairie School Board, David Hann has always focused on education. Now, as his sixth year representing Eden Prairie in the State Senate winds down, Hann still has an eye toward education policy.

This year being a non-budget year for schools, Hann’s been fighting a “defensive battle” to keep policy out that would intrude on the discretion of local school boards, he said.

The push to keep control of education policy local has been a main tenet of Hann’s legislative philosophy. This session, the focus has been on encouraging his colleagues “to resist the temptation of acting as a school board.”

To that end, Hann noted he was successful in deleting a provision in an education bill that would have made it a state law that no school could deprive a student of recess time (such as when used for a disciplinary measure).

Regardless of where anyone may be on that issue, “I think it’s something that school boards certainly can handle,” he said.

Another example of something he’s resisted is comprehensive sex education standards. Provisions for those standards were included in a recently passed House education bill.

 “Again this is an issue that has been handled well by local schools,” he said about the standards. “There’s really no need to make this a state provision.”

In many cases, according to Hann, legislators should give the local school board some flexibility to make decisions for their districts. Instead, over the years, there’s been more and more of an effort to do what he described as “micromanaging.” Aside from playing defense on such policy maneuvers, this session, Hann has been working to give Intermediate District 287 more flexibility in how it handles unmanageable students. Though it may take until next year to come through, Hann is working with District 287 and the Hennepin County Home School to set up a system to take some unmanageable, often violent students from 287 and transfer them to an environment like the Hennepin County Home School.

The process

At this point in the session much of the work that occurs is going on in conference committees, where Legislators meld together the House and Senate version of what has been passed. This marks the first year Hann has been assigned to a conference committee, in this case, the one dealing with bridge survivors’ compensation.

The Senate version of the bill put an individual cap on liability, explained Hann. In the final version that is being worked out, he believes that cap will remain, along with a fund that would allow for re-imbursement of uncompensated medical expenses, he said. Hann said that legislation could be resolved by the end of this week.

The days can be long and sometimes a little hectic for Hann.“As a minority party member, you don’t always get to set the agenda,” he noted.

His work on the conference committee has been different from the typical partisan shenanigans that play out throughout the session.

There, what you have is more of a dynamic of the House versus the Senate, he said.

“It’s been a very good experience.”

He said the partisan nature of the Legislature doesn’t mean you can’t find, on certain issues “ways to work with your colleagues who are on the other side.”

But Hann is by no means disturbed by the conflicts that arise between parties.

One of the things that the public has to appreciate, especially when it comes to those in the minority party, is “our job is to hold the majority party accountable,” he said.

The partisan conflict “is not personal,” he noted.

Sometimes you have to be pretty aggressive to kind of make sure your message gets heard, he added.

“That’s the nature of the political process.”