Minnesota’s local school boards have long held the power to decide how kids are taught about a variety of health education topics, including human development, nutrition, sex, child abuse prevention and other issues. That power, though, is about to shift.
New statewide standards set to phase in over the next three years will put health education benchmarks in place across all public K-12 schools. Beyond the basics, the new standards will take on topics including sexual abuse prevention.
“We need our young people to know these things,” said Steve Chapin, who teaches first aid, nutrition, sex education and human development to middle and high school students in the St. James district, two hours southwest of the Twin Cities.
“A healthy student is a better reader, and a healthy student is a better math kid,” said Chapin, who helped draft new statewide health standards meant to guide educators.
“There's so much in it that provides so much good stuff. I want this to be something that everybody grabs on to,” he added. “It's here for us.”
Consent, abuse prevention and media literacy
In 2024, with DFLers in control of the Legislature and the governor’s office, lawmakers passed a bill requiring standards to be developed. A committee formed in early 2025 spent nearly a year working on a series of drafts, the third of which was approved last year by Minnesota Education Commissioner Willie Jett.
The standards have been through several rounds of scrutiny. Public hearings were held last month. They’re now under judicial review. If adopted, they could roll out completely as soon as the 2028-29 school year.
Chapin and dozens of other educators, students and experts spent months putting together the new standards. The third commissioner-approved draft includes guidance on teaching CPR, nutrition, consent, media literacy and puberty as well as preventing abuse, pregnancy and suicide.
Rasana Mamdani, a student at St. Paul Central High School who helped craft the standards, said she was particularly excited about the language requiring teachers to help students with media literacy.
“Our lives (as students) happen on the internet, for better or for worse, and I think that because the internet is inherently a little bit fake, I think that having a really good understanding of what is real and what is not real on the internet is extremely important when it comes to young people's health,” Rasana said.
She said she was also pleased with the parts of the standards that address consent and abuse prevention education.
“I've looked at a lot of consent lessons, and they are vastly different,” she added. “Having consent lessons taught in a uniform way allows for students to all have the same definition of what consent looks like … is really important.”
One benchmark would require educators to teach kindergartners to identify the correct names for all body parts, something research indicates can help prevent abuse. Other benchmarks introduce students to concepts regarding healthy relationships, kindness and active listening skills.
“Every young person in Minnesota is going to get access to the same basic level of health information, no matter where they live, no matter who their teacher is,” said Jill Farris, a standards committee member and director for training and education at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Healthy Youth Development.
‘Government bureaucrats or local control?’
Not everyone thinks the new standards are a good idea. Rep. Peggy Bennett, R-Albert Lea, is concerned they are too “ideological” and too much of a burden on teachers.
“Comprehensive sex ed … sounds really good on the outside, but when you delve down into it, there are a lot of issues that are very much ideological and, I believe, belong in the hands of locals to decide what to teach,” Bennett told MPR News.
In a recent post online, Bennett raised concerns about health textbooks some other states have recommended that include discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation.
“These sensitive subject areas cannot be taught in a valueless void,” Bennett wrote. “Who gets to decide whose values go into your child? Government bureaucrats or local control with parental, educator and community input?”
The new standards do not contain requirements to teach gender identity or sexual orientation. Districts are allowed to choose their own health textbooks. And parents are allowed to opt their children out of health education and find alternatives.
Earlier this year, Bennett introduced legislation that would have made the K-12 health education standards, including comprehensive sex education and abuse prevention education, optional for Minnesota districts to teach. The bill did not make it out of committee.
Still, Bennett said she thought every student in Minnesota should learn abuse prevention concepts and skills. The subject is personal to her. During a recent hearing on a bill to prevent sexual grooming of children, she said she was groomed as a child by a school band teacher.
Still, she worries the standards will introduce too much of a burden to K-12 educators.
Chapin understands the concern.
“This is a lot to ask of an elementary classroom teacher, and I personally would rather see districts find funding to hire another educator that could help with this health education push. I just don't know if that's realistic in most districts,” Chapin said.
In St. James, a small district of about 1,000 students, Chapin said educators will need to be creative about implementing standards without cutting back on the active aspects of traditional physical education, but he believes it’s important enough to try.
He believes the standards leave plenty of room for local control and parental input and that parental input will remain a part of health education.
“Districts still have the potential to select curriculum that fits their community,” Chapin said, pointing to the input he seeks from families in St. James and the letters he sends to communicate what he’s doing in the classroom.
“I have huge support from parents,” Chapin said. “I have some that come in and ask some clarifying questions about identity and orientation and things like that. But other than that, we have full support.”
