Special Election Recap.  Both sides of the partisan aisle held serve as they retained the seats previously held by a member of their party in Monday's special election.  Washington County Commissioner Karla Bigham bested former State Representative Denny McNamara in the race to replace Dan Schoen in Senate District 54 by 530 votes, which translates to a percentage margin of about 3 3/4 percentage points.  This is a bit below former Senator Schoen's winning margin in 2016 in a district that was carried narrowly by President Trump.

On the House side, Jeremy Munson defeated Melissa Wagner by just under 20 percentage points (59.21% to 39.93%) to keep that seat in the Republican column.  Munson's winning percentage was about 7 percentage points less than former Representative Tony Cornish's level in 2016 in a district that Trump won handily.

As with every special election nationally over the past year, the numbers are sliced and diced to determine whether there is a "Trump effect" in the results.   While most races nationally have gone the way of the Democrats (or have shown a marked increase in the Democratic vote total in races they have lost), that wasn't the case here.  Recent Minnesota polls have shown that President Trump's support in rural Minnesota has not eroded to the extent it has in other parts of the country, which calls into question whether 2018 will be a "wave" election in Minnesota.  It's way too early to determine what the November races will look like up and down the ballot and we have a legislative session beginning next week that may frame the messages both parties will put before the voters.  So I'm not placing any bets one way or the other.

Here's the MinnPost article regarding Monday's special elections:  Special election results: keeping the status quo at the Minnesota Capitol

Speaking of MinnPost.  MinnPost staff has been putting together a number of great articles on education over the past few months.  Recently, reporter Erin Hinrichs wrote an interesting article that shows Minnesota is spending less on programming for gifted-and-talented students than a number of other states.  While the graphs accompanying the story are a little confusing, it's a good article.  I think one thing that isn't mentioned is that both in Minnesota and nationally, the pressure of achievement testing on school districts probably absorbs a lot of money that could be put into gifted-and-talented programs.

Here's the article:  Minnesota is less likely to offer gifted programming than other states, report shows

Good Article on "SEE Country."  A person knows they are getting old when the daughter of a contemporary is writing great articles in a publication.  Greta Kaul wrote the following piece of MinnPost on the population explosion in East Central Minnesota.  For those districts that are SEE members, this isn't really a surprise as outside of stagnant growth during the housing bust, student populations have been growing in a number of districts (and growing rapidly in some of them).  This has put a lot of pressure on voters to pass bond levies to house all of these new students.  The other angle on this that I always like to point out is that even though overall population (and by extension, numbers of students) has been growing, growth of value-intensive commercial and industrial property has not.  A lot of that has to do with the change in the economy from being based on manufacturing to being more heavily based on service industries.  While that trend may be changing a bit and East Central Minnesota has a strong and diversified economy, it is unlikely that the region will ever be the home to large "smokestack" industries, which means that the burden on homeowner taxes will remain considerable when compared to the region within the 494/694 beltway.

Kudos to Greta for this great article:  Why Central Minnesota’s population has exploded over the last few decades

Last, but not Least in Today's Wrap-Up.  The transition from the now-defunct Minnesota Board of Teaching to the newly-established Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board has not been without a few bumps.  There has been some concern expressed over the Board of Teaching's decision to tackle the responsibility of developing rules that were outlined by the 2017 legislature and handing that work product off to the new board when it began its work on January 1, 2018.  Now the new board is working to fill its Executive Director position.  Here is an article that describes the three finalists and provides some comments from stakeholders about them.

Link:  State board overseeing teacher licensure reopens its executive-director search