Finance
Minnesota voters back half of school finance levies, reelect most board incumbents
About half the Minnesota districts that asked voters for more money on Election Day got it.
In Northfield, the school district’s $121 million three-question funding request saw full approval, meaning school leaders will be able to move forward with building a new gymnasium, classroom addition and geothermal heating and cooling system.
Minneapolis voters OK’d a $20 million technology spending levy for the financially strapped public school district.
Voters across the state were willing to renew existing levies for building maintenance and upgrades, and for technology. It was a different story, though, when they were asked to pay more for day-to-day operating costs.
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Thirty districts this year asked voters to approve levies for daily costs, including 28 that put questions on ballots this week. Only 40 percent of those requests were OK’d — one of the lowest approval rates since 1980.
“One of the things that really stuck out to us is people were willing to vote to maintain. They weren’t interested in increasing their local property taxes,” said Kirk Schneidawind, executive director of the Minnesota School Boards Association.
Schneidawind said he believes that’s a reflection of how Minnesotans feel about the economy.
“The general default for many voters is, ‘I’m going to vote no if I don’t understand it or don’t know about it,’” Schneidawind said. “People, in their mind, the economy, prices of things and costs of things have gone up. And inflation, even though it’s been coming down, it’s still impacting their pocketbook. And I think perhaps folks saw that or felt that and weren’t supportive of new increases for our public schools.”
Statewide, 45 districts put some sort of financial question on their local ballots this year with 51 percent approved.
School boards
More than 300 Minnesota school districts sought to fill open school board seats this election. In places where incumbents were on the ballot, voters elected to keep them at a rate of nearly 87 percent.
While this year’s competition wasn’t as intense as in recent years, many districts had multiple candidates on their ballots. Behind those candidates were organizations spending time and money on training and endorsements.
The Minnesota Parents Alliance, a conservative organization launched in 2022, endorsed nearly 130 candidates in 56 Minnesota districts in its voter guide. Teacher unions backed nearly 100 candidates in 33 districts. The School Board Integrity Project, a progressive organization launched last year, endorsed 45 candidates in 27 districts.
In the 29 districts where there were candidates from both the Minnesota Parents Alliance and the teachers union or School Board Integrity Project facing off, 31 Minnesota Parents Alliance-endorsed candidates won and 50 union or School Board Integrity Project-endorsed candidates won.
Education Minnesota president Denise Specht claimed victory in an emailed statement, saying union-backed candidates won nearly 75 percent of their races.
Leaders of the Minnesota Parents Alliance also focused on wins, pointing to wins in 56 percent of races with endorsed candidates and seats gained in 47 school boards and majorities gained on boards in Elk River, Lakeville, Forest Lake and Prior Lake, MPA leader Cristine Trooien said in a statement.
Here are the results in a few districts MPR News tracked on Tuesday.
Prior Lake-Savage
In 2022, the open seats on this suburban district’s school board were hotly contested by opposing slates of candidates who staked out sides in a tug of war that involved organized parent groups, teacher unions, networks of political donors and families worried school equity efforts were in jeopardy.
This year there were six candidates running for three open seats. The candidates — just one of whom was seeking reelection — were divided into those backed by the local teacher union versus those who received endorsements from the Minnesota Parents Alliance.
Two of the Minnesota Parents Alliance candidates won, backed by a local parents group that sank at least $1,800 in the election. Just one union-endorsed candidate won, meaning this school board, come January, will be led by a majority of MPA-endorsed candidates.
Voters in this district also rejected the school system’s request for a levy to help pay for daily operations.
Brainerd
In Brainerd, there were seven candidates running for three seats. Only one didn’t secure endorsements from either the Minnesota Parents Alliance or the local teacher union. All union-endorsed candidates were incumbents. Of those, two won reelection. The third open seat was filled by a Minnesota Parents Alliance-backed candidate.
In the 2022 election cycle, Brainerd saw a frenzy of school board campaign spending with candidates racking up nearly $80,000 in disbursements on advertising, mailers and signs. This year, the spending has come way down and is now closer to $11,000.
The three election winners will oversee a district serving at least 6,000 students in north-central Minnesota.
Fergus Falls
Nine candidates were running to fill three seats in this west-central Minnesota district where nearly 3,000 students attend school. Three union-endorsed candidates, supported by about $2500 in union campaign spending, beat out three Minnesota Parents Alliance-endorsed candidates.
Lakeville
In Lakeville, nine candidates vied to fill three seats on a board overseeing district-level decisions for more than 12,000 students in this Twin Cities outer ring suburb.
Campaign finance reports from August and September show close to $20,000 spent on the board elections, mostly from the teachers union. The six endorsed candidates were backed by either the local teachers’ union or the Minnesota Parents Alliance, none of whom are incumbents.
One union candidate and two Minnesota Parents Alliance candidates won, meaning alliance-backed members will hold a board majority come January.
Osseo
In the Twin Cities suburban district of Osseo, there were six candidates running to fill three open board seats. None of the candidates were incumbents. They raised at least $9,000 between them for websites, business cards, flyers, T-shirts, signs and other campaign spending.
This district’s current board has been the site of clashes over policies regarding gender inclusion, instruction and LGBTQ+ pride flags.
On Tuesday voters backed two union and School Board Integrity Project candidates and one Minnesota Parents Alliance candidate.
St. Francis
In St. Francis, in the northern Twin Cities exurbs, there were 10 candidates running for four open school board seats. The Minnesota Parents Alliance and local teachers union each endorsed four candidates, none of whom was an incumbent.
The winners were evenly split — two union-endorsed candidates and two Parents Alliance-endorsed candidates won.
Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan
This metro-area district saw two candidates competing in a special election to fill a single school board seat. The local teachers union spent more than $90,000 to support their endorsed candidate, who won the seat.
For a company navigating one of the most consequential transformations in its history, financial clarity is not optional—it is essential. Natura &Co, the Brazilian personal care and cosmetics group behind iconic brands such as Natura and Avon, has long been committed to combining purpose-driven business with commercial performance. After a period of strategic portfolio reshaping, including the divestiture of its Aesop and The Body Shop holdings, the company is now sharpening its focus on profitability and operational excellence across Latin America and global markets.
At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.
That’s now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with SAP and Numen, a global SAP partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.
From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence
The project’s goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, SAP’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in SAP S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.
The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.
“The implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in SAP S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rogério Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from SAP S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the SAP AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors—discriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.”
A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption
Natura &Co’s application derived from a prototype SAP partner Numen created in early 2024 at SAP’s global Hack2Build on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of SAP Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and SAP. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.
Numen brought deep SAP implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of SAP S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on SAP Business AI Platform. The technology stack—SAP S/4HANA, SAP AI Core, SAP Fiori, and SAP Business Technology Platform—provided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.
“SAP enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,” said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.
The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.
A blueprint for other businesses
The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running SAP S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.
The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co’s Equador operations.
Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.
“The success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,” Dias Garcia noted. “We are now ready to move forward—deepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.”
For SAP customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
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