Authorities in central Minnesota say students aboard a school bus used the bus radio to call for help on Tuesday afternoon after the driver had a medical emergency.

It happened just after 3 p.m. in Crow Wing County. The sheriff’s office said students on the bus noticed the 74-year-old driver wasn’t following their usual route.

“One of the 30 children on board assisted by using the bus radio to request assistance,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “The driver then stopped and let the children exit the bus in a rural area” near County Road 45, a few miles south of Brainerd.

The Brainerd Dispatch reported that the man then continued driving the empty bus, leaving the children alongside the road. Authorities located the children, unharmed, about 10 minutes later. The newspaper reported that the bus and the driver were found a couple miles away.

The driver was taken to a hospital with what the sheriff’s office said was a serious medical condition.

The children were released to their parents at the scene or transported home on other buses.

Two lawsuits were filed Monday against St. Francis Area School District over its book banning policy.

The ACLU of Minnesota and Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP filed one of the two lawsuits on behalf of two parents of children in the school district to end the “illegal banning of books from the district’s school libraries and classrooms.” 

The lawsuit is in response to the district’s recent policy change that removed librarians and teachers from the book approval process and replaced them with a website called “Book Looks,” founded by Moms for Liberty, a group that has been at the forefront of the conservative movement targeting books that reference race and sexuality.

The website rates books on a scale of zero to five, with zero being “for everyone” and five being “aberrant.” St. Francis banned books with a rating of three and above, according to the ACLU. If a book is already in the library and has a rating of three or above and is challenged, policy dictates that the book must be removed.

Since the policy change, the lawsuit claims at least 46 books were removed or are in the process of being removed from St. Francis schools.

Education Minnesota-St. Francis also filed a separate lawsuit over the book ban on behalf of eight students in the district whose parents are teachers.

That lawsuit claims the district’s policy is “antithetical to the values of public education and encouraging discourse.”

Both lawsuits allege the policy violates the Minnesota Constitution and state law, saying school districts cannot discriminate against viewpoints expressed in books and that it violates the right to free speech and to receive information, as well as the right to a uniform and adequate education.

“The Book Looks rating system that is now binding upon the school district discriminates extensively based on viewpoint, particularly with regard to topics of gender, race, and religion,” the lawsuit said.

The teachers’ union says the Holocaust memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel is set to be removed after a recent complaint.

On Sunday, Book Looks announced it was ceasing operations and taking all reports down from its website.

“Our charge was always to help inform parents and it would appear that mission has been largely accomplished. We pray that publishers will take up the torch and be more transparent regarding explicit content in their books so that there will be no need for a BookLooks.org in the future,” an announcement posted to the website says.

St. Francis Area Schools says its legal team is reviewing documents from both lawsuits and determining next steps.

About 4,100 students attend the school district.

We certainly saw this coming. For years and even decades, the professionals who care for aging Minnesotans have been hollering and waving proverbial red flags about the rapidly graying baby-boomer generation; how it could overwhelm assisted-living facilities, nursing homes, and other senior-care services; and how there just won’t be enough space or workers to care for everyone. In just the last decade, the population of Americans over 65 has ballooned by a third. And in Minnesota, by 2030, a fourth of the state is predicted to be older than 65, the age when long-term care is more likely a necessity.

Knowing all this, Minnesota is ready, right, after heeding the many, many calls for action? Right?

Hardly. Instead, 12,500 caregiving positions statewide are currently vacant, and while experts determined 27,000 additional nursing-home beds would be needed by 2045 to meet the coming demand, one in three beds have disappeared since 2000. Since the pandemic, especially, nursing homes and other senior-care facilities, rather than expanding, have been closing off wings, shutting down floors, or going out of business entirely, due to a lack of public and health-insurance funding and a dearth of workers willing to care for the elderly at wages clearly not competitive enough.

“At a time where we should be ramping up services for seniors (and) access to services, we’re actually seeing the access to senior care decline,” Kari Thurlow, president and CEO of

LeadingAge Minnesota

, an advocacy nonprofit in Minneapolis, said in an exclusive interview last week with the News Tribune Editorial Board. “Especialy in rural communities (like so much of Northeastern Minnesota), it is very difficult to staff nursing homes. Then it becomes a cycle. If you’re not able to admit residents even when they need it, you’re not able to generate revenue to sustain the operations. That leads to further financial fragility. …

“It’s heartbreaking and quite frankly shouldn’t be the way that we should be treating our seniors,” Thurlow additionally said.

Her organization and the Bloomington nonprofit

Care Providers of Minnesota

together make up the

Long-Term Care Imperative

, a collaborative advocating for seniors and senior care, especially at the state Capitol in St. Paul — where there’s lots of overdue work to be done this session.

Minnesota’s elected state representatives and state senators are uniquely positioned to address the coming crisis. They’re the ones who set the rates nursing homes and other care facilities charge both Medicaid and private-paying patients. And those rates are what determine caregivers’ salaries and benefits, the services residents receive, and the number of residents served by each facility.

“But lawmakers are apathetic,” Care Providers of Minnesota charges on its prepared materials. “Despite public support, the Legislature has chosen not to invest in long-term care.”

In 2023, the Legislature did allocate $300 million to struggling facilities. However, it was one-time funding, not a long-term solution, and it has since ended. Also, new mandates from the Legislature have heaped nearly $200 million in additional costs on already struggling facilities, specifically $20 million for time and a half pay for 11 holidays for care-facility workers and $175 million for minimum-wage increases. And Gov. Tim Walz’s budget proposal this year would cut $700 million from those same facilities.

“(With the) mandates, plus the governor’s cuts, you’re going to see financial conditions worsen and you’re going to see an increased lack of access,” Care Providers of Minnesota CEO Toby Pearson said in the interview with the Editorial Board. “And it’s going to hit in rural Minnesota first, because that’s where we have more of an aging population.”

To be sure, without legislative action this session, Minnesotans can expect even more wings, floors, and entire facilities to close — all with that boom of aging baby boomers about to be in need of care in those facilities.

One pair of bipartisan measures

in the House

and

in the Senate

would modify elderly waiver rates and nursing facility reimbursement rates. Another pair of companion bills in the

House

and

Senate

would make necessary changes to Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board. Rep. Natalie Zeleznikar is a co-author of the House version of each. The Republican from Fredenberg Township, whose district includes a bit of Duluth, is a former senior-care operator and long-time advocate for the industry and the residents it serves.

Even just the introduction of legislation is reason for optimism, according to Pearson and Thurlow. But it needs to be followed by overdue action.

“We feel like the committees are listening to us,” Thurlow said. “Obviously, it’s a great thing when it’s bipartisan.”

“We have been at the table at the Legislature saying we need more money to pay workers’ wages and benefits,” said Pearson. “They have repeatedly said no. … It’s frustrating on two levels. On one level, for a long time we were trying to get people’s attention (about the coming crisis), and now it’s hard because people have heard it so much it’s hard for them to hear the actual urgency.”

That urgency isn’t new. Neither is Minnesota’s long-time lack of meaningful action in response. That demands to end. This legislative session. Now.

“Our View” editorials in the News Tribune are the opinion of the newspaper as determined by its Editorial Board. Current board members are Publisher Neal Ronquist, Editorial Page Editor Chuck Frederick, and Employee Representative Kris Vereecken.