Minnesota and North Dakota Voter's Guide

Forum Communications Co., in collaboration with the League of Women Voters of Minnesota and of North Dakota, is providing this voter guide to help keep you informed ahead of the 2024 election.

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Voter Guide

SSD #1 School Board Member District 3

School board members oversee the care, management, and control of schools. This includes hiring, firing, and overseeing superintendents, who manage the day-to-day affairs of the district. They also set levies to fund the district and create school policies.Learn more here: https://www.lwv.org/blog/voting-local-matters-why-vote-school-boardIf your candidate didn’t fill in the guide below, visit the Secretary of State’s Candidate Filing site to find contact info (https://candidates.sos.mn.gov/). If you reach out, ask candidates to complete their Vote411 Voters Guide from LWVMN!Watch a candidate forum for this race recorded on October 5, 2026.

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  • Candidate picture

    Shannon Gibney
    (NP)

Biographical Information

Why are you running for the Minneapolis school board and what are your qualifications for this position?

If you are elected, what are your priorities as a school board member?

How would you balance issues concerning school safety, discipline, and student and teacher mental wellness?

The "Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act" is the state’s mandate on how to teach reading. How should the district assess its impact on students’ reading skills across the district? Specifically, what should the indicators of the success of this reading mandate be for Minneapolis students?

Given reduced enrollment and substantial federal funding reductions in education, health, and social protections, how will you fill the funding gap, particularly for disabled and underserved students?

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I'm running to be your next District 3 Minneapolis School Board director because I believe I can offer critical leadership towards state and local government full investment in public schools. I also want to work to change the culture of the school board, and implement changes to ensure that the district is actually accountable to community.

A writer and professor, I am also a longtime district parent and Powderhorn resident – I have one child at South High School, and the other is starting at Andersen Middle School. Both kids went to Bancroft Elementary School and got an incredible social, cultural, and academic education there.

I have been an active member of Minneapolis Families for Public Schools (MFPS) for two years now.
My priorities as a board member will all center around creating more accountability between the district, the board, and the community. This means facing our ongoing structural financial imbalance head on by continuing to rebuild the gutted MPS Finance Department, executing an aggressive enrollment strategy, and creating coalitions around the state to increase per pupil funding (which hasn't increased in Minnesota for more than 20 years).
Administrators need to work with teachers and parents at each school to execute school safety policies that are enforceable, logical, and rooted in community. Insofar as the board can support this work, we should -- otherwise we should stay out of it. There may be certain school safety, discipline and teacher mental wellness policies that support teachers, families and administrators district-wide that we find we need to pursue. If that is the case, of course I would get behind them.
We should see an increase in reading, writing and comprehension testing scores and general achievement across the district as a result of the "Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act." We should also see students' interest in reading and writing improve, and their general literacy bloom. In a healthy educational literacy environment, students are constantly building community and expressing themselves through all kinds of reading and writing.
The district needs to prioritize boosting enrollment (currently, 47% of Minneapolis children do not attend MPS), create more and where appropriate multilingual Pre-K and Kindergarten sites to onboard prospective families early, and plug up transition points where we lose families (especially elementary to middle school).

Working with parents, politicians, and stakeholders at MPS and throughout the state, I will help build coalitions and power to fully fund public education at the state level.
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The League of Women Voters of Minnesota and North Dakota crafted the questions sent to the candidates in the Spring of 2024. They reached out to candidates based on contact information in their public candidate filings. Candidates with email addresses were invited and reminded with emails. Candidates with only mailing addresses were sent a letter. Candidates with phone numbers received a phone call as well.

Candidate responses are published as they responded and have not been edited, except when responses were longer than the given character limit. In those cases, the responses are truncated.

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