Less than a year after the Annunciation Church and school shooting in Minneapolis killed two children and wounded 17 others, Minnesota politicians are debating school security funding – and the state’s largest teachers’ union is weighing in.

At least two bills are moving through the Legislature, which adjourns May 18:

HF 3493 would boost funding for the Safe Schools program and make the funding available to charter schools, cooperative units, nonpublic schools and tribal contract schools.

SF 5000 would establish a $4 million pilot program to purchase AI security equipment for schools.

Both programs would be open to public and private schools, although private schools would compete for a smaller pool of funds in the pilot program, state Sen. Michael Holmstrom, R-Buffalo, said in a release.

But the presence of money for private and religious schools was enough to prompt Education Minnesota, the state’s largest teachers’ union, to submit testimony opposing the pilot program.

In testimony before the Senate Education Finance Committee last week, Holmstrom called the union “a disgusting organization.”

“They have no interest in safety for our students in this state,” he said. “In fact, they’re really angry that we’d include nonpublic students. They’re really angry that we’d include tribal contract students. I don’t understand why we are once again having this conversation that somehow, some children are not worthy of protection in this state, but the children that their union members serve are.

“This is not an organization that this committee should continue to take seriously,” he continued. “This is not an organization that anybody in the state should take seriously, and it certainly isn’t an organization that is interested at all in the welfare of the students of this state.”

Holmstrom offered an amendment to include nonpublic schools in the same per-pupil safety aid formula as public schools, rather than making them apply for limited grants, but Senate Democrats voted it down.

“The very same students who lived through the horrors of the Annunciation shooting will be disadvantaged by this bill,” he said in a release. “It’s shameful to leverage their tragedy as a political talking point and then to force them to compete for school safety aid that should be available to all students.”

Religious schools vulnerable

School security funding was a contentious issue before the Annunciation shooting, which was perpetrated by Robert “Robin” Westman, a 23-year-old man who identified as a woman.

The state Catholic Conference implored Gov. Tim Walz to approve funding for private schools after deadly school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 and Nashville, Tennessee, in 2023, but the money never came.

Last month Judicial Watch sued the state for failing to honor its request for public records from January 2022 to August 2025 “concerning proposals to extend the state’s Safe Schools funding and a proposed $50 million Building and Cyber Security Grant Program to private schools.”

The conservative watchdog group filed the request in August – one day after the Annunciation shooting – but said the state has failed to respond.

Safe Schools has helped public and charter schools with security improvements for years but has left approximately 72,000 students in 653 nonpublic schools without coverage, EWTN News reported.

Cally Proctor, an Annunciation parent, urged the Senate committee to approve the security funds for private schools.

“Schools cannot control every variable in a broken world,” she wrote in an op-ed published in the Minnesota Star Tribune. “But they can control entry systems. They can install upgraded security measures. They can expand access to student support systems. Those are not ideological gestures; they are operational decisions.

“Some argue that public dollars should not be used for nonpublic settings,” she continued. “I understand the instinct to debate the proper scope of government spending. But children’s safety is not a partisan luxury. It is a public concern. And safety has long been understood as a legitimate use of public funds.”