Plain Talk With Rob Port

Like many organizations and government entities across our region, the Fargo School Board has had to weigh how to react to an erratic president who is on a seek-and-destroy mission for anything with even a whiff of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Katie Christensen Mineer is the president of the school board. She and her fellow board members have come under fire for removing from their website four "philosophies" related to how they handle students in the LGBTQ community. Some critics have accused her and her board of capitulating to President Donald Trump. "We did this when we did because we were in the process of applying for and renewing a lot of our federal grants, which is $19.7 million," she said on Plain Talk. "And we wanted to protect those dollars." But she added that the philosophies didn't really have any bearing on how the school district conducts its business. "I believed in these statements for sure and I think some people liked seeing them there," she said, "but the actual, like, i