The Topline: Tom Emmer ends a nine-decade drought

Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed.

Homeschooling up 39% in Minnesota

A recent Washington Post investigation found that rates of homeschooling are up dramatically across the nation, accelerated in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Minnesota, 39% more kids are homeschooled now than in 2017.

Data from the Minnesota Department of Education shows that a little over 50,000 kids were homeschooled during the 2022-23 school year, with an additional 56,000 enrolled in private schools and 870,000 in public schools.

Overall, homeschooling is up about 50% nationwide, according to the Post, while private school attendance is up 7% and public schooling down 4%. The shift marks a sea change in one of the foundational pillars of society. As one conservative researcher told the Post, “the personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition. They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”

Emmer the first Minnesotan to get a vote for House Speaker in nine decades

Here’s a fun bit of Minnesota political ephemera, courtesy of professor Eric Ostermeier’s Smart Politics blog: The votes Tom Emmer received for speaker of the U.S. House last month were the first for a Minnesota lawmaker since Farmer-Labor U.S. Rep. Paul Kvale got 5 in 1933.

Nine states, including the Dakotas, have never received a single vote for speaker, Ostermeier found. The biggest vote-getter is Massachusetts, “with 5,863 cumulative votes across all speaker ballots in U.S. House history.”

More than 500 Minnesota kids await adoption

MPR News reports from a recent Department of Human Services event for current and prospective adoptive parents that more than 500 kids in the state are currently awaiting adoption.

The Star Tribune, meanwhile, reports that since 2012, 86 Minnesota children died from abuse or maltreatment at the hands of caregivers supervised by child protection services. In several cases, young children ended up dead after they were handed back to the custody of their biological parents.

Overall, Minnesota has some of the highest rates of reported mistreatment under the child protection system. That may at least partially be because Minnesota lets individual counties manage child protection cases, which isn’t the norm in most other states.

Deer hunt on track to be smallest in decades

Preliminary data from the Department of Natural Resources shows that deer license sales are running about 4% lower this year than at a similar time last year, putting us on pace for the smallest number of deer hunters in decades.

The trend is a longstanding one, with serious implications for how conservation efforts are funded. Sportsmen have previously been an important part of the coalition — joined by environmentalists — that fights for conservation dollars and regulations. By this point in the 2013 hunting season more than 330,000 licenses had already been sold. This year, by contrast, there have been 272,000 sales.

First-of-its-kind Census data sheds light on Minnesota Indigenous population

Recent data from the Census provides unprecedented detail on the diversity of Minnesota’s Indigenous population. Ojibwe are by far the most populous Native group in the state, but data now exist on groups with only one or two self-identifying members in Minnesota.

The detailed reporting is, in part, an effort to undo decades of forced suppression of Indigenous identity at the hands of federal authorities, the Washington Post reports.

Drug, booze deaths overwhelm medical examiners

The Star Tribune reports that Twin Cities medical examiners no longer automatically perform autopsies for certain people suspected of dying of natural causes because the workload from drug and alcohol autopsies is overwhelming.

In Hennepin County, for instance, fewer than 20% of autopsies involved drug or alcohol deaths in 2019. By 2022 the share had more than doubled.