Boards delay joint session

Joint meetings of the Carlton and Wrenshall school boards that had been scheduled to commence the first Monday in March have been put on hold.

Instead, the smaller consolidation committee will meet at 5 p.m. Monday in the boardroom at Carlton High School. The committee, or consolidation team, meetings are open to the public, and feature superintendents as well as board chairs for both districts.

Carlton and Wrenshall districts are moving toward consolidation into a single district as soon as the 2025-26 school year. School boards from both schools voted earlier this year to pursue consolidation. The districts have both been victim to decreasing student enrollments and the state funding shortages that result from drops in student populations.

“The Carlton/Wrenshall consolidation team has identified some issues we need to address prior to the first session of the joint boards,” said Wrenshall board chair Mary Carlson in a statement to her board. “As such, we are postponing our first joint session until April.”

The two schools are competing and performing as a cooperative across all extracurricular activities for the first time in 2023-24.

The boards last met together in December, when they used a joint meeting to tour the three school facilities in use across the districts, the Wrenshall school, Carlton’s secondary school, and South Terrace Elementary School.

~Brady Slater