MN School District Tries To Drive Out Trump-Supporting Teacher

What happens when you are a public school teacher who displays even minor support for President Donald Trump? Activists might mount a pressure campaign in order to make you feel so uncomfortable that you resign.

That could have been the story of Brooke Zahn, a fourth grade teacher at Jeffers Pond Elementary School in Minnesota’s Prior Lake-Savage Area School District (Prior Lake), except she isn’t going anywhere.

On December 1, 2024, Zahn shared a picture that displayed support for one of the primary policy initiatives of the Trump administration: the deportation of illegal immigrants. That policy was one of the top messages of Trump’s campaign, and it is so popular, in fact, that Trump and Republicans across the board won a decisive election victory in 2024.

The picture Zahn shared showed an animated family with the words “a family that is deported together stays together,” essentially paraphrasing Trump border czar Tom Homan who, in late October during the campaign, told CBS News the Trump administration would be able to deport families together in order to avoid family separation.

“While the meme mentioned immigration, it really wasn’t about that. The whole reason I shared it was that President Trump’s agenda was not to break up families and was not to separate children from families,” Zahn told The Federalist in a phone interview.

That didn’t matter to Prior Lake, which suspended her for seven days without pay for sharing the meme in a private Facebook group, called “Prior Lake Light Hearted Conservative Group.”

In a Dec. 11 letter informing her of her suspension, Prior Lake claimed that the post “caused significant educational disruption across the District,” citing emails, calls, media inquiries, and, notably, public comments made at a school board meeting by students and parents.

The letter even said that families had inquired about removing their children from her class, which she said has not happened. The district made a “support group” to “address the harm from [the post],” which seems to be something like a microaggression group in order to emotionally cope with the meme (as far as Zahn knows, no one ever attended).

“Your decision to post this message and refusal to acknowledge any harm it caused is conduct unbecoming a teacher,” the letter states.

“There was a big push for me to feel very uncomfortable in coming back to work,” Zahn said.

“I was made to feel that the entire staff, or almost the entire staff, hated me and loathed me, and I was an embarrassment to our community and our school,” she added. “Christmas was really hard. The entire month of December was hard, emotionally. It was this huge struggle for me. I was uncomfortable shopping in our town. I would go out of town to go to the grocery store.”

But once she returned to school, she found out that much of the district’s framing was, at best, disingenuous.

“Once I got back into school and kind of got back into the rhythm, I really just took the stance of holding my head up high because I didn’t do anything wrong, and I didn’t go out of my way to apologize to people or anything like that,” Zahn said. “I just kind of was there, and I let people come to me and people treated me like they treated me before.”

But that does not appear to be for lack of trying on the part of the district.

Not only did they deceptively frame the situation, Jeffers Pond principal Patrick Glynn sent a message to all families informing them of “concerns raised about a social media post,” while not naming Zahn specifically. Though, it appears the situation was stacked against Zahn anyway, because Glynn said “I want to assure you that we remain committed to fostering a respectful, inclusive, and supportive environment for all members of our school community.”

The email certainly fueled chatter online, including by a Facebook group “Lakers for Love – A Community,” which has a post saying, “Okay, who can help me understand what’s going on at Jeffers Pond?” noting the “mysterious email,” and adding, “I’m wondering what happened and whether I should be concerned about the culture there. Don’t way[sic] to be nosy, but I have a multi-racial child there and we try to raise him to honor and respect all people.”

One commenter, inevitably, wondered whether it was about Zahn.

To make matters worse, staff members were made aware of an open investigation into Zahn before it had been concluded, something Prior Lake communications director Kristi Mussman told The Federalist was a common practice when there is a “significant disruption.”

Administrators also met with a group of high school students to “acknowledge their concerns,” Mussman said. That is bizarre, though, because Zahn is a fourth grade teacher and does not teach in a high school in the district.

Directly after that meeting, however, two of the students, who had never met Zahn, gave impassioned pleas at a subsequent school board meeting.

“A teacher meant to provide a safe and nurturing environment not only has openly said such a horrible and hurtful thing publicly, and to my knowledge, they will still have their position unless something is done,” high school senior Danny Nong said, implying Zahn should be fired. “I know many, many families within our district are disturbed and hurt by this, hurt by this news, and rightfully so. As a son of immigrants and as someone who works in tandem with organizations working against the wrongful deportation of people, I know how unjust and painful this is.”

Another senior, Jasmine DuHadway, was perturbed that Zahn had apparently “resisted taking inclusivity classes” and said that other teachers who agree with Zahn should face consequences.

Some in the district who spoke with The Federalist on the condition of anonymity suspect that those speeches were orchestrated by Dan Edwards, district executive director of academic services, Sam Ouk, district director of equity and inclusion, and Gust Abdallah, assistant principal at Prior Lake High School. Mussman claims that the speeches were not orchestrated and that district administrators were not trying to mount a pressure campaign against Zahn.

In the reprimand letter, Prior Lake said that although she shared the image in a private Facebook group, the fact that it had 876 members meant that the “intended audience, based on the name of the group, is clearly the ‘Prior Lake’ community” and that “regardless of the group’s designation as ‘private,’” Zahn “knowingly shared” the post.

She was disciplined under a school board social media policy, Policy 428, which states that “employees must be respectful and professional in all communications (by word, image or other means)” and “employees must make clear that any views expressed are the employee’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the District.”

Through a challenging web of logic, the district decided that her identification as a teacher for the district in a completely separate post supporting certain school board candidates was enough to violate the policy. That is all despite the fact that, as the Prior Lake letter admits, Zahn’s Facebook profile says “the views I share are mine & mine alone and only represent me” at the very top.

Families in Zahn’s classroom were informed that she would not be teaching and had been placed on leave.

Viewpoint Discrimination?

Zahn has a target on her back, it seems, because this is her third infraction since 2021: In September of that year, she was defending students’ rights to not have to wear masks in school, despite the district’ having a’s mandate. She got reprimanded first for encouraging parents to push back against the school boards decision to mandate masks — something which was not only never based in scientific evidence, but was also incredibly harmful for children.

The second infraction was a month later, when she refused to force students in her class to wear masks. She neither enforced the mandate nor said they could take their masks off. She was suspended.

This being her third infraction means that on a fourth, she could be fired — something that chills her free speech rights. That is how typical union dealings with districts work, and although she left the teachers’ union some years ago, Zahn was still required to work through them to advance legal proceedings. She said that the union, Education Minnesota, seemed to do a fair job telling her information she needed to know.

That same union, however, is part of the reason that there was a target on her back for sharing the meme, Zahn said. Prior to the meme, the union circulated a “pledge” to “stand up to bullies,” who it said was Trump.

Zahn publicly rebuked the pledge and told The Federalist that the message from the union was really that Trump-supporting teachers deserve to be bullied.

“I teach fourth grade, and we tell kids not to be bullies — to stand up to bullies,” Zahn said. “I know that it’s really unpopular for teachers to be not just be conservative, but allow it to be known that they’re conservative. And I know that if I speak up and say something, maybe other teachers will realize it’s okay.”

But that may not be the case for left-wing teachers and administrators in the district, and although Mussman assured The Federalist that it is not the policy or practice of the district to partake in viewpoint discrimination against conservative teachers, evidence suggests that there should be quite a few reprimands going around if that is the case.

One instance of left-wing reprimand was Prior Lake High School principal John Bezek, who posted a picture of him holding a Biden-Harris sign — another essentially anodyne political position — on social media. It is unclear if that was the reason for the reprimand, which the district confirmed, or if it was the picture of him posing next to a student who was wearing a shirt that read, “Who ate all the p*ssy?” Prior Lake’s own email content filter would not even let The Federalist inquire about that shirt directly, and it did not respond to clarify which, or if both actions resulted in discipline.

In another instance, Andrea Alice, a special education teacher who goes by her maiden name online, shared a picture of a school house with a sign that reads: “Attention: this school protected from drag queens [and] dirty books.”

The meme depicts the school house full of bullet holes, alongside an American flag with bullet holes. It is unclear if she was reprimanded, and the district did not respond to confirm.

One of the classroom doors at Hidden Oaks Middle School, another school in the district, is adorned with a “hate has no home here” sign that includes the Black Lives Matter logo and a gay pride flag. The door also says “people of quality don’t fear equality” and has a “land acknowledgement” stating “you are on Dakota/Ojibwe land.”

While Mussman said the “land acknowledgement” — a practice that distorts reality and claims that Americans are not the owners of their own land — is in line with “the District’s land acknowledgement.”

However, she also said that the district was unaware of the “hate has no home here” sign with the Black Lives Matter logo, meaning no one has been disciplined. Mussman did not respond to a follow-up inquiring if that logo violates district policy.

There are countless other examples.

For now, however, Zahn has retained a lawyer and is in early stages of planning a legal strategy, as her appeal was already denied.

“I feel like my First Amendment Right has been taken away from me online,” Zahn told The Federalist, as she deleted her accounts out of precaution, but maintains that she will continue to teach fourth grade despite the impact it has had on her and her family.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.