September through January is the best time of year to start building relationships with your elected officials, since legislators are less busy and have fewer people contacting them. The best way to build these relationships is by being friendly and by being a useful and trustworthy source of sound information and insight. Remember, you don’t have to be a member of the legislator's political party to work together.

Here are some activities you can do to start building a relationship with your elected officials now:

• Host a school tour for your school's legislators.
  
  
• Invite your legislator to coffee in your home district. Make the meeting informal but give them a chance to get to know who you are and what you care about.
  
  
• Call or send a letter to thank your legislator for something they did in the last session.  Legislators very rarely get thanked for the good things they do.
  
  
• Attend your legislators’ Town Hall Meetings. Ask questions during the meeting and introduce yourself afterwards.
  
  
• Go to local community events in your district. Oftentimes, legislators attend these events to meet people in their district. 
  
  
• Get personally involved in local political campaigns and the activities of your political parties.

Strong personal relationships are the best way to make sure your legislators know and represent your concerns.

Submit Topics for Audit, Investigation, or Evaluation 

The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) is a professional, nonpartisan audit and evaluation office within the legislative branch of Minnesota state government. The office's principal goal is to provide the Legislature, agencies, and the public with audit and evaluation reports that are accurate, objective, timely, and useful. Through its reports, the office seeks to strengthen accountability and promote good management in government.

The office conducts three types of evaluations:

• Financial Audits are conducted on a schedule established by the Legislative Auditor and Deputy Legislative Auditor for the Financial Audit Division.
  
  
• Investigations (also called "Special Reviews") are normally pursued at the direction of the Legislative Auditor, although the Legislative Audit Commission has the authority to order an investigation. Investigations typically address allegations that public funds or other resources have been used improperly by an individual public employee or official.
  
  
• Program Evaluations are selected by the Legislative Audit Commission, a bipartisan commission with 8 members from the House of Representatives and 8 from the Senate, equally divided between the majority and minority parties, in collaboration with the Legislative Auditor.

Research-Based Best Practices

Minnesota parents and citizens are concerned about the two central Accountability questions:

• "How do we know reform efforts are working?" and
• "How do we know what we're spending the money on is working?"

We want and need to hold our elected officials accountable to "use the data to identify needs to implement strategies for improvement."  Unfortunately, education reform efforts often seem whimsical or, at the very least, not suited to Minnesota.  Examples include:

• Q Comp was proposed by Governor Pawlenty in January 2005 and approved by the State Legislature in July.  Unfortunately, there is no research-based documentation of a correlation between teacher pay and student achievement.  What's more, the Legislature failed to provide sufficient funding to cover all aspects of the Q Comp plan.  And perhaps even more appalling (in this age of accountability), there are no firm plans to evaluate the success or failure of the Q-Comp program.  At the very least a study needs to be done to benchmark student achievement at participating schools to provide the basis for a more thorough program review down the road (Parents United, Critical Review 2005).
  
  
• The "70% Solution" was originally introduced in the 2005 session (at 65%) then reemerged in January 2006 as a major initiative launched by Governor Pawlenty.  Unfortunately, "...there is no observable relationship between spending more than 65% on instruction and high student performance...." A thorough, professional evaluation of the local (statewide) impacts of proposals like these needs to be conducted before Minnesota jumps on the bandwagon of just any and every education reform effort (Parents United, The 70% Game).

The Office of the Legislative Auditor, vis à vis the Legislative Audit Commission, is a key public resource for helping answer accountability questions. For example, one of the first investigations into the local (statewide) impact of No Child Left Behind was produced by the OLA in February 2004.

Each year, the Commission selects topics for evaluation.  Topic suggestions can be submitted at any time, but the Commission's process usually starts early in the legislative session, or even before.  The OLA generally compiles a preliminary "long list" of potential topics in January, but it doesn't hurt to submit topics before then (and to see if there are legislators interested in supporting the topic!).  For more information, see How to Suggest an Audit, Investigation, or Evaluation at the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor.

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