Andi Courneya for Forest Lake School Board

Get to Know Him

Meet Andi

My wife Jennifer and I have called Lino Lakes home for 13 years. We didn’t just land here by accident — we were drawn to the STEM focus at Lino Lakes Elementary. Our two kids are there now, but our history with ISD 831 goes back to ECFE, where I first saw the kind of intentional, high-level welcoming, warm, and inclusive culture this staff embodies every single day from the top down.

I’ll say it as plainly as I did on the record at the board meeting in the summer of 2025: I love this district. What makes it isn’t the business of the school or the operations — it’s the people. Learners and educators make the system function. What we have in Forest Lake is rare in both size and scale, and I am here to protect this people-first culture.

I’ve spent my career navigating complex systems — even some that aren’t designed to talk to each other. I bring that same spirit of innovative persistence to the leadership and mentorship I’m honored to engage in. I believe in Vertical Literacy: understanding how high-level policy affects classroom and site operations all the way down. Whether I’m mentoring business students at the Carlson School or serving on the ISD 831 Policy Advisory Committee, I’m always asking: how does it end? What is the actual result for a student?

I’m not here for partisan endorsements. I’m here for the work — to be a servant to our students and to make every one of their years in this system their year. My values — Collaboration, Openness, Community, and Integrity — aren’t words on a yard sign. They’re the variables that guide every decision I make. Healthy schools build healthy communities because they build healthy individuals. It’s that simple, always has been, and that’s the whole mission.

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Background & Service

Experience

Full Stack Application Developer

2015 – Present · Current Employer

One of three engineers running a custom, multi-million dollar platform that multiple vendors evaluated and couldn't replicate. The work: translating complex business needs into software that actually ships, scales, and holds up. No two days the same, reporting near the C-Suite. LinkedIn has the rest.

Policy Advisory Committee

2025 – Present · ISD 831

Engaged committee member working to refine and shape district policies that affect the daily experience of students and staff. His priorities: ensure protections aren't compromised, improve access and opportunity, and avoid burdening administrators with policy that is either toothless or harmful. Policy is how a district communicates its expectations — and those expectations follow students out the door into the world.

Principal Selection Committee

2025 · Lino Lakes Elementary

Represented the parent community in a formal administrator search — one of the most consequential decisions a school can make. Witnessed district staff operate with a level of cohesion, shared mission, and collaborative energy that was genuinely impressive. The process reinforced exactly why this culture is worth protecting.

Undergraduate Mentor

Ongoing · Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Mentors business students navigating the intersection of business and technology — helping them de-clutter complexity and recognize their own strengths. His approach: brevity, clarity, and direction that is suggestive rather than prescriptive.

What Andi Stands For

Priorities

Every vote, every decision, every suggestion — guided by the core values that have guided Andi's career and community engagement: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Integrity. Working beyond the wish.

🎓

Educator Excellence

We must protect and respect our educators or we undermine the culture mandate the board exists to uphold: a safe and effective learning environment. Andi is a vocal and active cheerleader of teachers and staff — in words and in action.

❤️

Whole-Student Success

ISD 831's curriculum deliberately weaves academic, social, and emotional growth together — not as separate programs, but as a unified model of what it means to educate a whole person. This isn't standard practice across districts. It's a commitment worth naming, defending, and expanding. Teachers are the engine of that model. The board's job is to build and protect the culture that lets them run it at full capacity for every individual learner.

🤝

Collaboration & Pragmatism

Andi doesn't believe most challenges are zero-sum games with winners and losers. His goal is to build multiple win-win scenarios and to be a representative voice for parents, students, and the community — not for any political interest group.

💰

Fiscal Responsibility

The board sits at the interface between taxpayers and the school system. That comes with a duty to "trust but verify" — to provide transparent, strategic oversight so every dollar serves students and earns the public's confidence.

⚙️

The Modern Polymath

The future belongs to students who can move fluidly between the digital and the physical — who understand the full stack of a system, not just its surface. Andi's vision is a district that breaks down the silos between STEM and the trades, produces graduates with the technical tenacity to troubleshoot anything, and partners with local industry to make that learning real. Foundational confidence — the kind that turns consumers into creators — is the goal.

🌲

Nature as Regulator

Not every answer comes from a screen, a lesson plan, or even a human. Nature and its residents have always been the most organically-effective tool for resetting an overwhelmed mind or re-centering. Kids instinctively recognize this, but we do not tend to its therapeutic longevity to preserve it in them. Forest Lake Schools need intentional, structured opportunities for students to learn through direct interaction with and in the natural world: not as a break from academics or learning, but as a distinct modality of comprehensive growth. Clarity when things are noisy. Patience when things aren't going your way. Wonder before the question even forms. Free thought without arbitrary limitation. These aren't soft outcomes — they're the conditions that make all other learning possible and effective.

Vision for ISD 831

Grow

ISD 831 is the Twin Cities' largest school district by geography — 220 square miles, roughly 7,000 students, and a community that stretches from Forest Lake to Scandia to Lino Lakes. That scale is both an asset and a responsibility the board must take seriously.

Andi wants Forest Lake to be the district other districts look to — recognized statewide for the right reasons. That requires a directional reset from the top. Educators should feel valued, supported, and empowered. Students should feel genuinely excited to walk through the doors. That kind of culture doesn't emerge from the classroom up — it comes from the board down. A board that enables and inspires it, rather than obstructing it or pulling it toward dysfunction.

Andi's domain-specific approach to growth means addressing financial challenges, improving student well-being and outcomes, and rebuilding community trust and district distinction — each on their own terms, with their own solutions. Forest Lake Area Schools deserve leadership informed by broad, diverse experience: with the tenacity to act and think ahead, and the openness to collaborate around the kids we serve. That's the posture — from the board seat, from a place of serving.

~7,000

Students in ISD 831

220

Square Miles — Largest District in the Twin Cities

10+

School Sites Across the District

1,200+

District Employees

ANDI