This year’s Senate Expedition marked the 10th anniversary of the project. Starting in the first week of February, OWL’s Integrated Math 1 students worked in 20 groups on one guiding question: “Does the budget of the state of Minnesota match the values of the state?” On May 5, 2026, they took their findings to the Minnesota State Capitol.

Each group paired a line of the state budget with a measure of how Minnesotans are doing: health care spending vs. uninsured rates and heart attack deaths, housing support vs. homelessness, Pre-K–12 spending vs. graduation rates, MPCA funding vs. air quality, environmental spending vs. lake clarity, prison education vs. recidivism, and more. Every page opens with a real Minnesotan’s story, graphs the two data sets side by side, and ends with a clear ask for lawmakers.

The Briefing Book

From First Draft to Final

The briefing book went through seven drafts between mid-March and early May. Compare the first draft (left) with the fourth (right) to see how the students’ writing, graphs, and arguments sharpened along the way.

The Posters

Each group also designed a poster that boils its research down to a single claim.

Want to see how the project works from start to finish? The 2023 post walks through the whole journey. You can also see the briefing books from 2024, 2022, 2019, and 2018 and before.