The Legislature should lock this money away in a dedicated account.

Last month, Minnesota learned it will receive at least $214 million, and possibly as much as $307 million, from a national settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. It is the largest Big Tech settlement in history, resolving claims that Meta deliberately built addictive features into its platforms, knew they were harming young people, and misled the public about it.

The settlement requires changes to the platforms too, among them stronger safeguards against content promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. Of all the harms this case was about, suicide is the most devastating. How Minnesota spends the money must reflect that.

Those changes will take years to prove themselves. The money will arrive in installments over the coming decade, and every decision about where it goes will be made here at home. That is where Minnesota’s own record should worry us.

Following Minnesota’s $6.1 billion settlement with Big Tobacco in 1998, the state created endowments from the settlement proceeds, including one dedicated to tobacco prevention and local public health. In 2003, facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, the state eliminated those endowments and transferred a little more than $1 billion to the general fund. Money meant to protect public health became a budget patch. Never again.

This settlement exists because children were harmed. As the CEO of SAVE, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, I hear from, and work with, parents whose children were pulled by algorithms into content promoting self-harm, eating disorders and hopelessness. Suicide remains a leading cause of death for young people in Minnesota. Every dollar of this money must go to the harms this lawsuit was about in the first place: our children’s mental health and preventing suicide.

That requires three commitments, made now.

First, put digital safety tools in the hands of schools, parents, children and educators. That means a digital well-being and media-literacy curriculum in every classroom, training that helps parents recognize warning signs, and resources educators can use when a struggling student walks through the door. AI chatbots and companion apps make this more urgent by the month.

Second, fund the mandates. Starting this school year, every Minnesota district must provide mental-health instruction, including suicide prevention, to students in grades four through 12. It is the right requirement. But it arrived with guidance documents, not dollars. The same is true of the cellphone policies every district was required to adopt, and the suicide-prevention training every teacher must complete to renew a license. Meanwhile, school counselors, social workers and psychologists remain scarce, especially in rural Minnesota. This settlement can finally pay for what the state has already asked schools to do.

Third, make suicide prevention a permanent fixture in every Minnesota school. Provide gatekeeper training so teachers, coaches and students recognize warning signs, crisis-response plans that work, postvention support after a loss and sustained promotion of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

One more thing this settlement is not: a substitute for law. Congress still needs to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. Minnesota still needs a Kids Code and laws that keep AI chatbots from engaging with children at all. Meta and its Big Tech peers are salivating at the prospect that voluntary, industry-backed safety ratings will give them cover while they spend millions to defeat meaningful legislation. A settlement is what a company pays after children have been hurt. A law is what stops the next company before they are.

But the money comes with a catch. Under Minnesota law, settlement proceeds are deposited into the state’s general fund until the Legislature directs them somewhere else. Someday a legislator staring at a deficit is going to look at hundreds of millions in Meta money sitting in the general fund and see a way out of a completely different problem. The law may allow it. That does not make it right.

I have spent more than 30 years in and around government and politics as a staffer, a chief of staff and a lobbyist. I know exactly how this goes. The money arrives. The press conferences end. A deficit shows up, as deficits do, and somebody notices a large pot of unrestricted money sitting in the general fund. Nobody ever votes to take money from grieving families. They vote for a balanced budget, and the kids get lost in the fine print.

The Legislature can stop that before it starts by locking this money into a dedicated fund, in statute, before the first payment arrives. This settlement exists because Minnesota children were harmed. Spend it on them. All of it.

Erich Mische is the CEO of SAVE — Suicide Awareness Voices of Education — a Minnesota-based national suicide prevention nonprofit that was founded in 1989. The organization’s website is save.org.