With a vetoed education bill in pieces, a special session looming, and the July 1 Minnesota budget deadline fast approaching, local school officials are left to speculate about exactly what kind of funding will be handed down to individual districts.
Gov. Mark Dayton had initially proposed increasing education spending by $700 million in the 2015-2016 biennium. House Republicans initially proposed spending $157 million more. At press time, both Republicans and Dayton have agreed on giving schools a $525 million increase, but nothing has been set in stone.
Dayton initially claimed he would not back down from his demand for universal, school-based prekindergarten education, but eventually he did relent to Republican pressure and agreed to allow districts to opt in to the program.
“There has been lots of conversation about pre-K education, and we all agree that it is important and all kids should have the option if they want or need it,” Forest Lake Area Schools Superintendent Linda Madsen said. “However, we first need to get the K-12 funding formula stable so that were not cutting so often, and then we can look at and figure out pre-K. It doesn’t make sense to do all of that and still have K-12 struggling.”
Another problem with universal pre-K in some schools is the fact that districts would be saddled with finding a way to finance a large portion of the changes that would need to be made to implement the program.
“Funding for extra space, equipment and licensed teachers are the big pieces that would need to be discussed,” Madsen said. “A lot of people do not realize that early education teachers do have a license that is required, and I think it would be difficult to find enough properly certified educators to take care of all of the kids that we would see incoming if universal pre-K were to pass.”
Another agreement that both Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, and Dayton mentioned in press conferences June 1 was a plan to increase the amount of per pupil funding that individual districts would receive. The formula increase for the 2013-14 biennium was 1.5 percent, and the new proposed increase for the current biennium is 2 percent.
“We planned our district budget based on 2 percent in order to get a balance,” Forest Lake District Business Director Larry Martini said. “However, it wasn’t enough as we had to cut $2 million from our budget.”
Martini said wage inflation (often close to 3 percent) has been the primary driver in increased district costs.
“In the last couple of years, we staved off budget cuts by using some of our fund balance,” Martini said. “This year, cutting 2 million simply balanced the budget. We really needed that 3 percent increase in order not to have to cut.”
Republicans also agreed to a compromise on their rollback of the long-standing “last in, first out” teacher layoff process. Under the compromise, the requirement that schools base their layoff processes on teacher seniority was stricken from state statute. However, the GOP’s initial goal of changing the statute to require that staffing decisions be merit-based was dropped, leaving layoff procedures to be negotiated by individual districts.
“We know the system as it currently stands and we’re comfortable with it,” Martini said. “However, we will be able to work with different things because we have excellent relationships with different bargaining groups.”
As for the rest of what may come of the eventual budget agreement, there are no answers now.
“There are a lot of policy provisions that we just don’t know where they will land,” Martini said. “Being in limbo is kind of frustrating in some aspects, but really all we can do is wait.”