While the battle over teachers collective bargaining rights and education funding have grabbed national press coverage in nearby Wisconsin, the battle over the future of public education in Minnesota has flown under the radar. Even in Minnesota.
Most of the big news revolves around funding issues and let's face it, those tend to be pretty boring. But here are a couple of pieces which give a real sense of what is coming.
In this interview, the finance head of one suburban school district talks about the hit that will come if the current plan to freeze special ed funding becomes law.
For us that results in about a $58 per student reduction in funding from the level that is in the law right now. On the other side, the House was proposing about a $34 increase per student in the funding formula. When you combine the two, you were looking at about a $24 per student net loss.
And in this interview, he talks a bit about the impact if the plan to strip away school integration money becomes law:
The other thing the House was proposing was that they would change or remove the current state requirements for integration. They would now call the money innovation funding, and it would have a totally different set of parameters about what the state was hoping the outcome would be after using that money.
On the Senate side, you're right, that bill would eventually strip all integration funding from the districts. The funding would remain at the current level in year one and then in the second year, all of the integration funding would go away. It would be replaced by something called "literacy innovation" aid.
For our district, we are currently funded at the $129 per pupil level. In the Senate version, we would receive $129 per pupil in year one and then in year two, the integration money goes away and we would receive $107 per pupil in literacy aid. So there would be about a $22 per pupil loss. We would receive the same amount of money under the House version, but there would be an entirely new set of regulations attached to the funds.
