Sacred cow or sitting duck: In budget crisis, is education funding on the chopping block?

Photo: Lisa Yarost, Flickr

Will state funding for education take a hit in efforts to close Minnesota’s gaping $5.3 billion state budget deficit?

State Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis, thinks so. “Do the math” was his pessimistic analysis at a panel in Bloomington last Tuesday, pointing to education’s 40 percent share of the state budget. Without new taxes, significant cuts throughout Minnesota’s budget will have to be made, and education’s huge share of the budget makes it a tempting target, said State Rep. Mindy Greiling (DFL-Roseville) in an interview on Friday.

Ask public school officials, though, and they’ll probably tell you what Lois Rockney, the chief financial officer of St. Paul Public Schools, says: After years of underfunding, “[t]here’s no fat left to cut” in school districts’ budgets.

In St. Paul, the Capitol may be dividing against itself over the issue of funding. Pogemiller has floated the idea of a 1.6 percent cut in every major budget area, and while the idea is not even a firm proposal yet, it’s already eliciting strong reactions from other members of the Legislature.

“I don’t think that’s a sensible approach,” said Greiling, who chairs the House K-12 Education Finance Committee. “The House does not agree with [Pogemiller’s suggestion],” she said flatly.

And Greiling feels she has Gov. Tim Pawlenty in her corner. According to Minnesota’s Constitution, Pawlenty has the authority to unilaterally cut unspent funds in the current fiscal biennium (ending in June), and he will propose the budget for the 2010-11 biennium. In an interview last week, Greiling said, “The governor has named education funding as one of his priorities to protect, and I look forward to holding him to his promise.”

If the governor decides to protect education funding, this would mean other huge budgets, like health care and welfare dollars, would see deep cuts — hardly a popular decision and one that could severely impact those sectors of government.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do for the long term” if education funding is cut, said Peggy Ingison, the chief financial officer of Minneapolis Public Schools. Most districts rely heavily on aid from St. Paul to fund all aspects of their operations. On average, 20 percent or less of a district’s funding comes from local property taxes.

Minnesota’s school districts vary widely –- some urban, some rural; some small, some large; some financially healthy, some barely holding their heads above water –- so any cuts in state education aid would impact them all differently. Some school districts may weather this crisis relatively well, because their voters have recently approved multiyear property tax levies that will give some cushion to their budgets through the most tumultuous times of this recession. Dennis Peterson, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools, said he was confident his district won’t even start feeling pressure until 2010-11 because a property tax levy passed in 2007 makes up 27 percent of the budget. In 2005 the district restructured itself, anticipating declining amounts of state aid, and now draws students from area private and charter schools.

But to most of the school officials this reporter spoke to, the future is unclear, verging on gloomy, and many were anxious about their districts’ future health.

In Minneapolis, Ingison says district leaders are afraid parents will pull their children from the district if too many specialized programs — such as culturally focused schools or language immersion programs — are cut. After struggling with declining enrollment for many years, MPS established many of these programs in recent years in an effort to woo parents back to the district and away from the charter schools that have attracted parents with these kinds of alternative education options.

“The 2010-11 school year doesn’t look good,” Burnsville-Eagan-Savage schools Superintendent Randy Clegg said in an interview Friday. While that’s 16 months away, if state aid gets slashed, the most serious cuts will hit then. Clegg said his district “needs to know what we can live without.”

In New Ulm, in southern Minnesota, Superintendent Harold Remme said his schools would be freezing all non-essential new hiring, and were also experimenting with ways to share some administrative personnel with neighboring districts. For Remme, this is a bitter decision. “We just came off of six years of declining enrollment… [where] we cut $700 million from the budget each year.”

“We’ve made as many reductions as we possibly can,” said Superintendent Chuck Futterer of the Cook County Schools, on Minnesota’s North Shore. “We’ve been looking at reductions for many years” as enrollment has declined and state aid has not kept up with inflation. “We’ve cut bus drivers, custodians, support staff, maintenance workers, and we’re looking at cutting one principal [out of two],” whose duties Futterer will take on. “The only thing left to cut is teachers.”

Superintendents are waiting on tenterhooks for January, when the governor is to issue his proposed budget for the next two-year fiscal cycle, so they can start planning ways to accommodate any state budget cuts. Most schools, they said, will manage to scrape by through cutting what are usually considered essential staff and programming. However, it’s an open question how healthy and effective public school systems will be after serious cuts like these.

Photo: Lisa Yarost