Mindy Greiling

Ominous news about job losses and financial woes at Minnesota hospitals over the last week coincide with Gov. Pawlenty’s line-item veto of $381 million in General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) grants and his vow to make more cuts by unallotment. But as bad as the doomsday scenarios are, they shouldn’t include St. Paul’s Regions Hospital closing — a prospect that a DFL press release warned of over the weekend.

Will state funding for education take a hit in efforts to close the gaping $5.3 billion state budget deficit? State Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller thinks so, noting that since cuts could affect all state departments, it’s optimistic to expect education’s 40 percent share of the state budget to remain unscathed. Schools officials contend that, after years of underfunding, there’s no fat left to cut. Meanwhile, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has vowed to protect schools funding. With no resolution yet in sight, school officials statewide are wondering if — and when — their districts will feel the pinch.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty already received one black eye this legislative session when a bipartisan coalition voted to override his veto of the transportation bill. Now another piece of legislation, the education finance bill, is causing our chief executive and wannabe veep to take up another round of arm twisting, threats and hard negotiation to avoid [...]

When Minnesota Rep. Mindy Greiling, a Roseville DFLer who chairs the House K-12 Finance Division, recently went to Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), the majority-Muslim elementary school in Inver Grove Heights made infamous by a March Star Tribune column, what she discovered was entirely different from what writer Katherine Kersten had reported. In fact, what [...]