President Dooher's remarks

Good afternoon. I’m Tom Dooher, president of Education Minnesota, the statewide educators union.

I’m here today to talk about the levy elections taking place in one-third of the school districts on Tuesday.

There has been much reported in recent weeks about Minnesota’s public schools and their struggles to provide even the basics.

In my travels around the state, here are just a few things I’ve seen:

Forty-eight students in a high school physics class at Duluth East. How much hands-on learning can take place in a class like that?
German textbooks in Sauk Rapids-Rice that still refer to two Germanies. The German currency in this textbook is still the Deutschmark.
Thirty-one students in a Brainerd kindergarten class. Overall, Minnesota now has some of the largest elementary classes in the nation. Our ranking has dropped to 47th.

There are stories like these all across Minnesota, reflecting a chronic shortfall in state funding.

Now, some of the same politicians responsible for this lack of state support are trying to make sure school districts don’t get an increase in local tax dollars either. They’re throwing around big numbers, manipulating the facts to make it look like school districts received a huge windfall from the state last session, and don’t need more resources.

The truth is, our schools wouldn’t need local taxes to fund the basics if politicians were doing their job. One Minnesota newspaper, the St. Cloud Times, has gone so far as to label this an “epic failure.”

When the state fails to invest in public schools, Minnesota is left to rely on hometown investments in each community. It’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s not equitable or sustainable. A student’s education should not depend on his or her ZIP code.

But for now at least, this Band-Aid approach is the only thing we have to maintain opportunities for students in a broken funding system.

And it’s not just us saying it. Here are some of the recent comments from superintendents around the state:

Willmar Superintendent Jerry Kjergaard: “The Minnesota Miracle is dead and buried. We’re out here just trying to survive.”
Chatfield Superintendent Ed Harris: “We’re walking up to a cliff and that cliff is not on the horizon. It’s within plain sight.”

The list goes on and on.

And what happens if the levies get defeated?

As another superintendent, Richard Hanson from LeSueur-Henderson, put it: “People will drive by the schools and they will look the same. But inside it will be very different.”

Why is this happening?

For the past decade, Minnesota has been approaching a crossroads with regard to K-12 funding. We have now arrived at the turning point. We can return to our former path of excellence and innovation – or we can do nothing.

If we do nothing, we will be remembered as the generation that gave our children fewer educational opportunities than we were given ourselves.

Now I’d like to briefly present a few facts about Tuesday’s levy votes and school funding in Minnesota.

There are 115 districts going out for levies this fall. All but one will vote on Tuesday (Brooklyn Center).

These districts are marked in red on this map. Districts in blue are those that have levies in place but aren’t voting next week. The handful of districts shown in white have no levy now and are not asking for one.

The fact that levies are almost universally needed to fund basics is a sad statement about how we fund schools in Minnesota. These used to be called “excess” levies, because they were intended for special purposes over and above the basics. A better name for them now would be “survival” levies.

Of the 145 questions on the ballot, more than half involve the renewal of an existing levy. A defeated levy in many of these districts would be catastrophic.

How did our schools get to this point?

According to the Minnesota Department of Education, funding simply has not kept up with inflation. By 2013, the state aid provided for each student will be 13 percent less than it was in 2003, using inflation-adjusted dollars.

You’ve probably heard the claim that the Legislature provided a $650 million increase for K-12 schools this past session. According to Minnesota Public Radio’s PoliGraph fact-checking feature, the actual figure is $700 million. But it will not solve local districts’ financial problems.

Most of it, $500 million, comes from automatic increases built into the school funding system to help cover such things as

increased enrollment,
the rising number of students in poverty
and increases in special education costs.

There is $200 million in new spending – but much of that is to pay districts’ borrowing costs due to the state’s accounting shift.

About $49 million of it is earmarked for rewards to schools based on student reading scores.
Smaller amounts are reserved for small schools and other specific aids.

The point is – Little of this money is available to maintain general school programs in most districts.

You can spin the numbers all you want, but the bottom line is this: Our schools are hurting. This is not just numbers on a spreadsheet; this is for real. And that means our students are hurting.

We’re at a crossroads in Minnesota, and we need to decide which direction to go.

We’ve been conditioned in recent years to continually ask the question, “What can our schools do without?”

That’s absolutely the wrong question to be asking.

We should be asking instead, “What do our students need to succeed?”

At the very least, our students need the state to fund the basics of their education.

November 04, 2011