The push is on for Pawlenty’s schools plan

05/25/2005

Norman Draper,
Star Tribune
May 25, 2005

Minnesota’s biggest school districts stand to gain tens of millions in new dollars over the next two years under Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s latest school funding plan, according to district-by-district figures released Tuesday by Education Commissioner Alice Seagren.

The figures, available by individual district on the Minnesota Department of Education website (education.state.mn.us), are meant on one level to provide further details on Pawlenty’s plan, announced Friday. On another level, said Seagren, it’s a prod meant to muster public sentiment to get lagging state education budget negotiations moving again.

“The clock is ticking,” she said.

She said the Pawlenty plan, which is based in large part on a 75-cent-per-pack smoking “health impact fee,” represents “significant increases that will meet or exceed the needs of school districts in Minnesota.”

She noted that the $13 million in new money the Pawlenty plan would allocate to St. Paul schools next year would come close to wiping out the district’s $15 million deficit.

Seagren is traveling the state and holding news conferences to push the Pawlenty plan, which would boost basic education spending by 4.5 percent a year over the two-year budget period.

Both the Senate and House have K-12 budget plans, and Senate and House researchers also have broken down the effect of their plans on the district level. But the district-specific breakdowns are often done using different accounting methods, making it difficult to match up one plan against the other in order to get apples-to-apples results.

Still, in some key indicators, Pawlenty and the Senate are growing tantalizingly close in what they want to spend for schools. For example, the plan drafted by the DFL-controlled Senate would give Minneapolis another $670 per student in “general revenues,” comprising the bulk of state aid, for 2007. The Pawlenty plan comes in at $674 for that same year.

Figures for Anoka-Hennepin and St. Paul are also close.

The Republican-led House is proposing lower amounts.

But the big obstacle remains not the figures themselves, but how to get the money. Major differences remain on how big a part taxes, gambling revenues and cuts to other parts of state government will play in financing funding boosts for K-12. And Pawlenty has attached conditions to his budget plan that DFLers might not find palatable.

Education Department statistics show that under the Pawlenty plan, Minneapolis schools stand to receive at least $39.5 million in additional funds over the next two years; St. Paul stands to gain at least $40.2 million, and the state’s largest district, suburban Anoka-Hennepin, would gain a minimum of $34.6 million.

Adding a Pawlenty proposal to change the way teachers are paid toward a more merit-oriented system would add millions of dollars more to those amounts if districts choose to participate.

As if to acknowledge the political intent of the statistics, the sample districts in Tuesday’s Education Department news release included Thief River Falls and Willmar. Thief River Falls is in the home territory of Sen. LeRoy Stumpf, DFL-Plummer, chairman of the Senate K-12 Education Budget Division. Willmar is the home of the DFL Senate majority leader, Dean Johnson.

Both are key antagonists of Republican Pawlenty in the Legislature’s budget struggles.