The Minnesota Legislature’s budget deal includes a 2 percent increase to the per-student formula each of the next two years. They also increased cross subsidy relief in the budget deal.
Crookston Public Schools Superintendent Jeremy Olson says the district will wait for official numbers from the Department of Education before updating their budgets but does estimate an increase of about $150,000 in the budget each of the next two years. “Right now, a 2 percent increase is about $154,000 what we’re estimating,” said Olson. “We always want to wait until the official numbers come out from the Department of Education because that’s what we get paid on. It looks to be about $150,000 each year, which is generally 2 percent for our district.”
Even though Olson is pleased with the funding increase, he said looking forward the funding needs to meet the cost of living and maintenance of schools cost increases. “Obviously any kind of funding is good,” said Olson. “The issue when you look at a 2 percent revenue increase is that cost of living and costs to schools going up about 3 percent. It certainly helps, it doesn’t quite get us where we need to be. The last couple of years we’ve been pretty happy with 2 percent because the years prior to that we’ve gotten much, much smaller increases in funding. We are very appreciative of what we’ve gotten the last few years but looking forward, we are going to need to at least start meeting the cost of living increases.”
Regarding what the two percent does for next year’s projected budget, Olson says it helps, but how much still needs to be determined. “The 2 percent in reference to our budget does help us,” said Olson. “We were originally looking at a budget with what we had for sure which was budgeting a zero. It does help us. It gets us close to where we need to be. We also have a corresponding teachers settlement that will be finalized at the conclusion of negotiations which will have an offsetting expense as well. We’ll have to see how that affects our budget overall but very good news compared to what could’ve happened.”
The legislature also included additional cross subsidy relief to make up for the federal shortfall in special education funding. Olson explains that the cross-subsidy to what the district needs to cover by taking from general education funds to meet the special education funding requirements. “Cross-subsidy is the difference between state and federal funding and what our district has to put in to cover the costs of special education,” said Olson. “Obviously it’s a very important program to our district and helps a lot of students meeting them where they are at and tries to attain a level playing field. Last year our cross-subsidy was close to $1 million. As we look at cross subsidy relief is about $30,000 additional state funding.”
In 1975 the federal government pledged to fund 40 percent of special education costs. The reality today is they are only funding about 8 percent explains Olson. “The state has really done there part and now we can even make an argument they are doing more than there part,” said Olson. “Where the funding has really fallen is at the federal level going from the 40 percent that was promised to about 8 percent. That gap has been covered traditionally by school districts in what we call a cross-subsidy. We’re really appreciative of our legislatures for seeing that problem and trying to create a solution.”
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