During its latest meeting, the Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools board refined its legislative platform, opting to call on the state to update its 54-year-old education funding formula.
The platform will be used when board members and district officials meet with legislators in St. Paul to advocate for some of the district’s key objectives. Lawmakers representing the district attended a January board meeting to urge board members to share Prior Lake-Savage’s story.
Key to that is the state funding formula. District officials project an $11 million budget shortfall in the coming years, in part because the 1971-made formula does not take into account the current level of inflation or the state’s declining birth rate.
“This (formula) was built for a growing population and now we have a declining one,” said Dan White, PLSAS board chair. “It’s the foundation for everything that we’re able to do and it’s crumbling.”
As an example, staff members reported during the Feb. 10 meeting that the Prior Lake-Savage school district’s kindergarten enrollment, a bellwether for long-term enrollment trends, is down 20% from just four years ago.
In addition to the funding formula, the board is looking for the state to refrain from introducing new mandates for schools, and to increase funding for some of its current mandates. Board member Mary Franz warned against asking for the funding of all of the state-mandated programs, instead focusing on just those with the largest impact on PLSAS.
“If you walk into a legislator’s office with a list of 70 things, you’ll probably end up with none,” she said.
The board agreed to focus on three specific mandated programs: earned sick and safe leave and paid family leave for district employees, summer unemployment mandates and the READ Act, which institutes reading goals for students in kindergarten and up.
The district platform also asks St. Paul to create a K-12 testing assessment taskforce to evaluate current testing requirements and to repeal the state’s K-3 nonexclusionary discipline policy that forbids districts from suspending its youngest students.
The discipline policy is a very important topic to the district’s elementary principals, Superintendent Michael Thomas said.
“We don’t have principals looking to suspend kids,” he said. “But in a situation where that’s our last option, we don’t want that option withdrawn.”
