Letter to the Editor: Independent School District 191 Forced into Short-Term Borrowing

Despite repeated concerns voiced by parents, school advocates and district officials about using education funding as a slush fund to balance the budget, Republicans like Rep. Pam Myhra and Rep. Diane Anderson pushed forward with expanding the K-12 funding shift. Schools are now owed a whopping $2.2 billion and alarmingly, for the first time there is no budgetary plan to pay it back.

As a result, school districts like the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage district will be forced into short-term borrowing in order to meet the needs of students according to a survey conducted by the Association of Metropolitan School Districts. Independent School District 191 is just one of many metro area school districts having to resort to borrowing. This means resources that could have been spent in the classroom will be used to pay off loans. The Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district isn’t alone. Of those surveyed, AMSD found that over 60 percent of schools indicated they will need to borrow.

Minnesota’s future success is reliant on the opportunities afforded to our next generation today. I urge Rep. Myhra, Rep. Anderson and my other Republican colleagues to make funding our schools a top priority in the upcoming legislative session. We must put an end to this method of budgeting that simply passes the buck, compromising our economic future and squandering our most basic priority—the education of our children.

While we may have different perspectives on education policy, I think we can all agree that asking our students to foot the bill for our budgetary failings is neither sound education policy nor is it an efficient approach to balancing our budget.

State Representative Mindy Greiling, DFL-Lead on the House Education Finance Committee