Last Thursday, I testified on behalf of Representative Newton's levy extension bill. The bill would restore Minnesota law to its former provisions before 1994, allowing school boards to extend operating levies by a vote of the school board.
During the committee
discussion, an opponent of the bill suggested that school referendum votes serve the purpose of publicly
verifying the stewardship of the school leadership. I’d like to take this opportunity to
suggest that, in fact, this is provably incorrect.
In the
following table I’ve listed some referendum votes:
|
District - per p
|
Year
|
Result
|
|
Mpls- $2000
|
2008
|
Passed 71.0%
|
|
Osseo $285
|
2012
|
Failed 33,792 - 33,908 49.9%
|
|
St. Paul $821
|
2012
|
Passed 78,692 – 49,303 61.5%
|
|
St. Cloud $555
|
2008
|
Passed 24,295 - 22,176 52%
|
I suggest that these votes are not reflective at all of which
districts are the best stewards of money, nor which districts are doing the
best educationally, but rather are reflective of the readiness of their
citizens to support public education, regardless of any of those factors. For example, the Osseo
school district has been recognized as exhibiting stellar results in attacking the
achievement gap, yet that district could not renew a small referendum. The loss of that referendum threatens to destroy the very programs that support these positive results.
In many states, school boards are called trustees. We school board members are, in fact,
trustees. It is our job to find
efficiencies, to act as wise stewards of public funds, to hold our employees
accountable. The school board members
that I know take this job very seriously.
The whole idea of representative democracy is that the public votes for
stewards and gives them the power and authority to do their job. One
of the reasons that Minnesota’s school finance system is fundamentally
broken is that it gives board members the responsibility, but not the power, to do our job.
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