State funding worries Morud

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

April 30, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

Bemidji schools Superintendent Rollie Morud, unhappy with current legislative efforts to increase the public education funding formula, wanted the world to know it Tuesday.

Morud told the School Board Tuesday night that if current dollar figures for funding increases proposed by either the Senate or House pass, the budget reductions approved for next year would be nothing compared to the painful reductions that would be suffered the year after.

"Things are going badly," he said. "I don't know whether the flooding has affected the thinking of those in St. Paul, but some dike broke down there. The numbers they are proposing now are nowhere near what they had promised us in the beginning of the session."

Currently, the school district receives about $3,500 per student a year in funding, Morud said, and early in the session state legislators had agreed the state's public education severely needed an inflationary increase, the first in probably 10 years.

Increases such as $108 for the first year in the biennium and $105 for the second year had been mentioned early in the session, he said.

However, the most recent legislation in the Senate calls for a $35 per student per year increase in the biennium's first year and another $35 for the second year. The House bill, which is even a more dramatic about-face, Morud said, calls for a $75 inflationary increase the first year and an $8 increase the second.

"With the $108 and $105 per kid extra, there would have been an addition of $1.2 million to the district in two years," he said. "At the present numbers being mentioned, we would only gain about $500,000. That's a significant difference."

To add insult to injury, Morud said a proposal called the "common schools" plan introduced by Sen. Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis, would provide $100 million in funding to mostly private and parochial students and some public students.

That would result in private and parochial schools receiving anywhere from $6,000 to $18,000 in funding per kid a year, as compared to the $3,500 a year for public school students.

"It's an attempt to get money into the parochial schools systems," School Board Chairman Jim Smalley said.

Morud concluded his legislative report by asking district parents to start a grass-roots lobbying effort with representatives, saying legislators expect school board members and superintendents to call them. But they take calls from parents more seriously.

"We've got a pending disaster with public education funding in this state," he said. "Schools with larger general budget surpluses may be all right. But we're on the short side, and it's only going to get worse."