Governor Kristi Noem can’t even come up with creative excuses for failing to uphold the state’s promise to use the extra half-penny sales to raise teacher pay. Asked yesterday at her slapdash students/teachers/women’s conference (which she had plenty of money to throw together on a whim) where she gets off putting no money in the budget to raise the state’s target teacher salary, Governor Noem fell back on the typical specious Republican response that our low teacher pay isn’t her fault:
“I don’t decide teacher salaries, school board members do. What I wasn’t able to do was give a percentage increase to school districts across the board state-wide. So, with the tough revenue year that the state is having, we just didn’t have extra money in the budget this year,” says Noem [Jenna LeMair, “Gov. Noem Hosts South Dakota LEADS for Teacher and Students,” KDLT, 2019.12.09].
Um, Kristi? You decide the target teacher salary. You write it in your budget. It’s part of state law. It determines how much money each school will receive from the state and how much money each school will be allowed to tax its own residents’ property to pay its teachers. So when you decide not to increase the target teacher salary, you make it really hard for school board members to decide to raise teacher salaries. Some districts may screw up their courage and ask for another opt-out (although 44% of districts are already tapping that well to make up for the state’s lack of enthusiasm for investing in children, so asking their constituents to increase their local property tax levy even farther beyond the state cap is not easy), but in general, school board members can’t decide to raise teacher salaries with money you don’t give them.
Give us a break, Kristi. You’re the Governor. If you want South Dakota teacher pay to increase, you can decide to make that happen. Governor Daugaard did it and happily claimed credit for it. Now when you decide to short teachers, you don’t get to put the blame on the locals you choose to starve.
If the law requires a specified raise to keep up with inflation, can a governor dismiss that law with the usual GOP “we can’t afford it.” Do any of the affected groups have the courage and financial wherewithal to go to court?
If only there were a union for teachers to file suit against the state to follow the law. If only there were…
David,
She will have to get the Legislature to change the law. If she can do that, she can do what she wants. I doubt it will all go her way, but she may get some compromise. I would assume there will be a lot of discussion around this. Generally, they dicker around with various parts of the school aid statutes every year. This is more than dickering, though. It’s a major shift of funding for this year out of the general education formula into the special education formula. It’s pitting students against students and parents against their own children. It’s classic Republicanism of divide and conquer. It’s just a horrible thing she’s doing. It will also be devastating to rural schools, so she’s also pitting urban schools against rural schools.
Jerry, the other thread explores the idea that no law has been broken until the final budget is passed. This certainly puts the process on that path, but the budget allocation has not been finalized.
I suppose the analogy is my putting a candy bar in my pocket in a store; it is not shoplifting until I try to leave with it. I can still choose to take it from my pocket and pay before I leave — abiding by the law that requires payment.
I think more to the point it to call out the Governor’s talking point here about salary determination: which as Cory points out is the FIRST step in the determination of the new formula structure. That salary number drives the rest of the formula.
Word is her ‘conference’ costs $40,000 to put on, and yes, she stuck the DOE with the bill even though they had no say in planning or executing the event.
Do we know what attendance was for this completely inane event? If it was sizable, she can say it’s because she is so popular and knows what’s best for education. If attendance was poor, she can say that educators don’t care about what she is trying to do for them or whatever important topic was discussed at her stupid event.
Is there any chatter among SDGOP leadership about following the law?
MAYBE … if the teacher’s union hired J.M.Grudznick as their lobbyist again, he could embarrass Governor Kristi into finding the money to pay the teachers AND finding the money to give more to Dr. Powers autistic spectrum child.
Problem Solved – thank you Mr. Lansing
Noem included no raise for teachers, but another raise for her daughter on staff. Not yet a college graduate, the daughter now makes $58,000 a year, if I caught it right from KELO.
Robin, once upon a time Klueless Kristi’s act with the raise would have made her a “brazen hussy.” Now it just makes her a somewhat clumsier leader of the SDGOP than Marion EB5 Rounds.
Can we do better than electing this woman to Governor.
What happened to the 1/2 cent sales tax revenue from the internet sales windfall that everybody was blowing about a year ago. State government was suppose to be flush with money! Like every other policy she’s proposed, the priorities are her’s and not in the best interests of this state. We ought to be fed up with the constant ultra-conservative insult to education. Is it because a well-educated kid, with independent and critical thinking skills, will imperil the weak-minded control freakism of the Republican party when they become old enough to vote? The continued political assault on education from every angle just infuriates me. We fall further and further behind the rest of the world in academics and technological knowledge every year just because these political control freaks are frightened by an educated mind and well-developed intellect.
Moses6: No, we can’t seem to do that, because the (R) behind her name is a sort of magic talisman in this totally backwards-ass state. We used to elect Democrats once in a while.
No wonder we’re still stuck in the 19th century…
Back in December of 1993, when then Governor Miller gave the first of two state of the state addresses, he made no mention of property tax relief, which was a hot topic back then. When asked by a KELO reporter as to why he didn’t mention property tax relief, the Governor said, to paraphrase him, that property tax relief was a local issue. Well, a year and a half later, Janklow, who defeated Miller in the 1994 Republican gubernatorial primary, didn’t think so, and then Janklow went on to increase the state’s take from video lottery to offer property tax relief.
The reason I walk back to this period in South Dakota history is because today, some 26 years later, Governor Noem’s excuse on teacher pay and the suggestion that somehow its a local issue once again speaks of a governor who is out of touch with the needs of the students, the teachers, and the parents in this state, who are all taxpayers. The question I ask then: Is whether Governor Noem, with her Miller indifference, will politically survive a challenge in 2022 either from an other Republican or a Democrat, or will such an indifference along with her hemp intolerance be the makings of her own political demise of an lonely and local reality?
JKC, your hopeful proposition of an analogy between Kristi and Walter Dale falters on one key difference: Janklow beat Miller in a Republican primary in which Janklow was rousing passions for tax cuts; a Republican challenger cannot rouse similar passions among the GOP primary electorate for raising the pay of public servants. Miller was out of touch with the passionate primary base; Noem is out of touch with the sensible but less passionate middle who will have to rally behind a candidate (Dem, Green, Indy, who knows?) who will be labeled a Warren/Sanders-loving socialist by the Noem machine.