The Associated School Boards of South Dakota held their first online Delegate Assembly last month (online! thank you, boards, for doing your part to prevent coronavirus and reduce meeting costs!) and approved 39 Legislative resolutions and 12 standing positions. Among their five advocacy priorities for the 2021 Session is additional funding during the coronavirus pandemic:
RESOLUTION: ASBSD supports additional state and federal funding for school districts due to unforeseen and continued expenses incurred during the COVID 19 pandemic.
RATIONALE: There are many new one time and on-going expenses that school districts are incurring during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to continue to provide high-quality education. These expenses are related to added staff needs for both certified and classified employees and multiple expendable items such as PPE, cleaning products, barriers and other items. Current budgets are being stretched and will need additional dollars to maintain a safe environment for students to learn in [ASBSD, 2021 Legislative Resolutions, Item C9, p. 11, retrieved 2020.12.10].
Governor Kristi Noem Tuesday offered to increase funding for K-12 by 2.4% in Fiscal Year 2022 and to not penalize schools for pandemic-related decreases in enrollment:
Continuing in the spirit of strengthening communities, in addition to the 2.4% inflationary increase to K-12 education, I am also recommending an additional $11 million-dollar one-time investment.
Traditionally, once we have final enrollment numbers for the school year, we adjust the budget to reflect actual enrollment versus what we projected last year. This year, COVID-19 has led to declines in enrollment across the state. This means that if we follow the traditional model, we would cut $11 million from the school funding formula.
I do not want to do that this year. Instead, we will propose that we invest this $11 million on a one-time basis. Our hope is this will help provide a final bridge for schools past the pandemic [Gov. Kristi Noem, FY 2022 budget address, as transcribed by that Sioux Falls paper, 2020.12.08].
Hmmm… my glance at the Fall 2020 enrollment numbers last month didn’t show a big decrease in public K-12 enrollment, but ssshhhh! If Kristi can spare $11 million extra from the hundreds of millions in federal coronavirus relief dollars she’s sitting on to fabricate a budget surplus, I’m not going to fuss. We should just be glad, I suppose, that Governor Noem is willing to use any coronavirus dollars for the actual public purposes for which Congress intended them.
Yeah, I wondered where that whole “drop in enrollment” notion came from (lots of people moving out?). We almost have to assume that the governess understands NOT what enrollment (not attendance) means.
I can imagine her tiny brain thinking, “Two three syllable words with nuanced differences in meaning that kinda sound alike. Hmmm must mean like, the kinda same thing, so it don’t matter which one I pick.”
Yeah, I’m puzzled. If we look at the Governor’s own budget proposal, page 12-4, the section on Education, we see FY2021 (this fall) K-12 enrollment at 136,115, down just four students from last year. The budget proposal estimates FY2022 will see K-12 enrollment increase to 138,813. That’s a 1.98% increase in students.