Brenda Seehafer

Rolla

The legislature has reached the halfway point, and I worry our lawmakers don’t have their priorities straight. My biggest concern is K-12 funding. Governor Kelly Armstrong proposed 2% increases in the K-12 budget for each year of the coming biennium. The percentage the Legislature is working with now seems to be 3%, but that is simply not enough.

For starters, a point of clarification: K-12 budget increases are not teacher salary increases. Since the costs of running a school increase as inflation increases, the budget increases will likely not be reflected in teacher salaries. This is a huge issue for teacher recruitment and retention. In 2023, in response to unfilled teacher positions, then-Governor Doug Burgum created a teacher retention and recruitment task force. The resulting recommendations included funding educator pathways, funding mentorship, maximizing benefits for educators, and optimizing educator earnings. These suggestions share a commonality: they require increased public education funding. If the legislature doesn’t even keep up with inflation, how can they hope to address teacher retention and recruitment issues?

In addition to the measly 3% proposed increases, the House and Senate both passed education savings account bills, which would use public dollars to pay for private school tuition. SB 2400 will cost $25,800,000; HB 1540 will cost $36 million every year plus a one-time cost of $40 million. Public schools are already underfunded, let’s not make it worse by diverting valuable public resources to private schools. Instead, let’s provide our chronically underfunded public schools with the resources they need, as they educate more than 90% of our state’s students.