Seven Things You Need to Know About the Hopkins Public Schools Budget

wants to know what you think about how it plans to spend money.

The district will host a public meeting Tuesday to seek input on the budget it’s drafting for the 2011-2012 school year. Such meetings don’t exist in a vacuum, though. They are just one part of a running conversation about how the community can best educate its students.

Here are seven things you need to know to get up to speed on that conversation:

1) The state faces a $6.2 billion budget deficit: Minnesota legislators are frantically trying to fill a gaping hole in the state’s budget. No one has yet put forward a concrete proposal to cut K-12 education funding. But with that category taking up about 38 percent of the state’s general fund—about 10 percentage points more than the next biggest category—many expect education to see some type of cut before the final budget plan is in place. State money is particularly important for school districts, accounting for more than two-thirds of Hopkins’ revenue in the 2011 fiscal year. The school district is still a ways off from learning how much it will lose (see No. 7 below). But planners penciled in a 3-percent cut in state per-pupil funding, which would cut about $150 from the approximately $6,000 per student schools now receive. Directors, anticipating more of the funding shifts that the state used to postpone payments to future years, also told staff to plan on waiting to receive more of this money—a delay that would cost about $30 per student in borrowing expenses.

2) Schools must work within certain funding constraints: Like any industry, education has certain boundaries within which schools must work. Staffing costs, for example, account for the vast majority of school expenses. In Hopkins, personnel expenses make up more than 80 percent of the district’s general fund budget. The state also mandates that schools set aside portions of their budgets for specific areas—including special needs, professional development, debt funding and other categories. Schools continue to ask the Legislature for more freedom to move money between categories. Lawmakers have occasionally loosened up some of the restrictions, but districts have still invariably had to direct money to at least some mandated areas.

3) Funding has been flat the past eight years: The amount of money schools receive per pupil has not changed in eight years. Schools argue that this flat funding actually represents a decline in real-world terms because of rising costs. Hopkins and other schools to approve a so-called “implicit price deflator" that would adjust school payments to compensate for inflation.

4) The state and school districts can't backfill deficits with stimulus money this year: Federal stimulus dollars helped fill holes in school district budgets when the state first began facing budget pressures. Hopkins alone received about $1.3 million in Federal Education Job Funds intended save or create school jobs. But that was a one-time injection of revenue for the 2010-2011 school year. School districts won’t have that money in subsequent years.

5) Declining home prices don't mean taxes go down: Property taxes aren’t like a sales tax in which the taxpayer pays a certain portion of the property’s value. Instead, property values merely determine how to divvy up the levy that the school district or other local government decided to collect. In other words: Property taxes don’t determine the size of the pie; they determine how the pie is divided. For a detailed explanation, see Hopkins Patch’s .

6) Hopkins, like other schools in the state, faces an “achievement gap”: One of the most vexing problems that Hopkins faces is a difference in performance between white students and students of color. The issue is one that school board directors return to frequently while tackling the various issues that come before them.

7) The school board is dealing with uncertainty: Tuesday’s budget hearing comes after the Legislature has been in session for just a little more than a month. When the board gives its preliminary approval for the budget March 17, the Legislature will still have several more months in session—particularly if the session extends into the summer as many expect. That leaves the district facing some big unknowns made all the bigger because of the dominant role that state money has in school budgets.

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Public meeting on the 2011-2012 budget

When: 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Eisenhower Community Center Boardroom (second floor), 1001 Highway 7

For more information, contact Bobbi McLaird at 952-988-4021.