Urban Schools Threatened by GOP Education Budget

Both chambers of the state legislature passed a controversial education budget bill this week that would drastically reduce how much money urban schools receive. If approved by the governor, it would hit magnet schools like Windom Spanish Dual Immersion School in Southwest especially hard. 

Minneapolis Public Schools officials say the funding cuts mandated by the bill—$415 per student for Minneapolis, and $395 per student for St Paul—would significantly damage the district’s ability to sustain many programs, including popular magnet programs. Governor Mark Dayton has criticized the bill but not said whether he would veto it.

“For a whole variety of reasons, we’ve been doing budget cuts for a lot of years now,” said Minneapolis Public School Budget Director Sarah Snapp. “Trim a little here or trim a little there—we’re done with that now. We’ll be having to make dramatic changes in the kids of programs and services that we offer and that we provide for our students [if the bill becomes law].”

It would reduce or cap three kinds of funding that Minneapolis relies on: integration funding, funding to help the district deal with high concentrations of poverty in its schools and special education funding.  This would allow the legislature to modestly increase the basic per-pupil amount all school districts receive from the state. In particular, integration funding is frequently used by schools to pay for additional services that are aimed at closing the achievement gap.

Snapp doesn't rule out all possible reforms. “We need to make changes in how we deliver educational services,” she added. “We as a district, and I as an educator, are not satisfied with what we deliver. But putting the district on a starvation diet is not the way to make constructive changes.” 

At Whittier Elementary, an International Baccalaureate (IB) magnet school that serves all of Southwest Minneapolis, receives about $100,000 in integration funding, said Principal Dr. Shawn Harris-Berry. She said the school uses its share of integration funding to keep its teachers’ IB training up to date, as mandated by the international body that governs IB programs worldwide. Harris-Berry said the IB program has been instrumental in diversifying the school and in raising students’ test scores across racial and economic lines.

“The integration funding covers at least half, maybe more than half of our ability to implement the IB program,” she said. “To make up for these cuts there would be cuts in other areas." 

At Windom Spanish Dual Immersion School, another magnet that serves Southwest Minneapolis, Principal Lucilla Yira said that a loss of integration funding would cripple the school.

“Without integration funding, we can’t keep the dual-immersion model,” she said.

Integration funding, she said, helps fund bilingual teachers, who who can both help Spanish-speaking students who are struggling to learn English and direct a classroom of English-speaking students. The school gets $124,ooo in integration funding, she said. It funds bilingual staff who have licenses to teach in both Spanish and English, as well as more Spanish reading materials than the district usually provides. 

If he cuts went through, she said, “we would have to cut a lot of positions. Our program would be dying.”

Even schools that saw their enrollment areas curtailed by Changing School Options two years ago use integration dollars to help students from other areas of the city enroll in their schools. Washburn High School Principal Carol Markham-Cousins said the cuts would keep students in less-affluent areas of the city from accessing the best education opportunities available in the Minneapolis school system.

At Washburn, Markham-Cousins said, much of the schools $200,000 in integration funding goes to buy MetroTransit passes for all students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. These students’ families income is at 130% or less of the poverty line. Between 25% and 30% of Washburn’s students live outside of Southwest Minneapolis, Markham-Cousins said, including some who live outside of the city but who chose to go to Washburn instead of their home districts.

“It would really affect the quality of education of students," Markham-Cousins said. “It would support the idea that poverty is an indicator of the kind of education you receive."