School Daze

Others have posted about the upcoming school referendums in their communities. The Savage Lands are facing their own bonding and levy referendums. In years past, denizens of the Savage Lands have paid little attention to school referendums. In large part this was due to the fact that we knew that our school district was growing and needed to build more schools, hire more teachers etc. However, as our taxes have gone up and up and an insatiable local government (on all levels to be fair) has asked for more and more out of the taxpayers, people have started to pay attention and what they found may spell doom for the school board.

Based on the Minnesota Department of Education data (complied here) a friend of mine put together the following graph.



Eleven years of "negative fund balances" (as the school board calls it) is a good indicator that the board is not exactly paying attention to how much they are spending and how fast. The school board says that they have to have these "negative fund balances" because this is a rapidly growing district. You can not argue with the fact that this district IS rapidly growing. However, when you compare this school boards spending with the spending of other rapidly growing school districts in the area, you start to see even more clearly, what this board is doing wrong.

Shakopee is probably the closest to Prior Lake/Savage in size, growth and challenges in the state. Both have roughly 6000+ students registered, both have had to build new schools in order to accomodate the growth in their districts and Shakopee has a higher number of ESL Students (which is considered special education) due to a large Hispanic population and an even larger Russian population. Yet while Prior Lake/Savage have run deficits for 11 years, Shakopee has run budget surpluses! Similar challenges, similar funding (from the state AND property taxes) and yet very dissimilar results.

This is why the residents of the Savage Lands (and every school district) need to pay attention to what their local government entities are doing. If you let them go unscrutinized, as residents of the Savage Lands have done for the last decade) you get the results we see today! Every level of government needs the scrutiny of the electorate. Left unchecked, government gets a sense that they are more entitiled to your money than you are. They didn't work for it, the taxpayer did and as our Founding Fathers showed us - sometimes you have to fight to keep what you work so hard for!

The good news is that all we have to do today is get engaged and look up the information (as the concerned citizens at Citizens For Accountable Government did). It may be bad for your blood pressure momentarily, but if that information motivates you to get off of the couch and get involved, you will be better for it!