We appreciate the conversation

Education Minnesota president Tom Dooher was gracious enough to visit our district last week and meet with teachers and myself to talk about public education issues, the state, and how North Branch fits into the equation.

We talked about current legislation and how, if passed, North Branch Area Public Schools (NBAPS) would be affected. We also talked about how dedicated NBAPS staff is and how incredibly the staff as a whole has weathered budget cuts and failed levies, and persevered. More than perseverance though, this staff has excelled at making the very best of our situation and maintained an environment that allows students the opportunity to thrive.

Perhaps most importantly, we discussed the very crucial issues facing NBAPS. You can’t live in our district and not know the primary issue we face; state funding. The current general funding formula is organized to reward the districts with great property wealth while district like ours, with little commercial industrial property and high tax burdens, are punished. There are systems in place to assist districts with great poverty, but those don’t help us either.

Essentially, NBAPS exists in a place in which we don’t have the wealth to subsidize our state funding, and we don’t have poverty enough for the state to subsidize the district.

We also talked about the spiral affecting the district; we are forced to cut programs and people are encouraged to look elsewhere for education, which in turn impacts enrollment and requires the district to make more cuts.

Dooher expressed great understanding about our issues and promised to continue carrying our message.

Will you join him? We have new representation at the state level and they need to hear from all of us about how important it is to solve this problem; solve it for our community and solve it for our children, who’s education suffers more with each passing year.

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