“This is the fourth year in the last five that we’ve had to make budget adjustments,” said Edina Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Ric Dressen. This may seem like old news to manyEdinaHigh Schoolstudents, but there’s a new twist this year: Students are finally directly affected by the $5 million of cuts to the annual budget as class sizes increase across all grade levels and the costs of activities rise. Because teacher and paraprofessional salaries comprise 77% of the District budget, the District is no longer able to keep cuts from affecting staffing, causing the increase in class sizes.
Part of the problem this year is that the District will only see 60% of the nearly $60 million that it was promised by the state government as part of the state budget fix that delayed funding to schools across the state to help balance the budget in July. To compensate for this, the District needs to borrow the difference, which will lead to interest costs.
To help cover some of the budget shortfall, the District is looking for additional funding in the form of various grants, including from the Edina Education Fund.
Some of that additional revenue will come from increased activity fees atEdinaHigh School, even while the District provides less money to those activities. The new fee schedule, approved by the School Board on July 18th, raised fees across the board. EHS Assistant Principal Jenny Johnson said that the new fee structure was determined “more systematically” than the previous system, where “some of the fees … hadn’t even been adjusted” in recent years.
In addition to looking for new sources of revenue, Edina Public Schools is looking to stretch each dollar farther by pushing teachers to print less and use less electricity. However, budgetary savings are not the only driving force behind this push to go green, Dressen said, noting a genuine desire in the District to be more environmentally friendly. The reduction of printing at school has shifted responsibility to students to print the materials they need for class, an issue which Steve Buettner, District Director of Media & Technology Services, said will likely be resolved in years to come, noting that the transition process is “messy,” adding that computers and internet technologies “are called disruptive technologies for a reason,” but that once fully implemented and optimized, technology will make the District as a whole more efficient as teachers shift away from paper-based instruction to videos and other forms of online instruction.
Edina Public Schools faces further budget cuts in the future if two levies up for renewal in November fail. The $1 million operating levy provides extra funding for the District General Fund, while the $4.5 million technology levy allows the District to implement more technology in all schools. If passed, the technology levy – larger than the current $1 million levy – would allow the District to “free up” $800,000 in capital resources to spend on things like textbooks and desks, as well as $1.2 million of general fund dollars, which would be “of real help” to the District given its current constraints, according to Margo Nash, Director of Business Services for the District.
These savings are in addition to another $1.5 million in annual spending on technology that would occur if the tech levy passed. This increase would have “an incredible impact” on the District, Buettner said, adding there is “a lifetime difference between what we can have today” and what the original levy provided for.
“We’re going to have to have students be more focused and ask our teachers to be more flexible and more creative,” Dressen said, although he did not elaborate on how to get notoriously rowdy high schoolers and their teachers to achieve his goal “to cooperate to make sure the classroom is a positive setting” with minimal disruptions.
