Education budgets are complex beasts that every school district needs to tangle with each year, and clarity is essential throughout the process to ensure good decision making.
It's on top of mind for Rapid City Area Schools leaders as they plan their priorities for the next legislative session.
However, district business manager Coy Sasse said the waters are muddied.
"We talked at length obviously about the state aid situation, and it became apparent through some of the discussion and comments that sometimes the confusion around what exactly is happening with state aid extends all the way into those types of groups," Sasse said. "Certainly, there was some confusion in terms of what we battle with as a district, which is, it is a misleading statement to say state aid is increasing by four percent, and there are more accurate ways to make that statement.”
Sasse explained the difference between a political promise and the brass tacks.
“It is not as simple as drawing a straight line from state aid increase or teacher compensation increase: X to actual wages should increase by: Y," Sasse said. "The message that ‘state aid is increasing by four percent’ sounds a lot better and is much simpler to say than ‘the target teacher salary component of the state aid formula is increasing by four percent.'”
That four percent increase was proposed by Gov. Kristi Noem in her budget address. In that same speech, she called out school districts for not doing enough to improve teacher pay.
For board president Troy Carr, more clarity is needed from the top down.
“There’s so many people who are smarter than I am, and I’m just two and a half years into the education business – and I understand it," Carr said. "Why is there such a misunderstanding of the concept that four percent that comes out of a governors’ mouth is not four percent in a teacher’s pocket?”
Across the state though, another matter is turning heads. School lunches, a vital source of nutrition for kids across the state, are no longer a promise after COVID-related funding lapsed this year.
Another issue officials discussed is school lunch debt. While some put their boots on the ground and fundraised to ensure no child goes hungry, others are turning to the legislature for a long-term answer.
However, Rapid City Area Schools superintendent Nicole Swigart said the states lunch debt isn’t evenly distributed.
“We did have a big discussion with all our superintendents," Swigart said. "I was shocked in that discussion because we have significant lunch debt – we’ve heard about that – however there are districts in the state with zero lunch debt, which I found amazing. They don’t necessarily care if there’s a bill about lunch debt because they don’t have an issue.”
Last session a proposal to provide free school lunches, House Bill 1221, failed on a 14-1 vote in the House education committee.
Session begins on the second Tuesday of January in Pierre.