The South Dakota Department of Education is requesting an increase of $7.8 million in Fiscal Year 2015. That includes Governor Dennis Daugaard’s proposed three percent increase, plus extra funding for technology improvement.
Per student allocation is nearing its FY10 level, but Wade Pogany with the Associated School Boards of South Dakota tells the Joint Appropriations committee educators want to set the bar higher for South Dakota students. He says schools aren’t able to reach this goal with the money they’re being given.
“They’re not trying to make money in the money that you give them, they’re trying to meet an expectation, they’re trying to get to that point. The farther that expectation is, or the higher it is from the resources they have, the stronger the tension—the distance between the two points is a strong tension. There is, and what I hear from board members, is a lot of tension because they can’t achieve their goal, they can’t get to where they want to go,” Pogany says.
Pogany says many school districts are only maintaining assessment levels, but aren’t able to grow without resources. Rob Monson is the executive director of School Administrators of South Dakota. He shares concerns that students’ national test scores won’t improve if education funding isn’t increased at a higher level.
“Looking at the data of the NAEP score where we’ve excelled pretty well, we’re starting to see that level off. My outlook on that is if we’re seeing that right now and we’re overtaxing the teachers and everyone in our school systems; we’ve overcrowded our classrooms, you saw the numbers rising we’re gonna pack those classrooms even more with higher need students; I do believe that we, without fixing a problem, are going to see our scores go down,” Monson says.
Monson says legislators need to stop weighing education and need to start feeding it by investing more money.