The legislature has begun to pass the legislative priorities for 2025. Every year the school district has to come up with initiatives that should be added to our schools and sends recommendations to the legislators and see what gets accepted. Unfunded mandates, as well as student behavior and support are included in the district’s legislative priorities.
The legislature puts out mandates that schools need to follow, but they do not pay the whole cost so then schools have to pay off the mandates with district funds. Some of these include the READ act, Minnesota’s Unemployment Insurance and Paid Leave Program, School Meals and Non-Exclusionary Discipline Requirements.
These mandates take a toll on the district’s budget; about $1.3 million not including additional professional development costs. As a result, the district has to use their own funds on these mandates instead of other things that the district may need.
Placing this expectation on districts is unfair, mostly because teachers and schools are already struggling due to understaffing and lack of funding, sports and society and physiology teacher Kris McCarthy said.
Although there are many aspects legislators consider when making unfunded mandates, in order to have them cover the full cost there is a process that needs to be done. The school board must express their concerns about how spending money on such mandates can negatively impact the district. The school board and district leaders attend conferences and speak with legislators t0 advocates for them to cover the cost.
“They don’t always see the full impact of their decisions, however. The school board and district leaders met with local legislators recently to share how the unfunded mandates are impacting our schools. Making them aware of the financial reality of how unfunded mandates negatively impact classroom resources, teacher support, and student services is important,” Carissa Keister, Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Communications, said.
The district is adopting a new system called MnMTSS to keep students and staff safe and provide support. This new system will allow teachers and staff members to go through special training to be able to understand the new framework and keep the students protected.
On the other hand, the 2025 legislative priorities impact how principals spend most of their time. For example principals spend time on behavioral issues rather than instructional learning. This affects many different things at the schools because instead of spending their time teaching valuable lessons and helps students with educational problems, they are spending majority of their time on students behavioral problems.
“All of the assistant principals here at Stillwater High School spend a vast majority of their day dealing with student issues that pop up during the course of the day, everything from chemical health to maybe a physical altercation, to investigating a theft, or any of all kinds of different things. Attendance is a huge one, because attendance is down, and assistant principals are people who are responsible for trying to help curb that with individual students that takes up a ton of time, and none of those things have anything to do with instruction in the classroom or teaching and learning,” Principal Robert Bach said.
“We are working on something called an MnMTSS structure, which basically is a system wide structure of supports for students. We have teams of people that are getting some training on and learning about and trying to figure out how best to implement here at Stillwater area high school,” Bach said.
In addition, a lot of important topics are in the priorities this year. Many different characteristics of the school will be affected and changed. The state’s budget has fallen short this year so, additional funding many not be available to cover the cost of extra concerns.
Instead of asking for more, the district is urging “lawmakers to pull back on unfunded mandates that force schools to divert resources away from core educational needs,” Keister said.
As 2025 rolls in, the new priorities will become part of student’s education. Meanwhile, the district is moving forward with MnMTSS and new safety building projects.
