Lori Sturdevant: Rattling the tin cup before voters

Parents in Anoka-Hennepin School District 11, the state's largest, catch on pretty quickly to the reasons to reauthorize an existing property tax levy and bump it a bit higher.

And well they should: As many as eight schools, including one of the district's five high schools, will close next fall and more than 500 teachers will receive pink slips if at least two of the four proposed levy questions do not win voter approval Nov. 6.

In addition, remedial courses for needy students and advanced-placement courses for gifted students will disappear. An applied-learning high school co-located at Anoka Technical College and considered a national model, will close. Many extracurricular activities will vanish; those that remain will charge steep participation fees. Class sizes will swell to among the largest in the state.

Those stakes explain why, when parents at Anoka's Washington Elementary School discussed the levy with school board member Tom Heidemann on Tuesday night, their questions ran along the lines of "Where can we get a yard sign?" (from Heidemann's trunk) and "Where do I vote?" (Polling places in school elections can vary from general elections. Voters should double-check their voting location.)

But parent Lori Posterick had deeper questions -- of a sort that voters in the other 98 Minnesota school districts turning to their voters this fall are probably asking, too.

"Does every district in the state face this?" Posterick asked. "Does the general public understand what's going on here?"

In other words, why? Why, five years after the last recession ended and three years after red ink receded from state budgets, are more than a quarter of the state's schools rattling the tin cup with voters this fall?

And is somebody being spared by political protectors, while others are placed at risk?

Well, yes. Favorites were played by the 2007 Legislature. But that was recompense for the favorites that were played in the opposite direction in previous years. School districts with large special-education populations -- Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, St. Cloud and a few more -- suffered when state special-ed subsidies were frozen in 2003. When the political balance shifted in those districts' favor this year, they engineered a thaw.

That meant narrowing the per-pupil increase to a trickle in the 2008-09 school year. Anoka-Hennepin projects less than 1 percent growth in state funding next year, not enough to keep pace with inflation.

But that's only a small part of what has 99 of the state's 341 school districts pleading for taxpayers' help.

The bigger story is the accretion of two decades of coping with chronic financial strain by making regular runs to the ballot box. School boards have turned their option to seek voters' permission for "a little extra" -- hence the name "excess" levies -- into a way to sustain basic operations. As Heidemann explained Tuesday, discretionary levies are now "part of the system" for nearly all districts.

Since those levies were supposed to be for extras, they aren't permanent. Most, like the one Anoka-Hennepin voters approved in 2002, have a five-year term.

That means on one day in November every five years, voters are given the chance to kick the struts out from under school programs. In Anoka-Hennepin, a huge 22.5 percent of the district's discretionary budget is on the line on election day.

In this state, no other governmental unit puts as large a share of its enterprise up for voter reauthorization. Cities don't ask voters every five years whether to keep 22 percent of their police force on the job. The state doesn't ask whether 22 percent of subsidies to nursing home residents should be cut.

Asking schools to go begging to the voters is not an orderly way to build a world-class education system. It's a crap shoot.

The outcome in District 11 and other districts around the state is by no means certain. School referenda afford taxpayers their only opportunity to push back against rising property taxes -- and they've been rising, plenty fast. As the big baby boom generation ages, a smaller share of voters have personal ties to public schools.

The $22 per month that average voters will pocket if "no" prevails might look awfully tempting to some voters. A stock-market crash the week before the election, a surge in home foreclosures, a calamity that depresses turnout -- on such influences Minnesota is allowing the quality of its K-12 education to hang.

"It takes time to build" a quality school system, parent Michelle Donaldson ruefully observed, "but no time to take it down." In Minnesota, it only takes a single election day.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.