By Beth Hawkins | Published Thur, Jun 23, 2011 9:14 am
Among public-sector budgeting geeks, the name Peggy Ingison is often uttered in reverential terms. She was Minnesota's commissioner of finance during former Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s first term. Before that, she spent eight years as the state budget director and 14 as a Senate fiscal analyst.
The specific of said rhapsodizing is lost on those of us who’ve forgotten long division, but the general takeaway is that she can tease overlooked nickels from a spreadsheet simply by waggling her fingers over it.
Over the last few days, in her capacity as Minneapolis Public Schools' chief financial officer, a post she’s held since 2006, Ingison has been crunching and recrunching some mighty hefty numbers to try to figure out what will happen after the state government shuts down and she is, to put it mildly, frustrated.
“It’s just a waste,” she said yesterday. “We are all public entities and we are spending a lot of unproductive energy on this.”
This being the process of trying to wrest every cent possible from her harried counterparts at the equally frustrated state Department of Education, which has money and will continue to get federal funds but where there soon will be no one on hand to cut checks.
Summer school starts next week
Ingison’s boss, Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson, doesn’t want the shutdown to effect MPS’ families and students. Summer school starts next week, the district is committed to feeding needy kids over the break — a bunch of them newly homeless North Side tornado victims — and high-school seniors have makeup work to do.
Adding insult to injury, July just happens to be a three-paycheck month for district employees, who are paid biweekly.
MPS spends an average of $40 million a month, and Ingison figures the money on hand will stretch until the first or second week of August. After that, the district will have to borrow — an expensive process she’s already set in motion.
Two years of unallotments and funding shifts have forced most Minnesota districts to begin relying at least in part on credit — indeed, next week Ingison will squeeze a few more nickels from the ether by refinancing an existing bond — but there are limits.
“People have been asking that question: Let’s pretend it’s September 1,” she said. “I just can’t imagine that. We have to start making the gigantic teacher payroll in September. I don’t know if we can borrow that much.”
'The charters are really stuck'Still, it’s hard for her to think of MPS’ ability to sell bonds as a blessing, given that five years of double-digit budget cuts have left kids sitting in hallways and window wells.
“It’s hard to imagine what it’s going to take to bring people together,” she continued, not exactly calling out the electeds for whom she used to decipher the ledgers. “People just backed themselves into a corner.”
And then: “These are the same folks who are critical of government inefficiency. Well, here’s a built-in inefficiency.”
And finally: “Oh, well. I’m just one of a couple of hundred thousand people who feel that way.”
Beth Hawkins writes about education — from preschool through college and beyond — in Learning Curve. Hawkins has covered a variety of subjects for MinnPost since its launch in 2007, but has a particular passion for reporting on education. In addition to her conviction that education is one of today's most pressing issues on a policy level, she's motivated by her experience advocating for her two sons in great schools and not-so-great ones. Hawkins is the recipient of numerous national and regional awards, including several first-place Society of Professional Journalists Page One awards for investigative reporting and feature writing. Her work has appeared in More, Mother Jones, Minnesota Monthly and many other publications. She can be reached at bhawkins@minnpost.com.
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