18/09/2024
OK, some of you probably read my post below this one that focused on this line from Gov.Kristi Noem's weekly column last Friday:
"South Dakota schools spend more money complying with federal regulations than they actually receive in federal funding."
I wondered about that. And these days when I wonder about things I often start a conversation here. When I did, some suggested I do some reporting. (Dang, a guy just can't hide from his past, even in retirement!)
So I did a little reporting, with emphasis on "little." I sent a text to Noem communications chief Ian Fury asking if he had data to substantiate what Noem's column said. He referred me to Nancy Van Der Weide in the state Department of Education, who sent me this response from state Education Secretary Joe Graves:
""For the sake of simplicity, let’s just look at South Dakota school districts’ general fund accounts. This is the account that pays for salaries, building utilities, instructional materials and supplies—basically all the regular costs for running a school.
�“In South Dakota, of all the revenues schools receive for their general fund, only about 7.5% of those come from the federal government. (To avoid any skewing because of COVID dollars, we used total federal revenues $79,993,520 in FY 2020 divided by total general fund expenditures $1,073,486,569.)
�"Given that, it would seem reasonable that the federal government would have 7.5% of the say of what goes on in schools but, in fact, it is much, much larger than that.
�"Even though the federal constitution includes no authority over schools by the federal government—because education is a role reserved to the states—they still manage to have an immense amount of influence. For example, the federal No Child Left Behind legislation (now referred to as the Every Student Succeeds Act) essentially took over school curricula—pushing hard on English language arts and math and all but eliminating science and the social studies at the elementary level, restricting recesses, and limiting time spent on the arts.
�
"Title programming comes with vast swaths of regulation, but schools feel they must accept the dollars because they are so hungry for the extra dollar of school funding.
�"Special education funding also comes with vast amounts of regulation and has never been funded at even half the rate originally promised.
�"Changes in Title IX come with large price tags even for states where the new rules are largely unacceptable.
"In other words, in a constitutional system in which education is specifically reserved to the states, the federal government has taken control over a great deal of what happens in schools by funding just 7.5% of school general funds. Quite a deal."
I suspect some might argue with how Graves categorized the effects of the Every Student Succeeds Act, although he was in education for 37 years and was Mitchell schools superintendent for 23 years before joining Noem's cabinet.
So he knows a bit about running a school and how federal funds and regs affect the process.
Given what Graves says here, there seems, to me, to be no way to put a dollar figure on the overall costs of complying with federal regulations. Nor is there a way to precisely judge the benefits those regulations might have to the education of our kids, beyond test scores. But I'm guessing that Graves -- and Noem -- are right that overall the federal bucks South Dakota schools receive fall short -- perhaps well short, if special ed is any indication -- of matching the costs to comply.
I guess the greater question might be: Are the federal requirements and the apparent imbalance in costs versus revenue worth it to South Dakota's schools and, especially, to their students?
