The Duluth District just had to borrow twenty million to keep running, something it hadn’t done, if I remember correctly, since before I was on the school board. One of the reasons for this is the state’s delaying giving school districts state aid on time. If the State delays payments for a couple months and Districts can’t pay their teachers then they have to borrow money from banks and pay interest to do it.
According to this article the recent “compromise” plan of the GOP offered to Governor Mark Dayton included delaying an additional $700 million to schools. This says that the Governor was OK with that if not to the overall compromise:
Delayed school aid payments. The accounting maneuver helped Pawlenty finish a budget in 2009, when he exercised his executive authority to push $1.2 billion in school payments into the next fiscal year. The price of balancing the state’s books this way is that schools have to wait longer for the money, and the payments must be caught up if budget surpluses return. As the current shutdown started, both sides released documents showing that Republicans had proposed delaying another $700 million in school payments, and Dayton was open to it.
No matter how the state’s budget is resolved I think we can expect it will be solved in large part on the back of school districts.
