SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO.com) — School officials in Sioux Falls are calling out what they say is fuzzy math from the state Department of Education.
District business manager Todd Vik presented a document from the state DOE at the school board’s meeting Monday night. The document claims South Dakota’s education funding has outpaced inflation in recent years.
Vik said he aimed to “dispel some myths” both in the document and surrounding the issue of teacher funding, one of the most contentious topics in the 2020 state legislature.
Vik said the documents’ numbers were off for the 2017 fiscal year, the year the state introduced a half-cent sales tax hike to help boost school funding. Vik said the DOE’s document accounted for things like pension funding for that year, and the actual amount of money distributed to schools was significantly smaller. Take that out, and the growth in state education funding is just under the rate of inflation.
State spending as a whole has grown more than twice as much as education funding since fiscal year 2012, according to Vik.
The district also pushed back against the notion that increases in education funding won’t find their way to teachers, which Vik said he had heard in conversations with legislators.
“The notion that the state gives schools plenty of money and they just spend it somewhere else is absolutely, 100% wrong,” Vik said. He pointed out that growth in teacher salaries in South Dakota has outpaced growth in per-student school funding as a whole since 1998.
Board President Cynthia Mickelson said she was “frustrated” with how the state portrayed teacher salaries. The DOE used an estimate from the National Education Association in the document the board was examining. Both Vik and Mickelson said U.S. Census Bureau data was more reliable. The state’s Blue Ribbon Task Force used census data when analyzing the situation in 2015.
“Using the census data for the Blue Ribbon as their baseline, and then to use different data to show we’ve given more money, and now what are we doing, is a false narrative,” Mickelson said.
Vik said South Dakota lags behind neighboring states like North Dakota and Iowa in per-student education funding, according to census data.
