When my children were in grade school, I was a dedicated saver of “Boxtops for Education.” (My kids and my husband ate a lot of Cheerios.)

One day, however, it struck me that “Boxtops for Education” is an inadequate solution to the problem of adequate and consistent public school financing. 

As I write this, the Saint Paul Federation of Educators and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers petitioned to strike on Wednesday, February 23. This gives the unions and the districts nine more days to negotiate before a strike occurs. The teachers want higher wages, more mental health support for kids, smaller class sizes, and more diversity in hiring. 

The teachers want to help the kids and to help themselves. Is it impossible to focus on all of the children when a few need directed, mental health interventions. In the pandemic, the combination of their students' emotional stress and academic struggles is causing teachers to reach a breaking point. Like nurses in the health care system, they are weary of bearing the physical and emotional brunt of the pandemic.

My teacher friends have told me stories of kids who have hit them and their fellow students. Teachers are working with children who have not consistently been in a structured school setting for two years: 2nd graders are suddenly 4th graders and 8th graders are suddenly 10th graders. Many of these kids are behind not just academically, but socially and emotionally. 

Parents who could afford it have left the public schools for private schools that were more consistently open for in-person instruction. My friend who teaches at a small Catholic elementary school told me that her classroom numbers are higher than ever because of the pandemic. 

Public school financing is a mystery to me. I try to figure it out because I am very interested in education and education funding. I dutifully vote “Yes” to every school funding referendum to increase my property taxes to decrease class sizes. I feel it is my duty as a good citizen. But yet, the class sizes never seem to decrease. Why is that? Where does the money go? 

One year when my youngest daughter was attending Highland Park Senior in St. Paul, Minnesota, she spent the first week or two of school sitting on the floor of her English class until the school got another teacher because the class was too full. How could this have caught the school by surprise?

One year when I was an AVID tutor at the same school, we didn’t have an AVID classroom for some class periods. We had to either sit in a hallway on the floor or go to the cafeteria and help the cafeteria staff finish cleaning the lunch tables before we could start class. I thought, “Boy, these students are really getting a sense of how valued they and the AVID program are at this school.” 

The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University is dedicated to the study of higher education finance: https://edunomicslab.org/. Here are their recommendations. Public school financing should be:

1. Simple and transparent.

2. Equitable for students.

3. Financially sustainable. 

4. Outcome focused.

5. Flexible and adaptable. 

Let’s start with simple and transparent so I can figure out where my school funding referendum money went.