It’s beyond disingenuous, even by the standards of the Tim Walz administration, to deprive private schools of $109 million in the upcoming budget preparation in the name of reflecting “positive balances on the bottom line.’’
You want to take way the pocket change that has been helping private schools for 50 years? You could find $109 million in the couch cushions at the Department of Education or Health and Human Services or at Walz’s office or any authorities or agencies that have watched, incompetently, money fraudulently leak out of the Capitol to the tune now of more than $600 million.
That $109 million is all the private schools get, by the way. It is used for busing and some textbooks and counseling and nursing. Nursing. You know, for when the governor mandates masks and vaccines and things like that. The taxpayers are already paying for these services on top of the sacrifices they make to pay for the private school tuition. And we’re supposed to believe that after Walz signed off on blowing a more than $17 billion budget surplus and presiding over more than $600 million in taxpayer money lost to fraud that he suddenly developed a keen interest in fiduciary responsibility. And he wants to take it out on private school kids, or more to the point, their parents, who know when they sign up they are paying twice, for their kid and a public school kid.
It is far more likely that Walz finds private education disagreeable to his ideological flirtations and that he can look smart to Education Minnesota, the union that supports him and whose members cannot possibly educate a child as inexpensively as a private school.
Back in 1969 state statute required public school districts to provide private school children with transportation within the public school’s districts in an effort to provide equality of treatment in transportation. In 1975 Minnesota began providing nonpublic student aid in the form of textbooks, instructional materials, standardized tests and some guidance counseling and health services. It’s been on the books for 50 years. It absolutely could not happen today. The people we’ve managed to elect are most often appalled at the idea of education other than what the state commands.
Private schools are not burdened by the layers and layers and layers of bureaucratic balderdash from the state. They don’t have five assistant principals. Usually one principal and she’ll wonder why your uniform shirt isn’t tucked in. They can operate streamlined, thus more efficiently and at less cost. A bulletproof argument can be made that private schools save the state money. Using figures I’ve been intimately familiar with during the 50 years in question, the private schools can educate a kid for about $10,000 a year, while it approaches $30,000 a year in the public academies.
It should not go unmentioned that the state is facing a $6 billion budget shortfall. I suppose it stands to reason that if you irresponsibly blow an unimaginably huge surplus on God knows how many new state programs the till is bound to be short a few bucks come the next budget cycle.
That’s the cycle we’re in, the next one. The bills are due from that wild DFL frat party you all had to celebrate your trifecta. You’re short by an astounding $6 billion. Boy, that’s some governing. And this guy is out on tour hoping to get noticed as a presidential hopeful.
Cutting the pittance set aside for private schools could land only a very soft blow to $6 billion. Why, $6 billion won’t even feel the punch. It’s typical of how the Walz administration treats the taxpayers.
It’s an insult.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic’’ podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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