Endorsement: Vote yes with confidence for more school funding
From the editorial: "Minnesota’s outdated method of distribution from the Permanent School Fund cost students $28 million in one year alone."
By FCC Editorial Advisory Board
Today at 8:00 AM
This sounds too good to be true: More money for public education, at no new or additional cost to taxpayers, and without draining the principal of the funding source, the Minnesota Permanent School Fund.
But it is true. “You can actually trust (it),” Rep. Spencer Igo of Wabana Township told a Forum News Service reporter earlier this month.
He’s the Republican author of a bill in the House that helped put a constitutional amendment on the Nov. 3 ballot in Minnesota to make the hard-to-believe school-funding improvement a reality — if voters approve.
And they should. While the Constitution should never be altered lightly, Minnesotans can vote “yes” with confidence for this one. A long-overdue modernization, really, voter approval would change the percentage of proceeds from the fund and how those proceeds get distributed annually to every school district in the state.
Voters can resist the urge to leave the measure blank on their ballots, too, as that would count as a vote in opposition.
“It could mean millions and millions of dollars that … truly are owed to the students,” Sen. Mary Kunesh of Sartell, the DFL author of the companion bill in the Senate, said in an interview with the editorial advisory board for Forum Communications. “(Voting no) would be like leaving these dollars on the table and not getting them to the kids who really need them.”
Bolstering education funding was the whole idea when the fund was established more than a century and a half ago, in 1858, the year Minnesota became a state. Minnesota and other states took advantage of a 1785 national policy that allows states to use public-land assets for schools. Timber sales, mining, and land leases on about 2.5 million acres of designated school trust lands in Minnesota continue to fuel our state’s fund to this day. Most of Minnesota’s school trust lands, 92% of them, are in 10 northern Minnesota counties.
The fund has been growing at a healthy clip of about 6% to 8% annually. It stood at $675 million in 2010 but has since ballooned to $2.3 billion.
Sensing an opportunity to do more good with the additional dollars, the Legislature in 2024 created the Permanent School Fund Task Force to determine how. The fund’s distribution process had never been changed or updated, not once in the fund’s 168 years.
Task force members tapped the expertise of consultant groups, picked the brains of financial experts, and studied the best practices of professionals administering hundreds of private and public endowments at universities and elsewhere.
They learned that distributing the money how it’s always been done, based on interest and dividends alone, was “archaic,” as task force member Denise Dittrich, the director of government relations at the Minnesota School Boards Association, said. Voters will be asked to approve using full market value instead, the way most endowments nowadays base their distributions.
The task force also learned that increasing distributions from 2.5% to 4.5% of its three-year average would still be responsible while increasing dollars for everything from classroom supplies to teacher pay, construction projects, maintenance, and more.
Had these changes been in place in 2025, the $58.6 million distributed would have been $86 million, or $33 more per student. In other words, Minnesota’s outdated method of distribution from the Permanent School Fund cost students $28 million in one year alone.
While some larger Minnesota school districts stand to gain millions as a result of voter approval, many others would receive “enough to maybe save a teacher or a program,” as task force member Paul Peltier, who’s also chair of a "Vote Yes" group working to get the constitutional amendment passed, stated.
No matter what the amount, “It is not chump change,” Sen. Kunesh said. “And we have also strengthened the guardrails around ensuring that these funds are there into perpetuity. We are not trying to drain the fund in any way, shape, or form."
In the Nov. 3 election, Minnesota voters can heed those words — and also the sentiment of Rep. Igo, who said, “Let’s change the constitution (so) we can get more money to the kids, like our state’s founders intended.”
This endorsement was determined by the FCC Editorial Advisory Board based on news reporting, interviews, and other research. It was approved by FCC ownership.
