Budget Ax Falls on Minnesota Schools

Barbara Fiehn is about to learn first-hand what it's like to be a statistic. Fiehn, media services coordinator for the Rochester public schools, will be out of a job when the school year ends, the victim of massive budget cuts now sweeping Minnesota's public schools.

Rochester, one of the hardest-hit districts, has already issued 75 pink slips in an effort to close a $10-million budget gap in the coming school year. Other districts face similar cuts, the result of what educators describe as a bare-bones K–12 budget proposed by Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura.

For many of Minnesota's school libraries, the grim situation caps years of lean budgets. "It's going to make a difficult situation worse," says Anne Schroeder, media facilitator for the Anoka-Hennepin public schools, a large district in suburban Minneapolis. Schroeder says her collections are already aging and inadequate. But with the district trying to close a $6-million budget shortfall, the chances of improvement are slim. One result of the upcoming cuts will be that several elementary school librarians who now shuttle between two media centers will have to spread their time among three. "Collection development, buying new books, getting to know the teachers, and seeing the curriculum needs—anything we know of as best practices dies on the vine," Schroeder says.

Rochester, a middle-class city best known for the Mayo Clinic, has provided fairly well for its school libraries: $9 per student for materials and a comfortable budget for online databases. But the $9 figure will drop to zero next year, while elementary media specialists, who for the last decade have worked on a flexible schedule, will now have to spend half their time covering teacher planning time. All told, says Fiehn, libraries are losing $600,000 of a nearly $1-million budget.

Though Governor Ventura actually proposed an increase in the state education budget, it's a minuscule increase—$114 million on an $8.5-billion budget, or about 1.3 percent over two years. (Minnesota runs on a two-year budget cycle.) The problem, says Judy Bull, co-chair of legislation for the Minnesota Educational Media Organization, is that while the budget remains nearly static, districts are trying to cope with rising costs for things like wages, fuel, health insurance, and special education. The state House and Senate have each proposed somewhat higher increases—$355 million and $450 million, respectively—but even those two- or three-percent increases would leave little left for things like books. "If we get three percent this year, we'll be lucky," says Bull. But, she adds, "most cost-of-living increases are about that."

Elaine Keefe, who lobbies for the media organization, says although librarians could sorely use a dedicated line in the state budget, the current mood in the capital is against earmarked funds. So the state's school librarians are focusing instead on two other goals. One is to restore a school-library management job that was cut about a decade ago at the state Department of Children, Families, and Learning. The other is to commission a study of school libraries that would look at the link between media centers and student performance and at collection and staffing problems around the state. "We hear all this anecdotal stuff about the decline of media centers and a lack of staff," says Keefe. "But we don't have hard data that we can use at the local level."