As Minnesota spends $857M on at-risk students, debate grows over where the money goes

As Minnesota spends $857M on at-risk students, debate grows over where the money goes Pilar Pedraza KSTP 5 Eyewitness News is staying on top of that call for nearly $1 billion in aid to help struggling Minnesota students succeed. We’ve learned not all of those tax dollars have to stay in the building with the students in need. “I’m most interested in putting the dollars where the kids are and where the need is,” said Matt Shaver with EdAllies . Shaver was one of 14 education experts that Minnesota asked to look at what’s called compensatory funding and find new ways to distribute the dollars meant to help struggling students. Minnesota spent $857 million on compensatory funding this year. One concern Shaver said the task force had was how much of that money stays with the student. “It’s hard to tell if that’s making a big difference in their education if that money can be moved somewhere else,” he said. This specialized funding to help at-risk kids catch up with their classmates goes back to 1969. Since then how much of it has to stay in the building with the student who qualified for help has varied, from everything to half. Currently it’s at 60%. “Our task force ultimately recommended that we should guarantee that at least 70% of all dollars that kids generate at an individual school building go to serve their education,” Shaver said. “We’d like to see it at 100%. We think that this resource is where it is, but this is a compromise.” But, why do districts want or need to use the money elsewhere? Dr. Renee Sbrocco Corneille with the University of Minnesota spent years as a superintendent.  She says a lot of it has to do with district size. “Maybe there are three schools (in the district), and you can’t hire a reading specialist at each school because you don’t have the funding to do that,” she said. But, she added, when allowed to spend some of the money away from a particular building, you can hire one specialist who splits their time among the schools. By allowing the district to spread the funds around a bit, she says a district can help all struggling kids, even if some of those who need the help aren’t in the building that qualified for the extra money. She warned requiring all money to stay directly with the identified struggling students could lead to unintended and unwanted consequences. “We don’t want a system where we say, ‘Oh, all the kids that qualify for compensatory, you’re going to sit in one classroom with one teacher that is compensatory teacher.’ I think, last time I checked, that’s segregation in many ways. We’re never going to do that.” No matter what lawmakers do with the 70% recommendation, current state law says the amount that has to stay with students must return to 80% in the 2028-2029 school year. When lawmakers first set-up compensatory funding, it cost the state $500,000 in 1969. That would be about $4.5 million in today’s dollars. Lawmakers have revamped the funding at least four times since then, in 1971, 1987, 1994-95, and 2000. Each time they expanded which students qualify for the money, including adding English language learners and students with major medical problems to the list. By 2003 the state was spending more than $200 million a year on the program, a total which neared $600 million by the pandemic. Then, from 2023 to 2024 Minnesota saw a 68.7% increase in the cost due to a combination of putting more money per student into the fund and more students qualifying during the pandemic. Compensatory funding now totals roughly $857 million.