At the same Wednesday meeting the school board terminated – also effective June 10 – nine long-term substitute teacher and 14 probationary (three years or less) teacher positions.

Tuesday, July 13, 1999

At the same Wednesday meeting the school board terminated – also effective June 10 – nine long-term substitute teacher and 14 probationary (three years or less) teacher positions. While the long-term subs come into the position knowing it’s temporary, the effect of the cuts on the probationary, or non-tenured, teachers is sometimes a change of career. Even if they do get the opportunity to come back, sometimes the unknown takes a teacher out of the classroom

"Anytime we have cuts like this, we normally end up cutting the youngest individuals," Gordon Kuehne, president of the teacher’s union in Austin, said. "We lose some quality individuals that won’t come back. Aides and teachers both can go out in today’s market and find jobs that might pay better and will probably be more secure."

It isn’t only Austin’s school board who voted on teacher and staff cuts. In West St. Paul, 25 percent of teachers got layoff notices. In Fergus Falls the school board has announced a salary freeze.

Sandra Peterson, Co-President of Education Minnesota, talks about what built Minnesota’s budget surplus, namely "long years of inadequate school funding." She, and many other educators, want larger education formula increases – the amount the state pays for each student – to get schools back in the black.

In more than one district superintendent’s eyes, many of the problems in the Austin Public School district and many others dates back to the 1970s, when the state of Minnesota decided to take the burden of paying for education off the local taxpayers and provide the money itself. Unfortunately, Minnesota’s legislators don’t usually vote on education funding until the end of the session in May and then it takes someone or many people some weeks to translate that figure into something meaningful for the individual school districts. That translation may arrive as late as July, yet the district has to have a tentative budget put together by the beginning of June.

Another problem stems from the fact that the state has failed to keep up with inflation and increased technology costs. According to an update from Education Minnesota, the basic formula allowance for K-12 schools has fallen behind the rate of inflation by nearly 10 percent in the ’90s.

Gov. Jesse Ventura has proposed spending $560 million for K-12 on primarily two things: the basic formula and smaller classes. The Legislature has yet to vote on K-12 funding.