Austin School Board member Mary Kleis met with legislators in Washington, D.C. to advocate support about issues affecting education.

Kleis was elected to a two-year term on the 12-member Minnesota School Boards Association board of directors after the previous director left her post in the district, which represents schools south and east of Faribault.

“I’m not necessarily representing all the communities; I am representing the board,” she said.

Kleis returned last week from the nation’s capitol, where she met with every Minnesota legislator at the federal level.

“We have a delegate assembly that school board members serve on that decide what issues they want the MSBA to concentrate on at the capitol,”Kleis said. “That is part of my responsibility of being on the board of directors, to use the value statement that the assembly talks about and what’s best for Minnesota.

“It was really a great opportunity to let them know some stories from their district and what the impact is,”she said.

Kleis said the MSBA convened with other states in the National School Boards Association Feb. 1-3.

“It’s looking like some of our voices are heard,”Kleis said. “They each came from a different place; some of them wanted to talk to us, and some wanted to hear where we were coming from.

“I really feel like we were listened to,”she said. “It was very meaningful.”

The MSBA has three major issues they discussed with lawmakers:

Stimulus package

“That was the most timely,”Kleis said of the $800-$900 billion or more economic recovery plan. “There were a couple of things in that stimulus package we wanted to make sure were cleared up.”

In the stimulus package, the Senate has drafted a plan including $26 billion to school districts to fund special education and the No Child Left Behind K-12 law.

Kleis explained the federal government has had a commitment to fund up to 40 percent of the special education mandate; the most it has funded has been 19 percent. The NSBA wants it fully-funded.

“In the package, part of the money given to schools would be to fulfill that funding,”Kleis said. “We wanted to make sure if the federal government gave us money for special education, we wanted to make sure it was an amount we could sustain in the future.”

Kleis said that with so many school districts cutting budgets and just trying to maintain programs, creating new programs would be harmful if they had to be sustained.

The MSBA also advocated funding education for other reasons, like maintaining jobs.

“A lot of the districts are the No. 1 employer in a lot of these communities,”Kleis said.

“The school districts are a very important employer in the community.”

The last part of the stimulus package the MSBA advocated was updating buildings.

“The average age of Austin buildings is 50 years old,”Kleis explained. “A lot of the districts have about 50-year-old buildings.”

If districts were granted funding for updates or technology, “We would be ready to do a construction project right away,”she said.

No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal law, enacted in 2001 by President George W. Bush to increase standards of accountability for schools, is up for renewal.

“What we really wanted to get across is we like the accountability, we like that fact the kids are being reached … what we don’t like is the punitive part of the law,”Kleis said. “We need flexibility, and the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t really work for districts.”

With NCLB, the government pulls funding if schools do not perform up to standard for several consecutive years, with a goal of having all students at 100 proficiency by 2013-14. The law has forced schools to focus much more on test-taking.

“One hundred percent is pretty difficult if, say, you have someone from a different country that comes in,”Kleis said. “They are starting to understand that maybe 100 percent isn’t realistic.”

Kleis said the MSBA is just asking for “realistic perimeters.”

Medicaid

reimbursement

School districts, in collaboration with county health services, identify student needs.

The MSBA is seeking an extension on a law that would pay for Medicaid reimbursement to schools, which was not reauthorized.

Kleis said this “would allow districts to be compensated for identification of student needs.