By Keighla Schmidt, Staff Writer 

An analysis presented to the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School Board last month revealed the district has spent more money on special education when compared to comparable districts over the past two school years.

In the 2006-07 school year, $13,972,235 was spent in District 191 on special education. When compared to the Bloomington, Lakeville and North St. Paul school districts, North St. Paul had the closest tally, which lagged more than $1 million behind at $12,495,541.

While having the highest expenditures, Burnsville-Eagan-Savage also employs the most professional and paraprofessional staff, it had the highest-paid employees in 2005-06 and second highest in 2006-07. What’s more, the district had the highest cost per special education student at $9,629.

“We spent a lot of time in our district talking about programming, especially special education,” Superintendent Ben Kanninen said. “Our interest is specifically in the funding of special education.”

Unlike other funding, special education isn’t based on a child count; rather it is based on previous spending, said Business Manager Mark Stotts.

Funding for special education comes from multiple sources, including the general education funding, state special education base revenue, excess cost revenue, federal funds and third party revenue.

“This is a very complicated thing that we do,” Chairwoman Vicki Roy said. “It isn’t simple to explain.”

The complexities are in the variances from general funding. Those differences are vast and the consequences are also significant.

According to the federal maintenance of effort law, a district must spend the same amount or more money from one year to the next to avoid heavy fines from the state. With limited exceptions, a district not meeting the minimum requirement will face the general fund being reduced by the same amount of money the special education fund was condensed.

So cutting costs or finding ways to save money, is essentially not an option because districts will likely be punished.

In the 2006-07 school year, the state reimbursed 59.6 percent of the special education costs in District 191; the rest was paid for by the general education revenue to the tune of $9,842,782.

That reimbursement, Stotts said, improved from the previous year, which was 53.6 percent and should continue to improve as the state has made efforts to help funding. Specifically, Stotts said, the district can expect to get $1.2 to 2 million for the current school year.

The comparison of the districts, however, was not meant to alert the board to excessive or unnecessary spending, but rather to provide a benchmark.

“This is not meant to be a criticism of Burnsville in anyway, Burnsville may be doing everything right,” said Special Education Consultant Bob Fischer, who presented the analysis to the board. “You don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from.”

Board Member Ron Hill said he recognized the issue as a complicated one. “This is a challenge. We can’t cut, but what we need to do is get our maintenance of efforts in line with the maintenance of efforts of other districts,” hesaid. “This is going to take years.”

Missing from Fischer’s analysis was the type of special education students each district is serving.

Board Member Todd Johnson said he was concerned about the comparisons because a certain disability may cost more than others. “You can’t change the bowl of fruit that comes to our district,” he said. “We may look similar, but each case is completely different.”

Fischer said the comparison was still a valid one because the districts are all large enough to assume they are very similar.

The board did not take any action on the report, but directed Individualized Student Services Director Stephanie Corbey to do more investigating to see if the money is being spent in the most efficient way and to come back at a later point and present ways to be proficient in the future.

“We may find what we’re doing is the right thing,” Roy said. “We could have the correct model.”

Recognizing the matter as a complicated one, Board Member Dan Luth said he wanted to know what the board could do to help and what the first baby step in the right direction would be.

“This is a bottom up problem, and it’s going to take bottom up solutions,” Luth said. “I’m high, so help me understand, start to trickle them up to us.”

 Keighla Schmidt can be reached at kschmidt@swpub.com [2].