The second week of the 2024 Legislative Session is behind us and the primary bill of interest to Minnesota’s E-12 education community in front of the Legislature right now is HF 3489 (Frazier)/SF 3534 (Westlin).  This bill would clear up the confusion that surrounded the passage of the non-exclusionary discipline policy in last year’s Omnibus E-12 Finance and Policy bill and caused a number of municipalities and counties to pull School Resource Officers out of school buildings.

The 2024 Legislative Session started on Monday, February 12, and the Legislature is swinging into action. The first week in the education world largely focused on issues related to school resource officers and legislation aimed at removing concerns expressed by the law enforcement community after changes made to discipline policies during the 2023 session. This became a hot political issue right after the 2023 session as a number of interests—particularly law enforcement—felt that the language in the non-exclusionary discipline provisions past last session was vague and left school resource officers in an uncomfortable position as what they could and could not do in situations that required their intervention.

2023 Omnibus Education Finance and Policy Bill’s highlighted by SEE staff.

And . . . we have a bill! It didn’t take that long once things started falling in place and the education finance and policy committee came to an agreement on Friday and finalized its proceedings on Saturday morning. The outline of the bill should be familiar as the contents in the Senate and House bills—and the Governor’s recommendations—have largely mirrored each other throughout the bill construction process. The major elements of the final agreement were central in the discussion by all participants from early-January although there was a difference in the degree of importance of some provisions accorded to these initiatives in the two omnibus bills and the Governor’s recommendations.

This week’s update will also contain a legislative alert that I hope will spur members into action as the Legislature enters its most crucial phase of the 2023 legislative session. The conference committee is now upon us, and the big decisions are right around the corner. With the overall budget targets agreed upon by the Governor and the two legislative bodies in advance of the construction of the budget bills in both houses, there are not massive differences between the two bills. There are differences in priorities with each House shuffling dollars around to different programs to a varying degree, but both the House and Senate put money on the basic formula, cut into the special education cross-subsidy, reduce the English learner cross-subsidy, create a new revenue stream for student support personnel, and money for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. The House does create a program to pay for the additional time required to complete due process paperwork and an improvement to the transportation sparsity formula while the Senate has a newly proposed disparity aid program that provides revenue to districts with low levels of categorical revenue within the general education formula. But those proposals are clearly at the margins of these bills.