Governor Tim Walz says the teachers’ strike in the Saint Paul Public School District demonstrates the state needs to restructure the way it pays for education — another “Minnesota Miracle.” The governor says, “Those teachers are out there… asking to make sure that they have the resources necessary to provide for mental health, provide for the safe well-being of those students in the classroom, and the district is out there arguing and saying, we don’t have the resources to do that.”
Minnesota House Democrats propose using a third of the state’s 1.5-billion-dollar budget surplus for early childhood education programs. But any long-term change to education funding in Minnesota would not likely happen until at least the 2021 legislative session when lawmakers set a new two-year state budget.