The St. Paul school board on Tuesday night approved its first billion-dollar budget for the coming academic year.
The $1.035 billion in spending will require the district to dip into its general fund reserves to cover a $34 million revenue shortfall, but it will allow St. Paul Public Schools to avoid laying off any teachers or paraprofessionals.
The budget gap is largely the result of declining enrollment and the expiration of federal COVID-19 relief grants, which funded scores of jobs in mental health, human resources, finance and other fields within the district. District officials hope to retain many of these employees with this year’s deficit spending.
Other expenditures include funding for a new East African magnet school, teacher recruitment efforts, increased bus routes and safety improvements.
“Never did I think I would be leading a district with a $1 billion budget,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said before the board’s 6-1 vote. “This is an incredible, long-overdue investment in our young people, and they deserve every single penny.”
Although Gothard called this year’s budgeting process the most collaborative he has seen in his six years with the district, his administration was criticized at Tuesday’s meeting for not doing more to engage the community and the board along the way.
Jenelle Hill, a reading teacher at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School who has two kids of her own in the district, described a “lack of stakeholder engagement and transparency” throughout the process.
“It’s really appalling that there’s no detailed report on which stakeholders had input on this budget,” she said.
Board member Uriah Ward, who cast the lone vote against the budget, pointed out that board members only received a copy of the budget book on Friday, four days before they were expected to vote on it.
“It seems as if we’re set up where the board is not given an opportunity to make potential changes,” Ward said. “And that the way we operate now, is that we receive the budget, we ask questions about it, and then we approve it. And that’s been a little frustrating for me.”
District administrators committed to designing a more robust community engagement plan for next year’s budgeting process.
Five spending categories
The district’s general fund will see the largest increase of any spending category under the budget approved Tuesday, growing to $801 million from last year’s $719 million.
The general fund, which constitutes 78 percent of the total budget, covers instructional expenses like teacher salaries, along with maintenance, equipment and administrative support costs.