The Minneapolis school board on Tuesday discussed potentially painful cuts to address its $33 million budget shortfall.
Since the deficit for the next school year was revealed this fall, Minneapolis schools Superintendent Ed Graff has said he's considering all options to find savings in the state's third-largest school district. That includes potentially changing start times and asking voters for more money in a 2018 referendum.
"These are difficult conversations and hard decisions that we're going to have to make," Graff said.
For the past seven years, the school district has dipped into its emergency reserves to plug budget gaps.
Pulling from the dwindling reserves is no longer an option, district officials say, and it's forcing them to consider large-scale overhauls.
The district has to make tough choices to stem the cycle of "balancing a budget with such significant numbers," Graff said.
Minneapolis Public Schools estimates that about $25 million will be left in its rainy-day reserve fund by the start of the 2018-19 school year. This pot of money, called the fund balance, is "used for unanticipated or emergency situations, or to make important one-time investments in district initiatives," according to the district's website.
For the past several years, reserves were "healthy enough to access to overcome deficits, and because we knew we had this money available, significant funding changes were not made at that time," the district's website said. For a couple of years, the board spent reserves money on capital projects because those funds were too high, board Chairwoman Rebecca Gagnon said at the meeting.
