Editorial: Ratify aid shift for schools' sakes

Minnesota's public schools are on tenterhooks, watching and waiting for state lawmakers to decide what role they will be compelled to play in rebalancing the state's badly listing budget.

Will 17 percent of the 2009-10 school year's state aid payments merely be delayed, as Gov. Tim Pawlenty ordered in July with an unallotment that is now under legal challenge? (And if so, delayed until when?)

Or will schools see their state funds cut, by that or some other amount?

Definitive answers to those questions are likely months away. The final word might not be spoken until 2011, by a new governor and Legislature.

But legislators would give school officials a small measure of certainty if they would accede to Pawlenty's request that they ratify one portion of his July unallotment -- a $1.1 billion, one-time delay in school aid payments.

Schools' anxiety about the status of that move has intensified in the days since Ramsey County District Judge Kathleen Gearin issued a temporary restraining order about an unallotted nutrition program on Dec. 30, arguing that the governor's unilateral budget cuts last summer were constitutionally flawed. Though Gearin and the parties to the suit agreed yesterday to an expedited appeal of her order, unallotment could remain in legal limbo for months. School officials deserve to know ASAP whether the $1.1 billion they're not getting this year is a "school aid shift" akin to previous ones enacted in 1983, 2002 and 2003 -- all of which were eventually repaid -- or something resembling a permanent cut.

Some DFL legislators are dragging their feet about ratifying this gubernatorial move, arguing that the shift is a one-time gimmick that does nothing to permanently solve state government's ongoing money crisis.

Most DFL legislators evidently were open to a school shift as recently as last May, when they included one in the tax-raising bill that Pawlenty vetoed. But in their minds, said House Majority Leader Tony Sertich, a tax increase and the school shift were not severable. Proceeds from the tax increase are needed to repay the schools in the future, he said. The governor, meanwhile, remains as intransigent in opposition to any tax increase as ever -- a point underscored Friday by his spokesman, Brian McClung, after a closed-door meeting with legislative leaders.

Seeing their operating funds caught up in the Capitol's long-running tax fight must be discouraging for schools. It's also disheartening to Minnesotans who were hoping that the severity of the state's money woes would jolt lawmakers into a more cooperative mode.