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I am the co-chair of the Yes To Kids levy campaign in Stillwater, ISD834. I am writing to you to tell you the lessons I have learned from this experience and why this is an absolutely insane way to fund schools.

I own a multi-state business. I am a Republican. I know what it involved in meeting a payroll, corporate finance etc...

Since I have agreed to co-chair this effort, I have been essentially working half time. That means that I am generating less income tax revenue for the state. I am creating less jobs for the state. I am doing less to make this state more globally competitive as I spend my time figuring how to deal with the political fundraising, the organization, the marketing of this levy campaign. It is pretty much the same story for our 17 person steering committee and the hundreds of volunteers who are putting (collectively) thousands of hours to make this happen. The sick part of this is that we are going to have to do this all over again in 6 years.

This levy effort has been so expensive for me that if I were to have put this time into my business, I could have paid for my children's private school tuition for the rest of their K-12 careers at the most expensive private school in the city. I am committed to public education, but this is ridiculous and it is ridiculous for you to expect this of our parents and citizens to fund that which we need to keep our standard of living.

When this is over, I get to go back to my 'normal' volunteering as a PTA president of a large Jr. High school where I can devote even more hours to fundraising to support needed classroom materials and academic enrichment—things that used to be paid for by the state.

So, by setting up this Rube Goldberg funding mechanism at the state level, that cannot be easily explained to a taxpayer trying to understand the mess that school finance has become, you are really causing our communities to distrust their school districts—the very institutions that cause many towns and cities to maintain a vibrancy by having a future that is secure with children that will return to be productive members of that community. Who thought up this mess?

Now, let’s look at the devastation that a community faces when it fails its levies and only gets the state funding for a "basic" education. Class sizes mushroom, property values drop between 10-25%, families with children move out or fail to move in and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle.

Meanwhile the Chinese and Indians are figuring out how to educate their populations and they are figuring out how to get Minnesotan's jobs while we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic (also known as Minnesota Public Schools). The sad thing is that it is a situation entirely of our own making—namely by the legislature and the Governor. We fiddle with levies while Rome burns...

Please, PLEASE do something about this arcane house of mirrors that school finance has become. Fund it properly. Fund it generously, and get rid of the needless complexity and arbitrary politics. Let's get this back to the Minnesota Miracle—a time when Minnesota led the nation in education and no one was even close. That lead to a period of unprecedented prosperity in this state that just now we can begin to see its end on the horizon (coincidentally after our commitment to education dropped). If we want to keep it going, we need to properly and efficiently and generously fund public education.

Regards,
John Sievert
Lakeland, MN