• Today, February 13^th, we finished the 20^th day of the 2014 SD Legislative Session.  It's frustrating to watch as a few legislators use the platform of the House or the Senate to grandstand on federal or international issues which are entirely out of our jurisdiction.  Whatever their motives, we are spending an extraordinary amount of time in this unproductive manner.   We have voted on resolutions about Taiwan, auditing the Federal Reserve Board, federal immigration, demanding the Federal government to balance the budget, and more to come.  Because resolutions have no power of law, they seek to merely express opinion.  We were not elected to hear ourselves talk on issues which we have no chance of affecting through the SD legislature.

We're wasting time. I would like to see us spend our limited time working on what really matters to the voters of South Dakota!
• Throughout this past summer, I served on the Task Force on Education Funding.  We heard testimony from administrators, school board members, teachers, parents, and officials from the Department of Education. The 15 member Legislative Task Force recommended a 3.8% increase in the PSA (per-student allocation) and acknowledged the difficulties that school districts in SD face in attracting and retaining teachers. The Governor's Budget has recommended a 3% increase in the PSA (per student allocation) for the 2014-15 school year. That amount would be $4,764 per k-12 student. While this is an improvement, it must be noted that we were at $4,805 in the 2009-10 school year. (We are currently $41 dollars per student behind where we were five years ago!)
Even five years ago, when the PSA was considerably higher, SD teachers were dead last! Things have only gone from bad to worse, and administrators across the state have provided repeated testimony that we are in a crisis in terms of teacher recruitment and retention.  During this same time period, the state has grown revenues. SD has had a 13% increase in General Fund Revenues since fiscal year 2010. During that same time, we had a 3.7% decrease in the PSA  for our schools. 
The state has continued to push the burden of funding schools to the local taxpayers. Of the 151 schools, 66 are currently in opt outs (44 percent) for a total dollar amount of $26,135,562. By comparison, in 2004 we had 52 Districts in opt-outs with a total dollar amount of $15,023,162. Notice the trend in both more schools opting

(Continued on page 7)