Siouxland schools waiting for Iowa lawmakers to pass education funding bill

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KCAU)– Under law, Iowa lawmakers are required to pass the State Supplementary Assistance bill almost a month after Governor Reynold’s budget proposal. However, officials were unable to pass it on time, putting schools in a sticky situation.

“The education funding bill, known as SSA, sets the rate of increase for budgeting purchases for the following school year,” Lawton-Bronson Community School District superintendent Chad Shook said.

“Then we use that funding to fund our school in general, our entire instructional program is funded through that,” Woodbury Central Community School District superintendent Doug Glackin said.

Currently, lawmakers are discussing between a 2.5% and 4% increase in SSA funding for the 2024-2025 school year. Iowa school districts are required to submit their budgets by April 15th, which has some schools guessing what to write down.

“So at Lawton-Bronson we’ve set the increase at zero, because we want to plan for the worst case scenario,” Shook said. “And the unfortunate thing is that gives our taxpayers the highest possible tax rate.”

“We had to put in our best guess, right, of what the supplemental state aid was going to be, and kind of work from that to determine what our tax rates are,” Glackin said.

With uncertainty in the air for how much school districts will receive from the SSA, teachers’ pay is on the minds of many officials.

“This is the time of year we would normally be negotiating with our teachers,” Shook said. “We’ve had to set our teacher negotiations back. In fact, we haven’t had any meetings yet at this point to negotiate with our teachers on next year’s salary, because we don’t have any idea what the legislature is going to set it at.”

“They don’t know how much we have, we don’t know how much we have, we don’t know what’s going on with the other bills like the minimum pay for teachers,” Glackin said.

Woodbury Central Community School District officials said that while this isn’t the first time they’ve had to wait on SSA funds to be approved, they understand why it takes time to pass.

“We’re used to working at their rate, they’ve got a difficult job, they’ve got a bigger budget than me by far, so they got a lot of work to do on their budget,” Glackin said. “So they’ve got a lot of pieces to it that need to be figured out before they set supplemental state aid.”

Both Lawton-Bronson and Woodbury Central have already or plan to soon discuss next year’s school budget. Currently, the SSA bill is in the senate waiting to be discussed.

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