Sauk Rapids-Rice Facing $2.4 Million Budget Deficit

SAUK RAPIDS (WJON News) -- The Sauk Rapids-Rice School District needs to make some budget cuts for the next school year.

Superintendent Brad Bergstrom says the district is facing a $2.4 million deficit.

He says last year the state made a historic investment of $2.2 billion in education funding. However, a lot of that new money comes with strings attached.

There's really two big reasons.  Number one is that of the funding that was brought forward by the state in the last go-round there's was also a tremendously large number of mandates that came with that.

Bergstrom says the new mandates have taken about half of the new money invested in schools.

He says the other issue is education funding is not keeping up with inflation.

Sauk Rapids-Rice is also having to deal with declining enrollment.

We're continuing to see larger classes graduating. We have been graduating between 340 and 360 for the last several years, and we've been bringing in around 300 at our kindergarten level.

Bergstrom says with 80 percent of the budget being salaries, staff cuts will need to be made but isn't ready to say yet how many jobs may be lost.

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Meanwhile, the district still has two outstanding contracts with its unions with one tentative agreement having been reached.

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