Two days after Lisa Sayles-Adams began her new role as superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, the district’s budget committee sent her a list of recommendations to cut from the district budget and close an estimated $90 million budget deficit.

Senior leadership, including Sayles-Adams, made significant changes to that proposal before it was shared with the school board in March, restoring many of the budget committee's proposed budget cuts.

This was the second year the district had used a budget committee and a process called priority-based budgeting to form its budget.

When the board approved the final budget in June, the use of reserves had nearly doubled from the budget committee’s proposal, spending increased by $18 million compared to the prior school year, and the district stayed on its current path to deplete its reserves by the end of next school year.

The district has already convened the first of two budget committees to develop next year’s budget. The committees will face many of the same trade-offs as the district faced last year as it tries to close another large, but still unknown, budget deficit, while minimizing the impact to students.  

Department leaders presented budget proposals to the committee in January, which classified their requests as compliance, restricted funding, strategic plan values or non-prioritized strategies.

The budget committee targeted cuts at program for non-prioritized strategies, which are either not required by State or federal law or by the district’s labor agreements, or not aligned with the district’s strategic plan.

“There will need to be de-prioritization of good programs and services that have been historically funded, in order to remain operational and legally compliant,” the budget committee wrote in its proposal.

Through a public records request, Minneapolis Schools Voices obtained over 750 pages of documents and emails related to the budget process covering the first weeks of Sayles-Adams tenure with the district. In addition to the budget committee’s initial proposal, the documents include five documents summarizing modifications made during cabinet meetings.

The initial recommendations of district department leaders are detailed in a chart at the beginning of the materials emailed to Sayles-Adams on Feb. 10. The chart also includes whether the budget committee members agreed with the department leader’s recommendations.

Many of the recommended budget cuts  focused on reducing outside contracts, non-salary expenses or extended-time expenses, while the proposed budget increases were mainly for adding additional staff.

Ultimately, the budget committee proposed 16 major cuts, totaling $57 million. The committee acknowledged that many of the cuts would be controversial, such as eliminating the Office of Black Student Achievement and the Office of Latine Achievement.

This was the second year the district has used priority-based budgeting and a budget committee. In 2023, the budget committee included then interim superintendent Rochelle Cox, as well as her cabinet members.

The district’s former senior academic officer Aimee Fearing and former Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox co-chaired the committee. The committee also included Senior Human Resources Officer Alicia Miller, former Associate Superintendent Dr. Michael Walker, Associate Superintendent Laura Cavender, former Director of Budget and Planning Thom Rothke, Lake Nokomis Keewaydin Principal Kristiana Ward, and Assistant Principal at Southwest High School Jessica Busse.

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What did the budget committee suggest cutting?

The committee proposed scaling back the intervention triad program from $29 million to $8 million and funding the program with compensatory revenue. The committee recommended that the program be focused only on literacy, and be used to provide intervention staff to comply with the READ Act. One of the READ Act’s provisions requires districts to provide literacy intervention for students who are not proficient at grade level.

The budget committee also proposed a $10 million cut to the IT department, based on the department’s underspending of its budget in prior years.

It also proposed a restructuring within the district’s Central Office, which they estimated would have saved $5 million per year. The proposal centered on eliminating “managers managing managers.”

The committee’s “Centralization/Reductions of Large Sum Funding” proposal had an estimated savings of $7.1 million. The proposal would have centralized professional development funding district-wide under the discretion of the superintendent. Currently, individual departments control their own professional development funds.

The committee also proposed centralizing account specialist positions within the finance department, which would have reduced a number of positions. The proposal also included centralizing family and community liaison positions under a newly created communications and engagement department.

The savings from the centralization proposal would have been on top of the $57 million in proposed budget cuts.

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District leaders modify budget proposal before handing it over to school board

The budget committee’s initial proposal was modified by district leadership before a proposal was submitted to the school board in March, adding back roughly $15 million that the committee suggested eliminating. Unlike the previous year, not all senior leaders were part of the budget committee in 2024.

Senior leadership added back to the budget multiple programs including the Office of Black Student Achievement, the Office of Latine Achievement, and part of the AVID program. The Information Technology department’s funding was cut by $3 million instead of $10 million.

The budget committee’s proposal to centralize professional development, account specialists, and family and community liaison positions was largely ignored by district leadership. Very few of the committee’s recommendations to streamline senior leadership and eliminate “managers managing managers” made it into the final budget proposal.  

Senior leadership reduced the amount of proposed funding for new ESL teachers. The Multilingual Department asked the budget committee for the funding for 100 new teachers, and the budget committee recommended funding 47 teachers. Leadership cut that amount down to 25 new teachers, which will cost the district about $3 million to fund.

District leadership developed a proposal it said would cut $40 million from the central office, $52 million from schools and $3.2 million from contracted services on Feb. 21. The proposal maintained the $30 million in assigned fund balance to boost school budgets. The remaining budget gap was estimated to be $17 million.

At the time, the district had not reached a collective bargaining agreement with teachers and education support professionals. Those contracts would eventually add at least $25 million in additional costs to the budget, although the district has never publicly released an exact amount. Additional cuts to the central office and additional reserve funds were added to the budget by district leadership to cover these additional costs.

When senior leadership was finalizing budgets for individual schools in February they raised class sizes to the maximum allowed under the district’s contract with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. This change saved approximately $7 million.

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The school board’s involvement with the district budget

When the budget proposal got to the school board, they added back additional proposed cuts, including the Heritage Language Program, fifth grade band programming and three of the eight assistant principal positions that were proposed to be cut by Sayles-Adams

The school board approved a 2024-2025 district budget on June 11 that has a $85 million gap between its revenue and expenses, which will be covered by a combination of the district’s reserves and an assumption that the district will not spend $24 million on projected job vacancies.

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Looking ahead to the 2025-26 budget

The district has started the process of developing its budget for next school year, and is once again projecting a budget deficit of over 10% of its projected expenses.

In closing the budget deficit for next year, the district will face similar constraints as it did for this year’s budget. Many of the district’s expenses are required by State and federal laws and its labor agreements. Some of the district’s funding is restricted in how it can be spent.

The district will have approximately $20 million in additional revenue from the new voter-approved technology levy. But the district is unlikely to see additional state funding, beyond the automatic increase for inflation enacted in 2023, given the DFL’s loss of control of the state house of representatives.

It is unlikely the school board will close any schools before next school year as a cost-saving measure, given that the school choice process for next school year is underway. The district’s leadership and school board face the same set of non-mandatory programs from which to cut next year as they did this year.