OPEB: The Legislature and August 1st

The House is moving along a Bill to end our ability to bond for OPEB costs. Having been at the capital yesterday, I am thinking this will eventually pass. I talked to Rep. Paul Marquart; he is a representative from the Moorhead area. He put forth the bill to keep any district from doing this levy authority after March, but now the bill has been amended to August 1st. His reasons were pretty clear for authoring this bill. There was an intent by the legislature last year to allow this levy authority so that districts could free up their general fund, but then Alexandria announced that they were going to target their levied dollars to put all-day-everyday kindergarten in place in their district. Rep. Marquart said that this intent was clearly creating inequities because other districts would not be able to do this without OPEB. Then, I shared our plan for all-day-everyday kindergarten; he applauds our use of these monies because the use of compensatory dollars is our choice to use this allocation to create an intervention to close achievement gaps.