Minnesota lawmakers are hoarding a $2.3 billion trust while school budgets bleed.
The Permanent School Fund has been accumulating revenue from state-owned lands since 1858. Timber, mineral wealth, land sales—the state has been banking the proceeds for 168 years. A 2024 state task force calculated average investment returns of 8% over the last decade. The current payout cap sits at 2.5%. Rep. Spencer Igo proposed lifting the cap to 4.5%. That move increases per-pupil funding from $65 to roughly $95. A district with 2,000 students receives $60,000 extra in a single year. Sen. Mary Kunesh says it does not require raising property taxes. It does not require new local levies. It requires the state to stop locking away its own wealth.
The distributional pattern hits rural districts hardest. Fred Nolan of the Minnesota Rural Education Association noted that smaller districts struggle to pass local referendums. Without the additional $60,000, a district like that cannot buy curriculum materials or provide teacher training. Igo says the fund will eventually provide $300 to $400 per pupil across the state. He wants his forefathers to smile. They founded the trust on federal land grants. They never imagined the state would hoard the principal instead of distributing the earnings. We mothers of kids under twelve, doing the math at the kitchen table at eleven at night, know what that gap really is. It is not a timing issue. It is a policy choice deliberately designed to avoid taxing legislators and their donors.
The state disguises stewardship as thrift so lawmakers can avoid the political friction of approving new taxes. The 8% return sits in the trust. The 2.5% payout leaves classrooms underfunded. Annie Lowrey tracks how public safety-net deficiencies are deliberate design choices rather than accidental. This is the same design choice applied to K-12 infrastructure. The 2.5% annual disbursement cap, legislatively set in 1989, effectively decoupled school distributions from the fund’s actual compounding performance. The Minnesota Legislature passed the ballot question with bipartisan support. They say it relieves pressure; in reality, it passes the buck. It is politically costless to lock the money away, and politically costly to release it. They have chosen to bankroll the trust’s growth over the children in the classrooms.
Catholic Social Teaching demands that wealth be constrained by the universal destination of goods—the core idea that all creation is meant to sustain the common life of the entire community. This trust is state-owned land revenue, and the withholding violates that foundational constraint. The “do what you love” rhetoric disguises labor as passion so workers tolerate exploitation. Here, Minnesota disguises hoarding as fiscal prudence so legislators can sidestep the structural disinvestment that has been draining the pool of public education for decades.
This is the textbook definition of drained-pool politics: you deplete the public fund through neglect and then, when the district budgets begin to buckle, you ask the voters to release the emergency brake—but only just enough to quiet the panic. The $60,000 for a rural district does not even cover the cost of essential classroom supplies. It will not fill the chronic, persistent federal underfunding of IDEA, which has left local districts to shoulder an immense financial burden for decades while the federal government pays roughly one-third of what it promised.
Swift’s “this is me trying” catalogs the small recovery acts of a working mother whose labor goes invisible because it is classed as decoration. The legislative work on this amendment is an attempt at repair. But the repair stalls at the ballot box. Minnesota constitutional amendments require a majority of “yes” votes from all ballots cast. Leaving the question blank counts as a “no” vote. The legislature believes in a bipartisan way. We do not. We look at the $2.3 billion and the $65 per pupil and see the arithmetic they are willing to gamble on.
Rep. Igo speaks of a day when the fund could provide $300 to $400 per pupil. If our bipartisan legislators are so eager to link arms for the children of Minnesota, they should address the structural disinvestment that necessitates this ballot question in the first place, rather than raiding the trust fund of the 19th century to cover the policy failures of the 21st. “You’re on your own, kid” is the tagline of our contemporary care infrastructure—a hollow shell relying on the instability of local property tax levies and the whims of private wealth to provide basic services that should be a public obligation.
The kitchen-table version of this number is the $4.50 difference in a child’s classroom budget. The line item that does not show up in the political press release is the child who needs the curriculum materials that district cannot buy. If you have ever opened a school-budget email and seen a plea for levy support on the same morning, you already know the choice people are talking about is not on the table for rural parents. We are doing the math at the kitchen table at eleven at night. We are watching the 8% accrue in the trust fund while our children’s schools stretch every $65 until it snaps. The choice is not between funding and taxes. The choice is between hoarding and justice. We are asking voters to reach into the 1858 trust to pay for the curriculum materials of 2026 because we have decided, as a matter of policy, that we are no longer willing to fund the schools our children deserve. It is a choice. We should at least be honest enough to call it that.