Over the past week, Gov. Mark Dayton took his veto pen and struck down key measures to protect students from gun violence and new funding for districts facing budget shortfalls. These shortsighted decisions will undermine the ability of schools to retain teachers, keep class sizes low and make physical improvements to prevent the kind of tragedies we've seen in other states.
Republicans have given the governor three separate opportunities to sign into law more funding for school safety — one in the school funding bill, another in the supplemental budget and a third in the bonding bill. The governor has chosen to veto two of the three and has yet to make a decision on the final measure.
The Star Tribune Editorial Board mused last week that a stand-alone bill would have garnered the governor's signature ("Shortchanging kids and school safety," May 25). Given the governor's track record of vetoing common-sense legislation over relatively minor objections, as well as the administration's public opposition to other student safety provisions, I am not so sure.
As chair of the House Education Finance Committee, I was troubled by the lack of involvement by the governor's office throughout this session. Not once was I contacted or asked to meet with him to discuss his priorities. His disinterest in working with the Legislature made it difficult to reach final agreement despite our good-faith attempts to compromise and meet him more than halfway on numerous issues.
A stand-alone school safety bill would have included more than just funding for physical safety enhancements. Republicans identified a number of loopholes in current law that put students at risk and took action to address them.
Chief among them was a provision to expand the background checks conducted when teachers are hired to include stays of adjudication. Stays of adjudication occur when someone pleads guilty to a crime, but as part of the agreement with the courts, the offense does not go on an individual's criminal record if the person completes probation or other terms of the plea deal.
Investigations by local television stations revealed that individuals including school bus drivers who had been given stays of adjudication for sex crimes against children had passed background checks due to this glaring loophole. That meant that sexual predators were put in close contact with schoolchildren without the knowledge of school district officials or parents.
Our bill would have required stays of adjudication to be included in background checks. Had the Legislature chosen to send a stand-alone school safety bill, we certainly would have included this provision — which ultimately could have led to a veto.