For decades, Minnesota has subsidized private schools. Gov. Tim Walz wants to cut $109 million.

Students at St. John Paul II Catholic School in northeast Minneapolis hopped onto buses last week — beneficiaries of a decades-old state law guaranteeing free transportation to nonpublic school students.

Principal Tricia Menzhuber, surveying the scene, said that if state aid were taken away, “We’d lose most of these kids.”

Now, to the surprise of many, that threat is real.

Gov. Tim Walz, facing a modest surplus in the coming two years and then a potential $6 billion deficit in the next biennium, has proposed the total elimination of $109 million in nonpublic pupil aid over the next two years — funds that cover not just busing but also textbooks, nurses and guidance counselors.

Last week, Senate DFLers signed on to all but a fraction of that cut in a school finance bill approved in a party-line committee vote. The proposal faces tougher sledding in the evenly divided House. There, DFL and Republican leaders still are negotiating an education bill of their own.

Party priorities came into play during last week’s Senate Education Finance Committee deliberations on the private school payments.

State Sen. Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael, proposed restoring the nonpublic school aid in the Senate’s proposal by replacing it with other funds.

Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union, has backed the governor’s proposal amid fears of potential federal public school funding cuts.

“The exclusive private schools in the Twin Cities are going to be fine,” Denise Specht, the union’s president, said in a statement. “It’s the public schools that welcome every student, in every community, that the Legislature needs to worry about now.”

Much of the testimony criticizing the governor’s plan, however, has come from private schools serving students of modest means.

“It’s a myth that it’s all wealthy families going to these schools, and we can afford these cuts,” said Bonnie Jungels, principal of Notre Dame Academy in Minnetonka, where about 30% of students receive financial aid. “I think one of the greatest assets that Minnesota offers is the school choices.”

Minnesota had more than 460 nonpublic schools in 2022-23, according to the most recent rundown reported by the state Department of Education.

His budget also proposed cutting an alternative teacher pay program affecting public school teachers, among other reductions, but the state Senate has not followed suit.

Jungels has a special tie to the 1969 state law authorizing the busing of private school students. The legislation had been proposed six years earlier by her great-grandfather, John Kinzer, a longtime legislator from Stearns County, who described it as “a means of fairness and equity for all students in the state,” she said.

Notre Dame Academy estimates having to pay $163,000 in transportation costs if the funding were to be zeroed out, leaving the school to consider how much to pass on to parents and how much it could absorb in its $2 million annual budget.

For the past few months, private school officials have testified about the value of the state aid.

Dan Ahlstrom, head of school at Heilicher Jewish Day School in Minneapolis, said students have relied on state-funded counseling to “learn to be resilient against the trauma of social media” in what has been a stressful time for the Jewish community.

Jason Morrison, president of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis, said nearly 75% of its 413 students live in multilingual homes, each receives financial aid, and that for most families, buses are the only way to school and the support services provided there.

And Menzhuber of St. John Paul II said her school has made good on the state’s investment: 100% of eighth-graders go on to graduate from high school in four years despite many coming from families on “the margins of society,” she said.