This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
This session, the Legislature is grappling with a tough budget year. But our Dakota Political Junkie says it could be an easy fix.
Seth Tupper is editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight. He unpacks his commentary on how legislative actions impact the teacher shortage and how to solve the state's budget woes.
Read his full reporting.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Jackie Hendry:
So I want to start off, Seth, with your commentary piece recently saying, "It's not hard to figure out why young South Dakotans don't want to be teachers."
And it seems like this was spurred on by some conversation during the legislative session. Why don't you set the stage for us with what prompted you to write this piece?
Seth Tupper:
Yeah, what triggered that was I was in Pierre a week earlier this session and attended a Joint Appropriations Committee meeting, the main budget committee of the Legislature, where the Board of Regents came in and made a presentation and several university presidents came in and made their presentations.
And as the director of the Board of Regents, Nathan Lukkes, was going through his presentation. He had some slides about the number of graduates that were coming out of various programs, how many accountants and engineers, et cetera, that the state university programs are graduating every year and sending into the workforce. And one of the slides talked about the number of teachers.
And a legislator — I don't remember who it was now — interrupted with a question and asked Nathan Lukkes, "Why aren't we graduating as many teachers as we used to?" And Nathan Lukkes gave the answer that, "Well, there just isn't the interest anymore." He said that if you compare it to 10, 20, 30 years ago, the number of high school students that are coming into college wanting to be teachers is a lot less than it used to be.
There wasn't much discussion after that, but immediately my mind went to all of these bills we've seen this year, in recent years and past years that really have been — I guess I would describe them as trying to put some onerous mandates or at least mandates on public education without any additional funding. And of course funding for public education is a perpetual fight and struggle in this state.
So the commentary took off from there and laid out a bunch of the bills this session and in the past few years and things that I thought maybe was creating an environment, as I described it in the commentary, that was sort of hostile to public education and would maybe dissuade people from going into the teaching profession.
Jackie Hendry:
I think the last number I heard yesterday on the House floor, I don't remember the exact number, it was something around more than 200 open teaching positions right now throughout the state of South Dakota. That's been a topic of conversation for a while.
A lot of times this conversation leans into teacher pay, but you're seeing kind of additional layers on top of that. I wonder if you can just kind of talk through some of your past coverage of education in that realm, that pay versus pipeline versus political atmosphere?
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. Well, and I know a lot of people don't want to talk about this and they're tired of talking about it and it's a perpetual issue, but I think it does start with pay.
As many people may remember, South Dakota increased its state sales tax rate from 4 to 4.5%, I think nine years ago, ostensibly for the purpose of raising teacher pay, and we accomplished some gains.
And then we lost focus and we sit here today, we're 49th in average teacher salary. And you hear people complain about that every legislative session and say they want to do something about it, and we never seem to get any real traction with that.
So I think it does start there, and then you start layering things on top of it.
When I go into my kids' public schools here in Rapid City, there's a giant sign on the wall that says, "In God we trust," because in 2019 the Legislature in its wisdom thought that we needed to require every school to post that sign, so they did that, which, I argued in the commentary, was instead of tackling real problems in education, I don't think anybody really thinks that by requiring schools to post a sign on the wall you're really tackling real problems in education.
You layer on top of that similar efforts this year that ended up failing to require every public school classroom to post a copy of the Ten Commandments and to post a copy of the state motto, "Under God, the People Rule."
You layer that in and you start layering in other things like the social studies standards controversy of a couple of years ago when an initial working group was shut down and the governor was involved, then-Governor Noem, in reappointing people to a new working group. Some of those people appeared to have sort of an ideological alignment that she preferred so it kind of politicized the social studies standards process.
This year there's a big fight over school choice with three bills that arose and ultimately failed to try to peel away millions of dollars in state funds to direct toward private education options like homeschooling and private school tuition, et cetera, and public school lobbyists had to fight those off.
And when they did that, then some legislators got mad and dropped a bill in that would've made it illegal for school boards to hire lobbyists with public funds.
And so again, and there's more than that and you just start layering in all that stuff, and that was kind of my point in the commentary was, "Gee, I wonder why people don't want to be teachers in this state," because it just seems like there's such a concerted effort year after year to do things to make life more difficult for public schools in this state while not giving them any more money to do those difficult things.
Jackie Hendry:
So Seth, I know when I got started in reporting in South Dakota, I started as an education reporter. And during the legislative conversations I got real familiar real quick with this idea of local control. And we hear this pretty frequently in most education discussions, that idea that the local school districts or local school boards should be the ones to make a lot of these decisions.
How does that idea play into a lot of the conversations you hear? Because we are increasingly, as you say, seeing those bills putting certain mandates and various things onto school districts. So how does local control play in?
Seth Tupper:
Well, I think there still are some legislators who truly do believe in local control, and that belief helped fight off some of these bills this session, like the one that tried to require posting Ten Commandments in every classroom and things like that.
You heard that from some legislators who pointed out there's already a law in the books allowing schools to post the Ten Commandments if they so choose. And they said, "We don't need a mandate. We can have local control and they can choose to do it or not."
But I think there's a growing number of legislators, and there's quite a few legislators in the new crop that came in with this legislative session, that feel like local control should be subjugated in some instances to what they believe are broader concerns.
And some of those concerns are morality based or whatever, but there's no doubt that mandating every classroom in the state to post the Ten Commandments is not local control, it's the opposite of it.
And so for some legislators, I do believe local control is a true belief. For others I think it's just something that you use as rhetoric when it's convenient to advance your argument, and then other times you ignore it because yeah, if you truly believed in local control, I don't think you'd be filing a bill that said every single public school classroom in the state had to have a specific thing on its wall.
Jackie Hendry:
Yeah. And I also want to point out, there really seems to be growing momentum behind homeschooling or alternative education. Former Governor Kristi Noem mentioned this education savings account plan in her budget address that also had support from Governor Larry Rhoden.
This kind of idea of education outside of that public sphere getting public dollars, where do you see that playing into this ongoing conversation when it comes to public school teachers?
Seth Tupper:
Yeah, I think that's driving a lot of the conflict right now. We had a great series by our reporter Makenzie Huber a while back just before the legislative session. It looked at the growth in alternative instruction, whether it's homeschooling or micro-schools or private schools or pods and all these kind of new things that came out of the pandemic as new ways to do education. People discovered that you can do some classes online and you can take some classes at your local public school and you can do some homeschooling. You can mix and match or whatever.
And there's been tremendous growth in that. And part of that was fueled not only by changes brought by the pandemic and people looking at different ways of doing schools, but also the legislature and past sessions deregulating a lot of that area.
And so the proposals this session, the various kinds of proposals that some people would just label as with the catch-all term of vouchers, but whether you call them education savings accounts or whatever, there was another proposal to do property tax credits for people who do private education or homeschooling, all of that flows partly out of this movement toward different options other than public schools.
And I don't think that's going anywhere. I mean, I think this year that debate was tamped down a little bit by the fact that it was a tight budget year and some legislators who might otherwise be inclined to approve some of those ideas weren't this year because there wasn't extra money to spend for it. But you got to assume those will be back next year and maybe multiple years until they gain some headway.
And yeah, I think that's driving a lot of debate. Again, going back to this sort of new crop of legislators, there's a lot of new legislators this year.
Quite a number of them seem to have some interest in alternative instruction or have connections to homeschooling or private schooling and seem to want to come up with a way to direct some public funds to those options, and so I don't think they're going to quit with that effort by any means.
Jackie Hendry:
In a lot of ways it's almost like the ultimate local control like, "Forget the school boards, we want it in the hands of parents and families as directly as possible," really seems to be kind of the attitude that has been rising out of a lot of these conversations.
I don't know if that's what you're picking on too.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. Yeah, that is an interesting way to look at it because, I mean, some of the same legislators are the ones who are arguing that they should have local control over their own child's education and be able to direct tax dollars or they want to support that education even if it's private school or whatever. Some of those same legislators are the ones who are introducing and supporting the bills requiring putting mandates on public schools like you have to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
So it's, again, this idea of local control. Do you really believe in that or is it just some rhetoric that you bring up when it's convenient to advance your argument and that you ignore when it's not convenient?
Jackie Hendry:
Right. And we're going to touch on those tax conversations because it is really kind of hand-in-hand with these education conversations. But before we pivot to that, I just want to highlight a quote that you used to really close out this commentary on the teacher shortage from Rob Monson, who is the executive director of the School Administrators of South Dakota.
And the quote you use from Rob Monson says, "Public education is absolutely what made this country what it is. If we lose public education, we will lose this country."
And I just wonder if you can reflect a bit on Rob Monson's position there and why you decided to close out your commentary with that quote?
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. We actually had South Dakota NewsMedia Association, which is historically the newspaper association that we're a member of at South Dakota Searchlight. We had a news media day recently at the Capitol, and we actually brought in Rob Monson and also majority leader Scott Odenbach from the House who's a major supporter of education savings accounts and those other options, and we heard from both of them on school choice. And so that's where Rob made that comment to a room full of newspaper people basically.
And I think he brings up a great point because a lot of times that's lost that the people who are advocating for other options like education savings accounts, vouchers, tax credits, et cetera to support private education, a lot of times they base their argument in a criticism of public schools and the problems in public schools, test scores and finding teachers and funding problems and all that, and it sort of obscures the fact that if you look in the grand scope that public education is an incredible, amazing success story in this country, that the idea that every child in this country at least has the opportunity to get a quality public education no matter what's your background, your race, your income level, whatever.
Obviously, we know that there are problems in public schools, and not every public school is great and not every teacher is great, but by and large, the idea is that we offer every child in this country the chance for quality free public education, the opportunity, and that can solve a lot of problems.
When we talk about having to build prisons and we talk about wanting to create economic development, we talk about wanting to raise the next generation of leaders in government and politics, all of that ties back to school and creating a quality school experience for the most kids that we can.
So I think that's what Rob, he could probably elaborate on that a lot more eloquently than I could, somebody who's embedded in that world, but I think that's what he's talking about and I think that's something that gets lost in the debate a lot when we focus so much on the problems in public schools and forget to think about what a benefit is to society at large.
Jackie Hendry:
Sure. And as with so many things, the quality of any service really depends on the amount of investment in that service, and that pivots us into that tax conversation.
The budget this year obviously a critical conversation point as we're less optimistic as we were in years past with a lot of that federal influx of money post-pandemic. Now we're getting back to a bit more business as usual with the tax base for our services.
Another recent commentary you just put out, Seth, saying, "The simple solution for South Dakota's budget woes, restoring the sales tax rate."
Tell us about your thoughts on that.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because as we've been covering the legislature this session, especially when we were covering the part of the legislature where the Joint Appropriations Committee is setting revenue estimates for the next year, the absurdity of this situation just really struck me hard because we're in this situation where everybody has kind of accepted, "Oh, gosh, we're just going to have to make cuts. It's just a bad budget year and there's nothing we can do."
But when you think about what's really happened, you just go back a couple of years, and I don't want to get too long-winded on this, but there's a sort of a sweeping scale of things that got us to where we are right now, and it really started the last time then Governor Kristi Noem ran for re-election in 2022.
She had a brief moment where I think she thought that her challenger, then Jamie Smith, a Democrat, maybe posed a real challenge to her.
She abruptly comes out and announces her support for the Democratic position of repealing the sales tax on groceries, surprised everybody. And that set in motion a chain of events where Republican legislators really felt pressured to do something for sales tax relief, even though really there was no broad call for it, nobody was out asking for it except for Governor Noem.
And they ended up not giving her the grocery tax repeal that she wanted, but they gave her, of course we now know, a reduction in the overall sales tax rate from 4.5% to 4.2%, and they put a sunset on that, so it'll go back up to 4.5% in 2027. And that cost the state of South Dakota more than $100 million in revenue per year.
And so then you fast-forward, as you mentioned this year, we've spent all the pandemic federal aid that we got billions of dollars in federal pandemic aid, that's all gone. Sales taxes are declining. The economy's tough. There's high inflation. And so, boy, those $100 million would come in real handy right now to balance the budget.
And you have legislators acting like they don't even know that they did that. You have them blaming the budget problem on rising Medicaid costs and other things. And Medicaid costs are rising, but we knew that would happen.
And so when you think about how absurd this all is. All you'd have to do to solve this problem is go into the section of state law where it says the sales tax increase will sunset in 2027. You change that seven to a five, and all of a sudden you'd solve the budget problem with money left to spare because you'd have more than $100 million of extra revenue, which is more than is needed to close the gap that we have in ongoing revenue and ongoing expenses.
Is that going to happen? No, it doesn't look like it. But I just wanted to point out that this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. There's no mystery on why this is a tight budget year. There are economic factors and things like that, but it's also, as I said in the commentary, because legislators essentially flushed $100 million down the toilet two years ago, and they don't have that money now.
So as you can see, I'm a little riled up about it.
Jackie Hendry:
Well, I think it's a worthwhile conversation, and I apologize, I don't have the bill number off the top of my head, but there was a bill discussed from Deibert related to property taxes which was really kind of the goal of this legislation, but the procedure was more or less to bring the sales tax rate back to that pre-sales tax cut rate that we had to essentially do, as you said, change that '26 to a 2025 in the sunset clause and then funnel about 100 million into property taxes directly, versus letting that sunset go through and then having those dollars go back to the general fund to be dealt with from there.
And that bill didn't make it through, seemingly would've addressed some of the property tax issues. Now, granted, I know there's a lot of property tax policy at play. That was just one conversation I happened to listen in on, but I guess in kind of our closing moments, is there anything you would want to say about really the sales tax, the property tax, these ongoing conversations of what we're going to do now?
Seth Tupper:
Well, yeah, of course another thing I mentioned in my commentary was the fact that while nobody was asking for sales tax relief, and I'm exaggerating there, but for the most part, nobody was asking for sales tax relief a couple of years ago. But lots of people were asking for property tax relief. But inexplicably, the Legislature got fixated largely because of Governor Noem calling for it on doing something with sales tax, and they let the property tax problem fester to the point that now it's really a political liability for a lot of legislators and they feel like they have to do something with it.
So I'm not sure why, you mentioned the idea to raise the sales tax back up to where it was and use that revenue for property tax relief. That doesn't seem to really be going anywhere. I mean, maybe it still will. I mean, a lot of stuff are still in play with property taxes, but of course Governor Rhoden came out with his plan which doesn't include an increase in the sales tax rates, so that's had a big influence on things.
I'm not sure why because, again, to point to the absurdity of all this, the sales tax is going to go back up to 4.5% in 2027 if the Legislature doesn't act to prevent that. So, I mean, one way or another, at this point it's going to happen, but there doesn't seem to be an appetite to make that happen a year or two earlier.
I'm not exactly sure why. I know it's not popular to increase sales taxes, but we did it with the Republican governor, Republican Legislature in 2016 when they raised it to 4.5%. It's already set to increase again in 2027. But this is politics and this is the Legislature, and things get complicated, and here we are.
Jackie Hendry:
Things get complicated, here we are, and still a few more days to go before the answers become clear.
Seth Tupper is editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight. You can find this conversation and more about local politics on our podcast feed. Just search SDPB's Dakota Political Junkies wherever you get your podcasts.
Seth, thanks for your time. Really appreciate it.
Seth Tupper:
Thanks for having me.
