By Elizabeth Shockman, Minnesota Public Radio News

While Minnesota lawmakers struggle to start the new legislative session, education committee leaders in the House and Senate are quietly starting to set budget and policy priorities for nearly 850,000 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say they can work together to meet the needs of schools, but they have some differences. Here’s a look at what state representatives and senators say is on their to-do lists for K-12 finance and policy this year,

1) GOP eyes repeal, reduce, rollback

GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate hope to roll back some of the mandates passed by a DFL majority over the last two years. The GOP flipped seats in the  November election. House control is still in flux, but Republicans have at least forced a 67-67 split in the chamber that will compel the DFL to share power.

“The mandates that the state has put on our schools over, you know, many years … can handcuff our schools from being able to do the things that they believe are important for our kids to get the best education that they can get,” said Sen. Jason Rarick, R-Pine City.

Rarick, who is co-chairing the Senate Education Finance Committee this session, is especially concerned about a 2023 law making hourly school workers eligible for summer jobless benefits. Districts, he said, aren’t sure how to pay for or implement that.

Sen. Julia Coleman, R-Waconia, co-chair of the Senate Education Policy Committee, has her eye on Minnesota’s paid family and medical leave law, which she said schools can’t afford.

“They are really scared about the paid family leave bill coming down, which is essentially an unfunded mandate on the school district,” Coleman said. “My priority is to give schools relief when it comes to some of that, to give them more flexibility in the amount of funding or with the funding that they have.”

Rep. Peggy Bennett, R-Albert Lea, will likely co-chair the House Education Policy Committee. She said pausing or rolling back recently passed laws will give schools time to focus on what she described as core curriculum for schools.

“They swamped our schools,” Bennett said of the DFL-driven changes from last session. “There’s a lot (of schools) that are in financial difficulty because of them. They’re having a hard time focusing on what I call the core education components, which should be reading, math, science, that kind of thing.”

Bennett also wants some new laws she thinks will help increase transparency for families, including access to “easy-to-interpret data about their schools and the schools throughout the state. We’ll be looking at some of that in our first bills that we will introduce.”

2) DFL set to defend fledgling initiatives

DFL lawmakers see things differently. Many of them are focused on doing what they can to protect recently passed funding and policies, such as access to menstrual products in schools, ethnic studies requirements, civics and financial literacy requirements, the Read Act and other policy changes.

Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, co-chairs the Senate Education Finance Committee. She said she’s open to reviewing how policy is working and to make changes, but she wants to keep policies in place.

“My top priority, really, is to kind of preserve and sift down through all of the work that we have done over the last two years, the different programming we’ve done, the different investments that we put in there,” Kunesh said. “I want to see how those pieces of legislation are working or not working, and bolster those that need a little bit of more attention.”

Rep. Cheryl Youakim, DFL-Hopkins, is likely to co-chair the House Education Finance Committee. She’s pushing back on arguments from Republicans that her party went too far in passing new requirements for schools over the last two years.

“Not only did we have pent-up underfunding, we had pent-up energy around policy,” Youakim said. “There felt like there was a lot of policy, because it had been worked on for four years, six years, 10 years.”

3) Feds are a wild card

Some DFL lawmakers say they’re paying attention to what the new Trump administration does in education. The federal government provided about 11 percent of Minnesota education funding in fiscal year 2021.

Rep. Sydney Jordan will likely co-chair the House Education Policy Committee. She said she wants to be able to counteract federal policy and funding changes.

“I’m very, very concerned about what is being said from the federal administration as they relate to public education, especially as it relates to cuts to that funding, which was never enough to fund what the federal government mandates that we do here,” said Jordan, DFL-Minneapolis.

4) Seeking fixes for chronic absenteeism

Last session lawmakers started a bipartisan study group to look at why absenteeism is soaring in Minnesota. Now lawmakers want to tackle possible policy fixes.

“We’re going to try to look at that, and I hope a lot of it is, you know, maybe (a) post-COVID (problem) and is eventually going to go away, but I’m not sure that’s the case,” said Sen. Steve Cwodzinski, DFL-Eden Prairie, who co-chairs the education policy panel. “We want kids in school. And I think I have some pretty interesting ideas on what will (work).”

5 ) Read Act unity

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem to agree the Read Act is an important step in the right direction for Minnesota schools. They also seem to agree that the legislation, which seeks to overhaul the way instructors teach students to read, needs attention this session.

“I want to see how those pieces of legislation are working or not working, and bolster those that need a little bit of more attention,” said Kunesh. “Maybe we need to put some of the dollars that we will have towards ensuring success in those different areas, like the Read Act.”

In the Minnesota House, Bennett said she’s concerned about language in the Read Act she believes needs to be changed.

“We need to kind of reset parts of that and enhance it even more,” Bennett said. “The terminology ‘science of reading’ needs to be very clear in there … we have to make it really clear that the science of reading is what we’re pushing for.