Guest post: South Dakota spends too much on high school sport and not enough on education

Editor's note: Today, students in South Dakota are fifth in overall rank of those in debt and suffer that load at the highest proportion in the US. The Bendagate state is 37th in grant and work opportunities rank and is tied for 42nd in student work opportunities. But school boards spend a ridiculous amount of money on sport including one district that plans to close a rural school but spent $1.2 million on a field where American football injures students.

Republican South Dakota District 27 Representative Liz May sees red state failure in flat education results. 

More Spending, Same Results — and Now They’re Closing the Schools That Work 

By Rep. Liz May, South Dakota House of Representatives, District 27

Across South Dakota, we’re watching a troubling pattern unfold. Local school boards, faced with shrinking budgets and state mandates, are closing rural schools — the very schools that often outperform their larger counterparts in both academics and attendance.

In Meade County, for example, Atall and Hereford Elementary were targeted for closure to “save” about $250,000 from a projected $1.25 million general fund deficit. But that deficit wasn’t caused by bad teaching or overspending — it was caused by the way South Dakota funds schools.

When a district loses students, it automatically loses state aid because our funding formula is based on student count, not student performance. The smaller a district gets, the less funding it receives — even if its students are excelling. That creates a cycle where efficiency is punished, and “saving” the budget means closing good schools.

So, rather than rethinking the formula, the district moves students from successful rural classrooms into the larger town schools to boost headcount. Then they use Capital Outlay funds — which can’t go toward classroom instruction — to bus those same students farther every day. The general fund deficit shrinks, but not because the district became more efficient — only because it sacrificed local schools that were working.

According to the South Dakota Department of Education, per-student spending has risen more than 30% since 2017, from about $8,300 to over $11,000. Yet the state’s own Report Card shows proficiency in reading, math, and science has barely moved.

That’s not a classroom problem — it’s a system problem. Our formula rewards enrollment and administration, not learning and performance. And when test results reveal flat outcomes, we hear a new excuse: “The tests are wrong.”

But if the tests are so wrong, why do we still use them to collect federal dollars, determine accreditation, and justify spending? You can’t claim the tests are good enough for the money but bad enough to excuse the results. South Dakota has used the same state assessments since 2015 — and the results have been consistent year after year. That’s not a testing failure; that’s a failure of priorities.

Meanwhile, parents in Meade County and across the state are watching their smaller rural schools disappear — not because they aren’t working, but because the funding model makes them expendable.

If we truly value education, we should be rewarding performance, not paperwork. That starts by giving districts credit for sharing administrative services, streamlining operations, and prioritizing results instead of raw headcounts.

Closing schools that work just to prop up a broken formula is backwards. If we want to rebuild trust in South Dakota’s public education system, we need to prove that learning — not numbers — drives how we spend our education dollars.