What will the district do with this money if the referendums pass? What happens if they fail?

As I said, there are a lot of moving parts, and all of them factor into answering these complicated questions. It’s a fair question, and here’s what we know for certain.

If the operating levy fails, the district returns to statutory operating debt. That’s not a prediction. It’s where the numbers land. We’ve already seen what the last failure cost: $12 million in annual cuts over three years, including closing WestWood as a neighborhood school, closing the Twin Oaks pool, eliminating Laker Online and MNCAPS Pathways, reducing elective options for grades 6 to 12, and selling the District Services Center. Another failure means deeper cuts than those.

If it passes, the district stabilizes its budget and stops cutting the things students and families can see.

Think of it like a household. For 20 years, the family paycheck hasn’t kept up with the cost of living. Meanwhile, the grocery bill, the utilities, and the insurance keep going up. This family has already cut the extras. Now the cuts are reaching the things the kids notice.

The two ballot questions cover two different parts of that household budget. The operating levy is the monthly budget: keeping the lights on, food on the table, and the people who make the house run. The capital projects levy is the roof and the furnace. You can put those off for a while, but every year you wait, the repair costs more.

So why can’t the district hand you an exact list of what gets cut, and in what order? For the same reason a family can’t. If a household loses a second income, they can tell you cuts are coming and what’s on the table. But the exact order depends on things outside their control, like whether the furnace makes it through the winter. For the district, that means state funding decisions, enrollment, and costs we don’t set.