"Senate Bill 2243 creates a student loan reimbursement program for two teachers to work in a North Dakota school district or nonpublic school with fewer than 1,000 students," Forum News Service reported.

"The program will reimburse up to $4,500 per teacher in each of the first two years and up to $6,500 in the third year," with a maximum of $25,000 if the teacher is filling a critical vacancy.

So far, so good. SB 2243 now has passed the Senate and is being considered in the House.

But our point is to call attention to some of the prep work that made this billwhich is, after all, proposing new spending at a time of cutbacks everywhere elsesail through the Senate, 42-4.

Kirsten Baesler, state superintendent of public instruction, describes the process in her interview on this page. As Baesler recounts, it started with a North Dakota University System study of how well the NDUS is meeting the state's workforce needs.

Where training teachers is concerned, "what we learned is that the system graduates plenty of teachers," Baesler says.

"But if they don't get a job in Bismarck or Fargo or Grand Forks, they're choosing not to use that degree." For lots of would-be teachers, it's better to find alternative work in a bustling city than to go to work in a small-town school, especially considering the very modest salaries most rural school districts offer, it turns out.

That's solid and new information. Best of all, it's useful, too. It helped narrow down the policy-response possibilities, ruling out an attempt to, say, attract teachers from Minnesota or Wisconsin.

Then the state's leadership took the next step: They interviewed some of those Fargo and Grand Forks teachers-doing-other-things. So, what would it take to entice them to leave the bright lights and big city behind, and go to work in a North Dakota country school?

"A lot," said the teachers, as Baesler recounts. Specifically, it would take repaying their student loans, and through a much more generous program than the state currently offers.

Senate Bill 2243 was born.

To sum up, the supporters of this bill effectively researched the problem they were trying to solve, learned the particulars of that problem in North Dakota and crafted a policy that uses a targeted approach.

No wonder the bill passed the Senate. It should pass the House, too. And reformers of the future who are looking to pass laws should take a lesson from the history of SB 2243.

-- Tom Dennis for the Herald

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Editorial: Anatomy of a 'Do Pass' bill in North Dakota - Grand Forks Herald