My attention was recently called to a poll done by the Dakota Poll (www.dakotapoll.com) that looked at the public’s feelings about the South Dakota legislature.

It’s easily summarized: we could be doing better, especially on funding K-12 education, where the Legislature gets a 68% negative rating and only a 31% positive rating.   South Dakota voters also gave the Legislature a failing grade on helping SD get more high wage jobs, with 70% rating the peeps in Pierre negatively compared to a 28% positive rating.

The Legislature also gets a failing grade for making sure our education system is creating workers who are qualified to compete for high wage jobs, 60% negative to 39% positive.

Just for the record, no, I am not one of the sponsors of the Dakota Poll, though I am friends with some of those folks.   They do full disclosure on their website and also publish every question word for word.  They also publish every number the questions produce, including hundreds of pages of cross tabular data, so you can judge for yourself how much stock you want to put into the data.

So often the Legislature gets sucked into emotional hot button issues or stuff that is essentially trivia.  These poll numbers are reporting on the big stuff, folks!  We’ve got to do better on these key issues if we want to make a dramatic improvement in South Dakota’s future prospects.  Your thoughts?