For years, the St. Louis school district has experienced the convergence of two trend lines school superintendents hope never to see: rising employee-pension costs and falling student enrollment. Despite years of fully funding its share of the teacher-pension plan, the proportion of the St. Louis district's budget tied up in paying benefits for…

Chicago teachers voted last week to suspend a 7-day-old strike, sending some 350,000 students back to the classroom and paving the way for the teaching force to vote on a tentative contract. But for many in the Windy City, the contract has raised another potentially tall hurdle: how the cash-strapped district will manage to pay for it. District…

Even as they grapple with budget pressures from a sagging national economy, states are being forced to make tough decisions on how they will cope with an even more severe longterm fiscal concern: a projected price tag pushing $3 trillion to pay the pensions and health insurance of retired teachers and other government employees. Those commitments…

School business officials kept a close watch on the financial markets this week--and on district investment portfolios and teacher-retirement funds--as stock prices gyrated and once-sound institutions got government bailouts or crumbled into bankruptcy. While financial observers said it was too soon to predict how Wall Street's upheaval might…