The rally in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol was a chance for speakers to share their experiences of going to referendum. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.
Prentice School District, a rural district in the northern part of Wisconsin, will ask voters on April 1 to raise their property taxes and provide the district $3.5 million over the next four years for operational costs. It’s one of the smaller requests among the over 80 ballot measures — totaling $1.6 billion in requests — that will go before voters across the state next month.
Denae Walcisak, a member of a team campaigning to pass the referendum, drove three and a half hours from the Northwoods to attend a Friday rally at the Capitol organized by the Wisconsin Public Education Network (WPEN). She spoke about her district’s third time trying for a yes and described the lengths community members are going to for students in her district.
Her dad, who is a school board member, put off knee surgery for almost a year, Walcisak said, while he donated his time and money to fill in as a school bus driver in the rural district and to transport students to field trips and games.
“Teacher organizes fundraisers for the art club to pay for basic supplies… Our band teacher also teaches sixth grade reading. We have a part-time elementary gym teacher who is 82 years young. Our tech ed teacher bought a welding machine for his students with his own money… My son needs speech therapy. The school has tried twice to hire this year, but who wants to take a job at a school whose future is uncertain?” Walcisak said.
Even with the funding from the referendum, Walcisak said the district will continue to just scrape by. She called for more funding from the state.
“The lack of funding is affecting our whole community and our way of life. I ask you from the people of Prentice, please don’t let us fade away,” she said.
The rally marked the end of Public Schools Week, an annual recognition of Wisconsin’s public schools and a time advocates use to call for supporting and investing. Gov. Tony Evers issued a declaration on Monday reminding Wisconsinites that public education is a right and that public schools need support and investment from elected officials.
The rally in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol was a chance for speakers to share their experiences of going to referendum — the stress of repeatedly asking for them and consequences of failure — and to call for the state to make greater investments in schools.
WPEN Executive Director Heather DuBois Bourenane said the use of school referendums is an “overwhelming,” “expensive” and “incredibly disequalizing” way of funding schools. A scroll with the names of every school district that has gone to referendum since the last state budget was rolled out and suspended from the third floor of the building, reaching down to the ground floor.
“Not all of these referenda passed… Some of them had to go more than once, and still didn’t pass. Some of them had to go again and again and keep asking for less,” DuBois Bourenane said. “When we fund our schools like this, our gaps get wider and wider.”
State Superintendent Jill Underly, who is running for a second term in office against school choice advocate Brittany Kinser, said the underfunding of Wisconsin’s schools has reached a “critical point.”
“With the next state biennial budget, we have a chance — a real chance — to finally catch your school districts up and to give them what they need to thrive,” Underly said.
The pleas from rallygoers come as the budget writing process picks up in the state Capitol. Evers introduced a state budget proposal last month that would invest an additional $3 billion in K-12 education, and Republican lawmakers, who have said Evers’ proposal costs too much and therefore isn’t serious, are preparing to write their own version.
Jeff Pressley and Joni Anderson, members of the Adams-Friendship School Board, and Tom Wermuth, the district’s school administrator, spoke to the repetitive and divisive nature of the school referendum process.
“We’re on the treadmill for referendum endlessly. We live literally paycheck to paycheck or referendum to referendum,” Pressley said, adding that the state’s funding formula is the problem with school funding.
The state’s complex school funding formula takes into account a combination of state, federal, and local aid. Of the funding, local property taxes and state aid are the two largest sources of revenue for schools, but school districts are restricted in how much they can bring in by state revenue limits.
Revenue limits were adjusted for inflation until 2010 and since then, lawmakers have only sometimes provided increases. Currently, school districts receive a $325 increase annually in their per pupil revenue limits.
Referendums are a way for districts to exceed their revenue limits, and schools have begun relying on them increasingly to meet costs. Last year, a record number of school districts went to referendum.
“The funding formula in the state of Wisconsin worked significantly better from 1993 to 2010. During that time period, school districts were provided inflationary increases to the revenue limit…” Wermuth said. “Right now, we’re operating on a $3 million a year referendum. We’re in the second year of a four-year, non-recurring referendum… even with our referendum, we’re about $1.2 million dollars behind inflation. Like most districts, we can’t get off that treadmill.”
Pressley said lawmakers have made school boards and districts the “villain” by forcing districts to have to go to voters to meet costs.
“We have a lot of retired people on fixed incomes. Almost 50% of our funding for our schools comes from local property taxes. So, who’s the bad guy? It’s not the people in this building, it’s the people at the school district because you raised our taxes,” Pressley said.
Wermuth said he practically isn’t an educational leader anymore.
“I am a financial expert. I study spreadsheets and cannot get off selling referendums to the public,” Wermuth said. He added that the process is “incredibly divisive” and that “at some point in time, the tolerance is just not going to be. It’s not going to exist, regardless of what we try to do.”
Freshman Rep. Angelina Cruz (D-Racine) said that the problems facing school districts aren’t “unsolvable.” She said the state’s estimated $4 billion budget surplus could be used to help fund school districts, that the state could tax its wealthier residents to help afford costs and stop funding private school vouchers at the expense of public schools. She said that the recent budget proposal from Gov. Tony Evers was a good starting point as it includes raising the special education reimbursement to 60%, increasing per-pupil revenue and investing in student mental health services, universal free school meals and literacy education.
Cruz called on people to continue to speak up for better school investments — even as Republican lawmakers are likely to throw out all of Evers’ proposals.
“There is an appetite to fully fund our schools, and when the proposal comes back to not do that, you need to continue to show up, and use your voices to advocate for our kids,” Cruz said.
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