Here & Now

Greg Hartjes on an Appleton School District Referendum

Zac Schultz:

The future of public education is one of the big issues in this fall’s election but not just in terms of candidates. According to the Department of Public Instruction, 58 different school districts will have referenda on the November ballot asking voters to approve new buildings and to exceed the levy limit to fund operations. Appleton is one of those districts and we’re joined now by the superintendent there. Greg Hartjes, thanks for being here.

Greg Hartjes:

My pleasure, thank you for having me here.

Zac Schultz:

You’re asking voters two questions. First is $129 million for a new elementary school and other upgrades but you’re also asking for $5 million a year above the levy limit. What will that $5 million a year get you in terms of staffing?

Greg Hartjes:

So there are three parts to the $5 million. The first is $2.2 million for additional staffing at the kindergarten, first and second grade level. That came out of the pandemic. What happened in the fall of 2020 is we were looking to keep students in person but safely distanced within classrooms. We couldn’t do that with our normal staffing where we had 25 to 1. And so we reduced class sizes to 21. What our teachers and principals found out they really were able to meet the needs of students much better, as you can imagine, with 20 students in a classroom, especially around those grades where we’re teaching early reading and writing skills. And so, coming out of the success of the pandemic with small class sizes, we’re asking our communities to support kindergarten, first and second grade class sizes be reduced to 20 to 1 in perpetuity. So that’s the first piece. The second part is STEM staffing. We need to modernize our curriculum around science, technology, engineering and math. We feel like we’ve fallen a little bit behind and so we want to add actual STEM classes at the elementary and middle level. The final piece to that $1.6 million is to operate our new spaces. If we do pass the capital project part of the referendum where we’re building a new elementary school, we’re adding on to our middle schools, we’re looking at costs around heating, cooling, utilities, maintenance and cleaning and then a little bit of staffing that will go with moving sixth graders to our middle school. So we put all that together into a $5 million question.

Zac Schultz:

For the past several years, Republicans have not increased the amount of money going to schools through the budget saying that the federal ESSER funds should be enough to alleviate that. If there had been an increase, would you still need this $5 million or is this a direct response to the shortfall from the state?

Greg Hartjes:

They certainly play together. Had we gotten that increase, that would have gone towards more of our operations. And so this is operational. So some of that may have been able to offset the $5 million. But our reality is we have inflationary increases. Busing costs and obviously staffing when we’re talking about health insurance increases, wanting to be able to give a 2% compensation increase to our employees. We put all of that together and we need $4 to $5 million in new revenue every year just to cover our operational increases and inflation costs. We didn’t have that last year. We’re not having it this year so very challenging for us to just simply meet the operational increases that all businesses or employers in general see. So yeah, a challenge for us.

Zac Schultz:

On the November ballot along with your referenda is going to be the race for governor with two very different visions for the future of public education. Governor Evers wants to pump billions into public education and Tim Michels has said he wants to expand school choice. Do you want your voters in your area to be thinking about the governor election when they reach down the ballot and reach your referenda?

Greg Hartjes:

What we wanted to do is put our referenda on a ballot so the November election, when a large number of our community would turn out for the election. We really felt that was the most transparent way to go about a referendum. We obviously could have gone here in August. We could go in February. Those are not large elections. We want to put it on the biggest election this year just to get the most community members out and be able to vote whether they vote yes or no, we want them to be informed and make the best decision for themselves and we think having that at that big election for the governor race is going to happen.

Zac Schultz:

How much do you think the two different philosophies of the gubernatorial candidates will impact voters? Do you think they will see those discrepancies and make a decision on all these questions together?

Greg Hartjes:

You know, that will be interesting to see what happens. Certainly the Appleton community has supported public education for generations and we’re hoping that that continues. And we feel like the cost of our referendum is very reasonable. It’s going to be around $20 on $100,000 of property annually. That’s a number that generally is looked at as being reasonable and so we hope that even if you are perhaps looking at property taxes and concerns about those taxes, you feel like it’s worth that investment into our education. So we think that we may get voters from both Democrat and Republican side that support our referendum.

Zac Schultz:

All right. Superintendent Greg Hartjes. Thank you for your time today.

Greg Hartjes:

Absolutely, enjoyed it.