Here & Now

Why Are Many Wisconsin School Districts Holding Referendums?

Frederica Freyberg:
As we mentioned, next Tuesday, many voters across the state will decide on the future of their local school district. 62 districts are asking voters to approve an operating referendum which allows districts to raise their tax levy in order to fund day-to-day operations. The biggest request comes from Milwaukee Public Schools, where they’re asking voters to approve $252 million over four years, but the needs vary according to size. With the Juda School District seeking just $500,000 a year. What’s consistent is that, over the past few years, the number of districts going to referendum has increased and there’s no sign of the trend slowing down. “Here and Now” senior political reporter Zac Schultz explains why so many districts are facing this fiscal cliff.

Zac Schultz:
Inside Fort Atkinson schools, things look normal. Kids are reading, learning math, playing instruments. But things could look dramatically different next fall if the voters don’t approve the operating referendum on the ballot April 2nd.

Rob Abbott:
This isn’t a referendum that we can live without.

Zac Schultz:
Rob Abbott is the Fort Atkinson district administrator and this is his third straight year trying to pass a referendum.

Rob Abbott:
Two years ago was the first time that the community rejected the operational referendum. And in that effort, we made it clear that the needs weren’t going to change and that we would need to come back again, which we did last April.

Zac Schultz:
Fort Atkinson has a long record of supporting operating referenda for schools.

Rob Abbott:
So last spring, we failed the operational referendum somewhat significantly and it was really perhaps the first time that we really gave pause to things have really changed.

Zac Schultz:
The district cut $3.3 million from their budget, including 45 staff positions. Now they’re asking for $6.5 million a year for the next three years to avoid more cuts. Abbott says just about every district going to referendum is in the same situation.

Rob Abbott:
This spring or certainly with the next November election cycle, that districts who aren’t successful are going to be looking at significant reductions.

Zac Schultz:
But how did it get to this point? The short-term answer brings us back to the spring of 2021, when the state had received $1.5 billion in federal COVID relief aid earmarked for schools. Those COVID funds were supposed to be used to help kids catch up from pandemic learning loss and deal with increased mental health issues. But Republicans in control of the state Legislature passed a state budget with a zero-dollar increase in per pupil aid for students for the next two years, counting federal dollars as state funding.

Robin Vos:
This budget, more than any other one that we have seen in my lifetime, gives huge increases to public schools. Huge. More than they will probably even be able to effectively spend.

Zac Schultz:
Right before the vote, Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network made this prediction.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
The budget that has been put forward to our state Legislature that they will vote on one week from today in the Assembly is a promise to make existing gaps wider and to make existing disparities worse. I couldn’t have been more right about that.

Zac Schultz:
Today, she says the state has underfunded schools for 15 years, drawing a straight line from the state budget to local referenda.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
Oh, that’s an ‘a’ to ‘b’ line. That’s as straight as a line can get. The reason that districts are forced to go to operating referenda right now is because they are enduring these decade-long cuts.

Zac Schultz:
Since the start of April 2021, 152 school districts in Wisconsin have gone to the voters asking them to pass an operating referendum. Some of them multiple times. 123 districts, shown here in green, have passed an operating referendum. 29 districts in red were turned down by their voters, some of them multiple times. 62 districts have operating referenda on the ballot on April 2nd. One of those is the Richland School District.

Steve Board:
It doesn’t surprise me at all that many, many school districts are going to have to go to referendum just to maintain the services that they’ve been providing for our students.

Zac Schultz:
Steve Board is the district administrator. He says Richland used some of their federal COVID dollars for their intended purpose. They hired teachers to help with learning loss. Now they need the community to approve an operational referendum if they want to keep them.

Steve Board:
We tried to invest back into our students, and in doing so, we were rolling the dice a little bit because we didn’t know if those positions would continue, and obviously they wouldn’t without the support of a referendum.

Zac Schultz:
Richland is also asking for a capital referendum to update things like an old roof and broken bathrooms.

Steve Board:
Our community feels that our, quote, unquote, new high school, which is built in 1996, is new, but it’s pushing 30 years old.

Zac Schultz:
So how did we get to this point? While the short-term points to recent state budgets, the long-term answer is older than the Richland High School. The school levy limits were imposed by the state in the early ’90s to control property taxes. Each budget the state would increase the levy by the amount of inflation, but in the wake of the 2009 great recession and continuing through the Scott Walker era, the levy increases were uncoupled from inflation.

Scott Johnson:
The shortfall now is over $3,000 per student. That’s a monumental change.

Zac Schultz:
Representative Scott Johnson is a Republican in the state Assembly. Fort Atkinson is in his district and he used to sit on the Fort Atkinson School Board.

Scott Johnson:
Republicans have been in charge of the biennial budgets and it’s pretty clear that most of us Republicans want to favor school choice, voucher schools, charter schools.

Zac Schultz:
Johnson says too many of his colleagues in the Legislature are unfamiliar with school funding.

Scott Johnson:
Many do not understand it. It’s a convoluted, challenging system.

Zac Schultz:
Even fewer have driven a school bus, as he still does, and been able to see the kids that are heading off to class in the morning.

Scott Johnson:
I want to give that child a good morning greeting so that they’ve heard something positive.

Zac Schultz:
Johnson says the simple truth is school districts have to pass operating referenda just to balance the budget, because state funding has not kept up.

Scott Johnson:
We’re going to balance local school budgets by referendum, and so basically, every school district is facing this cliff. Every three, four years, depending upon how long they run their sunset referenda.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
So what happens in that situation? Local property taxpayers simply have to pay a larger share of the cost and we’re seeing that all over the state.

Zac Schultz:
In much of the state, the same voters who are deciding these referenda are the ones who elected the Republican lawmakers who underfunded the schools in the first place.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
Pointing out the gap between what voters want, what they’re voting for at the local level, and what they’re getting from Republican leaders in Madison I think is a really important missing link here that a lot of people aren’t really connecting.

Zac Schultz:
But don’t expect the schools to point that out.

Rob Abbott:
We’ve worked hard to be as apolitical as possible, and it’s not to our benefit to align, you know, one way or the other, but certainly the dichotomy societally is not playing to our favor.

Zac Schultz:
The Richland School District could not be in a more advantageous location politically. Both their Republican Representative Tony Kurtz and Republican state Senator Howard Marklein sit on the Joint Finance Committee which writes the state budget.

Steve Board:
I also try to have conversations with Tony Kurtz and Howard Marklein in terms of this is a reality of where school districts are at so that they understand.

Zac Schultz:
Both Howard Marklein and Tony Kurtz declined to speak with us for this report.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
The folks in the state house are a hundred percent to blame for that.

Zac Schultz:
DuBois Bourenane says beyond school districts having to constantly return to the voters, the problem comes when you look back at the map and see in which districts the referenda are failing or where they’re not even asking for more funds.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
It’s widening the gaps across our districts, across our schools, and it’s really guaranteeing that there are some kids in this state who simply are never going to see enough resources to thrive unless we change the direction this ship is steering quickly.

Scott Johnson:
There are going to be school districts that will be doing the bare minimums across the board and then you’re going to have the high rent districts that will spend almost twice as much and theoretically, we’ll try to tell the public that those two educational opportunities are the same, and I will suggest to you that that’s misleading.

Zac Schultz:
Reporting from Fort Atkinson, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”