In 2020, Madison School District voters approved a Referendum for 317 million dollars which helped pay for new facilities at La Follette High School, including a new auditorium.
On Wednesday, that auditorium hosted the Wisconsin Public Education Network summit, and La Follette Principal Mat Thompson used the occasion to thank the Madison community for the improvements. He also poked fun at the way Wisconsin funds public education.
“The state funding formula does not meet the needs of our students,” Thompson said. “Many districts across the state, including here in Madison, need to go to their communities to conduct a referendum.”
In April 2024, there were more than 90 referendum questions on ballots across the state. “These improvements that you see here today… were made possible by this community, the Madison community that is so supportive of our schools,” Thompson said.
The Madison Metropolitan School District will go back to the polls in the fall, asking them to approve a $100 million operating funding request and a $507 million construction request. School board president Nichelle Nichols said at the summit that it was a “really difficult and important decision” to go back to the community and ask people to “continue to invest in public education.”
Schools’ continued reliance on rising property taxes to cover costs and shortcomings in state funding systems were among the issues educators, school board members, state leaders and other public school advocates discussed Wednesday at the education network’s 10th summit, along with ways to advocate for solutions.
Looking ahead to the next state budget
Defending public education in the state’s next budget cycle was a major focus of the conference.
Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly told summit participants that the Department of Public Instruction is working on its next state budget request and will continue to seek more resources for public schools.
“We will not limit ourselves to the context of what can be. We will continue to try and design the future that can be,” Underly said.
Underly said there is a need to increase special education reimbursement, general aid, mental health resources and support for educators, calling those requests “bold, bold and doable.”
“We know that given the current constraints, we simply do not have the funding or resources to support all of our students, and that’s not okay,” Underly said.
Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, briefed attendees on the topic during a session that focused on what schools might consider in the run-up to the next budget. Chapman told the Examiner that her job is to help people, especially when they are looking to advocate for their schools, understand how funding works and the issues and challenges this presents for districts.
“My hope is that regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of what school funding should look like in Wisconsin, you have the facts,” Chapman said.
Income Limits and Special Education
In her presentation, she described state revenue caps as the “backbone” of school funding in the state, but explained that they are capped and have not kept pace with the rate of inflation for many years. Schools are increasingly relying on referendums to meet their needs, though the approval rate has been declining in recent years. Meanwhile, the state of Wisconsin still has a $3.1 billion budget surplus, Chapman noted.
Standing up for schools can be tricky. Many of the tools for funding schools in Wisconsin can pit school districts against each other, Chapman said. Finding policies that are “the tide that lifts all boats” and using a single voice to elevate them could offer a different path.
“There are ways to fund education that are flexible enough that each district can take those resources and apply them to their specific needs,” Chapman said, “and those are the things we look for when we look for things to advocate for in the state budget.”
Chapman said revenue caps and special education funding are two areas where districts could work together to advocate for improvements, as they could help the vast majority of schools. He said the No. 1 issue he hears from districts is that state revenue caps, which limit the amount of revenue schools can generate, have not kept pace with inflation since 2009.
School districts rely on their general funds to serve all students, but their “purchasing power has been increasingly diminishing over time,” Chapman said. “There comes a point when school districts can’t keep pulling rabbits out of a hat … How much better would it be if they had the resources? They need to close their budget gaps.”
Chapman also noted that providing special education to students can also be a big cost for districts, and a higher state reimbursement rate could help schools across Wisconsin. The 2023-25 state budget increased the special education reimbursement rate for public schools from 31.7% to an estimated 33.3%; however, this was nowhere near the 60% that DPI and Gov. Tony Evers requested.
Rejecting privatization
Summit participants also discussed school privatization and Wisconsin’s school voucher system.
Derek Gottlieb, an adjunct professor at the University of Northern Colorado, presented a session with University of Wisconsin-Madison adjunct professor Chris Saldaña titled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Vouchers.” Gottlieb argued that the voucher system is not helping the state fulfill its constitutional duty that “students have a fundamental right to equal opportunity for a sound basic education.”
“What it takes to properly educate every child is time, attention, care, a rigorous vision … and that requires resources on a much more massive scale than the state of Wisconsin has ever been comfortable with and Wisconsin citizens have ever been comfortable with providing at the state level,” Gottleib said. “Vouchers are not the way to make that constitutional promise a reality; quite the opposite. They undermine our capacity by diluting school funding across a much broader range of institutions.”
Voucher schools are not required to meet the same levels of transparency as public schools and They do not necessarily lead to better results for students, he noted.
The case for vouchers is based on evidence that “comes from these small, targeted programs like the one that was started in Milwaukee in the early 1990s and then this little secret is assumed to work the same way,” Gottleib said. “If you take it to scale, if you universalize it … all the evidence from the last five or 10 years, as these universal programs have become available in other states — in Iowa, in Indiana, in Ohio — suggests that not only do the benefits evaporate, but real harms are introduced and the budgetary impact is enormous.”
Gottleib said that instead of turning to the voucher program, the state should invest in public schools on a much larger scale.
At the close of the summit, WPEN Executive Director Heather DuBois Bourenane told participants that achieving the state’s constitutional imperative is a realistic goal.
“The state is not doing its job even when it has a massive surplus. We are fed up with our children paying the price while our funding gaps and racial disparities grow ever larger as we waste more and more money on privatization scams,” said DuBois Bourenane.
“We have so much hope in all of you who chose to spend the day thinking, learning and planning with us about all of these things, and we know that if we work together more, we can make a difference.”
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