Funding of Wisconsin’s public schools

On April 4, 50 Wisconsin public school districts will ask voters to dig deeper into their pocketbooks to approve referendums so the district can continue to operate.

Across the state, 249 school districts (nearly 60%) already depend upon voter-approved referendums to maintain their programs and services for students. In some cases, the referendums provided funds for districts to thrive, but increasingly referendums are providing funds districts need to simply survive. While the circumstances of each school district and the size of the ask may differ, the need for additional resources is a given.

How did we get to a situation where so many school districts have to beg voters to tax themselves more heavily to keep the school doors open, let alone to maintain adequate staffing levels?

Since the mid-90s, school district spending has been tightly controlled by state-imposed revenue limits. These limits have eroded local control of school boards and restricted what schools can spend on teachers, textbooks or other instructional materials, supplies, transportation, facilities and all the other things our kids and schools need to operate. These limits, by themselves, would not necessarily be a problem if the state allowed reasonable increases over time. 

Our definition of reasonable is an annual increase tied to inflation so schools can deal with the rise in costs for goods and services, including retaining teachers and other integral school staff. The state used to agree with this logic, as inflationary increases from 1993 through 2009 provided districts with a relatively predictable revenue stream. Large portions of Wisconsin are also losing population, and declining school enrollment is another challenge.

Wisconsin’s per pupil school funding model means for each student lost, several thousand dollars are lost to the school district. You may be thinking, “If the schools have fewer students, their costs should be proportionally lower as well.” That’s not necessarily the case. For example, the school district still needs to pay the second-grade teacher whether they have 15 or 25 kids in that classroom. Whether there are 40 students on the bus or 50 the cost of operating the bus is the same.

Over a decade ago, Act 10 was implemented and provided school boards the ability to implement cost savings such as requiring employees contribute to higher shares of their benefits, specifically health insurance premiums and their share of their state retirement contributions.

Act 10 also created challenges for schools partly because when it was implemented, public school districts received a funding cut of $554 per student on average. An unintended consequence of Act 10 was an exodus of veteran teachers, and the economics of supply and demand came into play.

Districts began implementing new models of compensation to attract and retain talent. Free agency hit schools just as it does in professional sports. Public schools are a free market today more than ever, especially as they now not only compete among themselves, but with a private sector that is facing its own challenges. Not the least of these challenges is dealing with inflation at a 40-year high.

Since 2009, the state has not provided increases in spendable resources to schools that met inflation in any school year. In three separate school years, no additional spendable dollars were provided to schools.

According to the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau, since Act 10 was passed in 2011, allowable school spending trails inflation by $2,236.60 per student. (See the Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo on inflationary increases for schools to learn more.) The only way schools can boost their revenues to at least try to keep pace with inflation is to pass a referendum to override the revenue limits.

It is little wonder that an increasing number of districts find themselves reliant on referendums to stay afloat. Last year, Wisconsin school districts placed 92 referendums on the ballot for basic operating expenses, the highest total ever.

In this article, we haven’t even addressed the challenges districts face in funding their special education programs, or the challenge of maintaining, updating and replacing technology that schools are increasingly dependent upon.

 School boards and administrators are spending untold hours in planning for referendums, and this translates to less time on their primary mission of educating kids. Beyond this, there are also direct legal costs, required notices to be published, and other costs associated with having the referendum on the ballot.

Few, if any, school board members ran for that office so they could decide which school programs to cut due to insufficient revenue. But this is what unstable, unpredictable school funding has brought about. It’s time to follow, without delay, the top recommendation of the state Legislature’s 2019 Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding and return to providing our local public schools with resources that meet inflation.

Dan Rossmiller and Chris Kulow are director of government relations and government relations specialist at the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, a nonprofit association that provides information and services to Wisconsin school boards in the areas of school law and policymaking, bargaining advocacy and leadership development.