Most school spending referendums pass

Wisconsin voters agreed to pony up hundreds of millions of dollars in higher taxes for their local schools at the polls this week, passing referendum proposals at a rate not seen for more than a decade.

In all, voters said "yes" to 55 of the 67 referendum initiatives that appeared on ballots across the state Tuesday, including a record number of requests to exceed state-mandated revenue limits to collect more money for operations. Those referendums, as well as dozens of requests to issue debt, will pump more than $980 million into districts over the next several years to maintain and expand facilities and programs.

Taxpayers' willingness to shoulder more of the costs of educating local students reflects a growing understanding of the financial restraints imposed by lawmakers — first by Democrats, and now Republicans — on districts, according to educators and the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. 

But Tuesday's tally came on a night when voters bolstered the ranks of Republicans, whose party has championed those financial restraints in recent years. And it comes five years after taxpayer angst fueled Republicans' passage of Act 10, the controversial statute that helped some districts curtail costs and property taxes by eliminating most collective bargaining for teachers.

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State Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du Lac), who chaired the Assembly's Education Committee last year, sees Tuesday's elections as vindication that he and fellow Republicans are on the right track.

"I don't know how else you can read that," Thiesfeldt said. "The people have said they appreciate the changes we’ve made and would like us to continue down the path we’ve been going."

Maybe so, said Todd Berry of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. But it also speaks to the central role schools play in the life, culture and economics of a community, especially in small towns and rural parts of the state where many of the referendum questions passed.

"I think what they're saying is we generally agree with this, or we think the approach is better than it used to be. But we reserve the right to tweak it to meet our local needs," Berry said.

"As Tip O'Neill used to say, 'All politics is local.' And there's nothing that can trump parents and grandparents that have certain opinions about their children's schools."

According to the state Department of Public Instruction, more than half of Wisconsin's 424 school districts have passed referendum initiatives since the beginning of 2012. This year alone, 79% of the 154 questions floated by districts passed, it said. The passage rate is even higher, at 82%, for the 71 referendum efforts seeking to exceed revenue caps — the state limits on how much a district can collect in state aid and local taxes — to pay operational expenses. Historically, Wisconsin voters have approved school referendum proposals at about a 50% rate, according to Berry.

Tuesday's winners included a few in southeastern Wisconsin. Voters in the Germantown School District, for example, agreed to borrow $84 million for a new field house, performing arts center, swimming pool and other projects. And in Franklin Public Schools, voters approved $43.3 million for a new middle school. There were also some losers, including a $64.7 million bid for facilities in the Arrowhead Unified High School district, which drew criticism last year for spending $600,000-plus on locker rooms for its athletic teams.

Rural schools struggle

But most of the proposals approved Tuesday were in rural communities where expenses have risen, but flat or declining enrollments have cut into their state funding, and the revenue caps limit how much districts can levy taxpayers to make up for that.

"We're constantly looking at expenses to see what we can save, but there's only so much you can do on an annual basis," said Tim Schigur of the Milton School District north of Janesville, where health care expenses alone rise on average by 8% to 12% a year. Voters on Tuesday gave the district the go-ahead to exceed its revenue cap by $2.5 million in each of the next five years for operating costs. But they narrowly rejected a bid to borrow $87 million for a new high school, swimming pool and other building and maintenance projects.

Since 1993-'94, the state has imposed revenue caps that limit how much districts can raise in their levies, a response to two decades of rising property taxes tied to school funding, according to the Taxpayers Alliance. In the past, the caps increased with inflation. Democrats reined them in beginning in 2009. Republicans cut them with the passage of Act 10 in 2011, and they've barely budged since then. At the same time, districts can't spend any additional money they receive, say for increasing enrollment or paying down debt, and instead must use it to lower its tax levy. 

As school district budgets were squeezed — by a combination of the revenue caps, declining enrollments and hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to state aid in more recent years — they turned to referendums for additional tax dollars to borrow for building projects or to exceed their revenue limits for operating expenses.

"Last year, we made $1 million in reductions," said Jim Brewer, superintendent of the Clinton Community School District near Beloit, where voters passed a $4.5 million referendum for operating expenses on Tuesday.

"We really need to look at making the funding formula more balanced," he said. "The state has kicked the can down the road so they look good in Madison, and meanwhile the rest of us in the local communities are having to pick up the slack."

The burden is particularly difficult for small districts, said Berry of the Taxpayers Alliance.

"They have certain costs they can't rearrange or cut," he said. "If you talk to a bigger school district, the superintendent might say, I have four chemistry teachers, I can cut one. But in a small school, the chemistry teacher might also be the biology teacher or the physics teacher."

Haves and have-nots

State schools Superintendent Tony Evers lauded voters for supporting their schools but said referendums, as a system for school funding, are not sustainable and over time will widen the gap between rich and poor districts.

"My kudos to the local communities. That's great," he said of the Tuesday's approval rates. "But it's reflective of the fact that the state needs to do more than they're doing now.

"If we continue down this road relying on the good will and support of local taxpayers, we're still going to have 20% of districts not passing these referenda, and we'll become a state of haves and have-nots."

If anything, Republican lawmakers are looking to limit districts' use of referendums. State Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Cedarburg) said he plans in the next session to reintroduce a bill that would curtail them. A measure that would have limited referendums to regularly scheduled elections, when voter turnout is highest, and would force districts to wait two years before reintroducing a failed referendum proposal drew heated opposition from school districts and Democrats last year and did not come up for a final vote.

Thiesfeldt, who is looking to resume his chairmanship of the Assembly's Education Committee, said he'll back that bill, but supports letting voters decide whether to boost local taxes for schools.

"That's their choice," he said. "They can always say no."