When a school district must ask voters simply to preserve existing teachers, programs and services, something is wrong with the system that funds it.
That is increasingly the condition of public education in Wisconsin. Operational referenda were meant to let communities approve spending beyond ordinary needs, not to keep ordinary instruction intact.
Interviews with current and former superintendents, school business officials, statewide education leaders and researchers point to a structural problem, not simply extravagance, mismanagement, or temporary economic distress.
Wisconsin’s system no longer keeps education costs, student needs, state aid and districts’ authority to raise revenue in balance. Referenda, program cuts, staffing reductions, deteriorating school building and disparities among districts are not separate problems. They are consequences of the same one.
The question is not merely whether a particular referendum should pass. It is why Wisconsin’s regular funding system so often cannot support its regular responsibilities.
A system governed by its past
Wisconsin’s revenue-limit system reaches back to 1993. Its original purpose was defensible: to restrain rapid increases in local taxation and maintain a predictable state-level commitment while preserving a means for communities to authorize spending beyond the limit.
But a limit is only fair if the standard behind it makes sense.
“Those revenue limits have essentially locked a district into its spending patterns from the 1993-94 school year,” Dan Rossmiller, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, told me. “And a lot has changed since then.”
Greendale Superintendent Kim Amidzich described the consequence: “Where you were in 1993 with your revenue limit determined how long you could go before you had to go to operational referendum.”
History may explain a funding disparity. It does not, by itself, justify perpetuating one.
From 1993-94 through 2008-09, revenue limits were indexed to the Consumer Price Index. For a time, that inflationary adjustment helped preserve the logic of the system. In 2009-10, the state removed the indexing mechanism. That connection was later severed.
Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, described what followed: “Districts are falling farther and farther behind what it costs to just keep their doors open.”
No government can repeal inflation by declining to appropriate for it. The price of insurance does not consult the Legislature before rising. Neither does the price of electricity, transportation, technology or labor.
A statutory limit can govern what a district may collect.
It cannot govern what the world will charge it.
The arithmetic of a shrinking school
The objection naturally arises that many districts are educating fewer children and therefore ought to require fewer resources.
The premise contains some truth. The conclusion does not necessarily follow.
“If you have 20 students in a classroom and a teacher that teaches them, you lose one student that’s $12,000 of lost revenue,” La Crosse Superintendent Aaron Engel told me, “but you can’t reduce much other than maybe some disposable supplies.”
A child may disappear from the enrollment count without taking one-twentieth of his classroom with him.
The teacher remains. The building remains. The lights remain. The roof remains.
Rossmiller supplied an equally useful example: if the student who leaves lives in the middle of a bus route, the bus must still reach the children at its end.
“They can’t shed costs as fast as they lose revenues,” he said.
Kenosha Unified chief financial officer Tarik Hamdan reached the same conclusion: “We are not able to reduce our expenses at the same rate that our revenue goes away.”
Retired Raymond superintendent George Slupski observed the same difficulty from an earlier generation of Wisconsin school leadership. Declining enrollment can reduce a district’s revenue even while many of its underlying expenses remain.
Here, then, is the distinction: enrollment declines continuously; costs often decline only in steps. Ten fewer students concentrated in one place may permit an economy. Ten fewer students scattered across ten classrooms may permit almost none.
A finance system that ignores this distinction eventually punishes districts not for extravagance, but for arithmetic.
Of economy and its limits
It will next be said that districts ought to economize.
No argument for greater state responsibility should become an excuse for less local responsibility. Public money deserves vigilance precisely because it belongs to the public.
Retired Franklin Superintendent Gerald Freitag emphasized the consequences of financial decisions made by local leaders. Even the apparently painless economy of postponing maintenance can prove illusory.
“It would be very easy to steal from maintenance accounts,” he said, “but the fact of the matter is that can have long-term repercussions.”
Greendale officials described adjusting staffing, competitively managing vendor contracts, sharing services, pursuing grants and restructuring health insurance. Kenosha closed and consolidated seven schools.
There must, however, be a terminus to economy.
“I’ve heard ‘cut the fat,’” Kenosha Superintendent Jeffrey Weiss said. “I’ve responded that, okay, I have, and now I’m hitting bone.”
Barbara Sramek, a retired superintendent who now prepares educational leaders at UW–Madison, expressed the same principle with admirable economy:
“They have cut all the paper and pencils they could. What remains are two additional ‘p’s’: programs and people.”
There is an immense difference between eliminating waste and eliminating education.
A larger class is cheaper. Fewer teachers are cheaper. Fewer counselors, advanced courses, technical programs, arts offerings and extracurriculars are cheaper still. One could obtain the greatest economy of all by educating no one.
Economy, therefore, cannot itself be the measure of a successful school system.
At some point, a budget reduction ceases to remove waste and begins to remove opportunity.
Money matters because opportunity matters
Yet the case for reform would remain incomplete if adequate school funding merely made administrators’ budgets easier to balance.
Money is not the object of public education. Educational opportunity is.
Christopher Saldaña, a UW–Madison professor whose research focuses on school finance and educational opportunity, points to the importance of the distinction.
“The most rigorous research on school funding tells us that increased investment in K-12 education improves both academic achievement and long-term life outcomes,” he wrote in an email to The Madison Federalist.
Those effects, he added, are “especially pronounced for marginalized and minoritized students.”
Financial scarcity does not necessarily impose equal burdens upon unequal circumstances. A child whose family can purchase tutoring, transportation or enrichment possesses resources beyond the schoolhouse. A child whose family struggles with housing or food insecurity may depend more heavily upon what the school itself can provide.
When districts become financially constrained, Saldaña said, targeted supports can be among the first things lost.
Thus, the relevant question is not simply how many dollars Wisconsin spends.
It is what educational opportunity those dollars purchase, for whom, and where.
When the exception becomes the system
The referendum was designed to reconcile two legitimate principles: fiscal restraint and local self-government.
If a community desires expenditures beyond the ordinary limit, let the community approve them.
But this reasoning depends upon the ordinary limit being sufficient for ordinary purposes.
Amidzich said the original system was intended to require a direct community conversation over spending beyond normal growth. Once the inflationary connection disappeared, districts increasingly needed referenda “to keep pace with inflation.”
An exception that becomes indispensable to ordinary government has ceased to function as an exception. It has become an indictment of the ordinary system.
“If the only way to sustain the public schools in each locale in Wisconsin is through returning to the local taxpayers with an operational referendum,” Sramek wrote, “the manner in which we fund our public schools is not sustainable.”
There is a further problem.
“We’re creating a system of haves and have-nots as a result of reliance on referenda,” Engel said.
Saldaña explains the mechanism.
“Wealthier communities can generate substantial revenue while taxing themselves at relatively low rates,” he wrote, “while lower-wealth communities tax themselves at higher rates and still raise less.”
And his conclusion is difficult to escape:
“Referenda are not designed to direct the most help to the districts that need it most.”
The accident of geography should not become the arbiter of educational opportunity.
A child chooses neither the taxable wealth of his neighbors nor the revenue position inherited by his district from three decades ago. He casts no vote determining whether his community will approve another referendum.
Yet each may influence the education placed before him.
Local control should permit communities to build above a sound foundation.
It should not require them repeatedly to reconstruct the foundation itself.
Obligations require means
Special education exposes the same contradiction in another form.
Wisconsin properly requires districts to educate students with disabilities according to their needs. These obligations do not disappear when reimbursement proves insufficient.
La Crosse school business official Brandon Munson explained that unreimbursed costs ultimately draw resources from the broader district budget. Greendale School Business Official Jonathan Mitchell described the same pressure: as mandated costs rise faster than reimbursement, a larger share of finite operating resources must be devoted to meeting them.
Engel reduced the consequence to one sentence: “Every kid, every staff member, our whole community pays for underfunding of special education.”
The state cannot reasonably impose an obligation, inadequately finance that obligation, restrict the means available to satisfy it, and then treat the resulting deficit as merely a failure of local administration.
For this reason, substantially increasing special-education reimbursement was among the most consistent reforms proposed by those I interviewed.
A dollar for schools is not always a dollar schools can spend
Another contradiction obscures the debate.
School funding and property-tax relief are frequently discussed as though one must be purchased at the expense of the other. Under Wisconsin’s revenue-limit structure, that is not necessarily so.
“The legislature has to realize that [with revenue limits in place] providing state aid is a form of property tax relief,” Rossmiller said.
Chapman explained the inverse proposition: “If the state puts more money in but doesn’t raise revenue limits, school districts don’t get more money to spend.”
A dollar spent in the name of education is not necessarily a dollar available for education.
The amount the state appropriates, the amount a property owner pays and the amount a district is legally authorized to spend are distinct questions.
Hamdan offered a striking example from Kenosha. A change in the district’s state-aid position contributed to roughly $9.5 million more in property taxes without increasing its spending authority.
“Our property taxes got spiked up by nine and a half million dollars,” he said, “and we didn’t realize a single dollar of that as extra spendable money.”
A system capable of producing higher taxes without greater educational resources ought to make us cautious about judging support for schools merely by the size of either a tax bill or an appropriation.
Adequacy is not the same as equity
Saldaña provides a useful standard by which a better system might be judged.
School finance must answer two questions.
The first is adequacy: does the system provide sufficient resources for children to meet the educational expectations the state itself establishes?
The second is equity: are those resources distributed so that students confronting different circumstances nevertheless have meaningful access to educational opportunity?
Equality in dollars is not necessarily equality in opportunity.
A rural district transporting children across great distances confronts costs a compact suburb does not. A district educating greater numbers of children in poverty may require resources another does not. Students with disabilities and students learning English bring needs that cannot be satisfied merely by pretending every child costs precisely the same amount to educate.
“Each of these circumstances carries real costs,” Saldaña wrote, “and each requires resources beyond what a flat per-pupil figure would provide.”
Treating unlike circumstances identically may produce mathematical uniformity.
It does not necessarily produce justice.
Wisconsin has already studied the problem
The defense of the present arrangement might be stronger if Wisconsin had never examined alternatives.
It has.
Professor Julie Underwood, former dean of UW–Madison’s School of Education and an expert in education law and policy, served on Wisconsin’s Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding.
Among its recommendations, she recalled, were “a regular inflationary increase on revenue limits; additional reimbursement for special education costs ... [and] funding for students who live below the poverty line.”
Rossmiller also served on the commission. Engel and Weiss independently directed me toward its work when I asked where Wisconsin should begin.
The particulars remain open to legitimate disagreement. Wisconsin may choose to repair its present system or eventually replace larger portions of it.
But there is a point at which continued study ceases to be prudence and becomes procrastination.
Wisconsin has reached it.
“They’ve got the playbook,” Weiss said.
“They created it.”
The question before Wisconsin
Educators’ testimony does not eliminate legitimate disagreement over taxation, spending or local responsibility. But the evidence points consistently in one direction.
Across districts, school-business organizations and researchers, the same pattern recurs: costs can rise faster than ordinary revenue; enrollment can fall faster than expenses can be reduced; and mandated obligations consume finite resources. Districts then turn to referenda to provide what the ordinary system no longer reliably provides.
Districts must still economize, justify their spending, adapt to enrollment and answer to taxpayers. But they cannot cut indefinitely without reaching classrooms, programs, and students.
A government cannot indefinitely prescribe the ends, restrict the means and assign responsibility elsewhere when the two no longer meet.
The purpose of school finance is not merely to distribute money. It is to provide the means by which Wisconsin meets its education obligations. If those means depend on a district’s revenue position three decades ago, its taxable wealth and whether voters can sustain another referendum, Wisconsin is not financing educational opportunity according to a coherent principle.
Local control is valuable. Local rescue is not a funding philosophy.
Wisconsin has studied the problem and developed reforms through bipartisan inquiry and decades of practical experience. What remains is not a lack of knowledge, but the political judgement to act.
