ELECTIONS

Wisconsin School referendums break records in 'landslide for public education'

Annysa Johnson

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Voters in Cedarburg approved a $58.9 million referendum Tuesday to renovate and build new facilities in the Cedarburg School District. An increase in enrollment has forced schools to convert some spaces, such as this former storage room at Thorson Elementary School, into classrooms and workstations.

Wisconsin taxpayers voted to pour at least $1.3 billion more into their local public schools on Tuesday, raising their own property taxes in most cases to pay for it and making 2018 another record year for school district referendums.

Capping an election cycle in which education issues dominated the governor's race, voters approved 77 referendums by school districts asking to borrow money for capital projects or exceed their state-mandated revenue limits to maintain or expand programming. They rejected just five, totaling almost $44 million.

All 23 ballot questions passed in southeastern Wisconsin, totaling $556 million, according to an analysis of data reported by the Department of Public Instruction. Those included a $124.9 million ask by the Wauwatosa School District — the second largest referendum Tuesday — which is expected to raise property taxes on a $250,000 home by $470 a year for the next two decades.

The suburban Milwaukee district will use those funds to build four new schools and remodel existing buildings. It passed with 61% of the vote.

"I’m grateful to our community for the decision they made and their support for our great school district," said Wauwatosa Superintendent Phil Ertl.

With Tuesday's tally, Wisconsin school districts have won taxpayer approval to add about $2 billion in new funding for facilities and programming in 2018, up from the record $1.7 billion committed in 2016, according to an analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The Policy Forum puts Tuesday's tally at $1.4 billion, slightly higher than DPI's, because it calculated each year of a multiyear request to exceed revenue caps.

That investment and the record rates of passage were seen as a victory for public school children, but also — because referendums exacerbate disparities between rich and poor districts — a clarion call for reforming the way Wisconsin funds K-12 education.

"It was a landslide for public education," said Heather DuBois Bourenane, executive director of the nonprofit Wisconsin Public Education Network, a coalition of public school advocates. "Kids are truly the winners."

But, she said, Wisconsin "shouldn't be funding our schools by referenda."

"We need funding fairness, and it starts with getting serious about revenue limits," she said of the state-mandated caps that control how much districts can raise in state and local taxes. "We need to get serious about transforming the funding formula ... so it's more fair for all kids."

The vast majority of the referendums that passed Tuesday were requests to issue debt totaling about $1.2 billion. The remainder sought to exceed revenue caps for operating expenses.

Jason Stein, research director for the Policy Forum, said the increases appear to have been driven by a host of factors, including individual district wants and needs, the economy and shifting attitudes among some voters who are prioritizing spending on schools over lowering taxes.

The rates at which the ballot questions are passing are also rising, to almost 90% this year compared with 79% in 2016.

"That would put us at the highest rate of passage we've seen going back to 1999," he said.

The ballot questions were posted in the midst of a heated governor's race in which Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers and incumbent Gov. Scott Walker made education a central theme of their campaigns.

Evers, who ousted Walker on Tuesday, maintains that the rise in referendums is "directly related" to the budget cuts Walker made to schools after he first got into office, and he has vowed to increase education funding by about $1.4 billion over the next two years.

FULL COVERAGE: 2018 Wisconsin Elections

Evers said his 2019-'21 budget would, among other things, increase funding for special education and English language learners, target resources for rural and high-poverty schools and bring greater equity in school funding across the state. At the same time, he said, it shifts more of the burden of funding schools onto the state and away from taxpayers who have been called on increasingly to boost their local school budgets by referendum.

"The school funding formula has been broken forever. It's time to do more than just shuffle the deck chairs," Evers said in August when he first announced the plan.

It's unclear how much of his agenda he will be able to enact, given Republican control of the Legislature.

Before Tuesday, voters had already approved about $648.1 million in referendums for 48 of the state's 421 school districts this year, according to the Public Policy Forum.

Districts say they are forced to turn to referendums by the revenue caps, which were imposed in 1993-'94 in response to two decades of rising property taxes tied to school funding. In the past, the caps increased with inflation, but they've barely budged since 2011, and any additional funds districts received had to be used to lower their levies.

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

Referendums are rising, both in size and numbers, despite recent increases in state aid for schools and attempts by lawmakers to rein in the ballot questions, according to the Policy Forum.

Since 1990, Wisconsin school districts have passed more than 1,600 referendum proposals totaling $12 billion — more than half of that in the last decade. Most of those have been to acquire debt for capital projects, but a growing number are to exceed revenue limits for operating costs to maintain programming.

In 2016 alone, voters approved referendum questions that authorized borrowing $1.35 billion, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayer Alliance, a predecessor organization to the Policy Forum. That was 10 times more than in 2011 and the most since the alliance began tracking the data in 1993.