POLITICS

Gov. Tony Evers won't seek to phase out school vouchers in first state budget

Molly Beck

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON - Gov. Tony Evers' first state budget won't include a plan to eliminate or phase out taxpayer-funded school vouchers despite once saying during his campaign that he would try.

Evers on Tuesday said he would seek to provide "more accountability and transparency" within the state's private school voucher programs but would not include a proposal to phase them out.

Instead, Evers said, he supports including on property tax bills how much each taxpayer is spending on vouchers for private school students living in their school district, something Milwaukee has done since 2011 and Racine initiated last year.

"I think that's not an anti-voucher issue, that's just a transparency issue," Evers said during an appearance at Marquette University. "I think the people of Wisconsin do need to have a conversation around public schools and publicly funded schools period and in order to have that I think we need to have the best transparency possible."

During his campaign for governor, Evers said he would work with the Wisconsin state Legislature to phase the vouchers out but did not specifically pledge to do so in his first state budget.

Separately, Evers said he planned to add positions to the state Department of Natural Resources, an agency that was hit hard by retirements and budget cuts during the tenure of Gov. Scott Walker.

While Evers did not provide details, he criticized the Walker administration's decision to eliminate many science positions over the past eight years.

Evers, who before becoming governor led the state agency that oversees public and private schools, said in September he would seek to phase out the subsidies available to low- and middle-income students if he was elected.

"Wisconsin’s public schools provide access and opportunity to over 860,000 kids. They have to be our priority," Evers said in a candidate survey for the Wisconsin School Administrators Alliance. "When we aren’t adequately funding our public schools, how can we possibly afford a parallel publicly funded private school system?"

Evers said he would "work with the Legislature to phase out vouchers" and "if Republican control of the Legislature makes that impossible" he would seek to increase public school funding and require private voucher schools to employ licensed teachers, among other changes.

Eliminating taxpayer-funded school vouchers has long been called for by Evers' strongest supporters in the fall election: public school advocates, Democrats and teachers unions who argue the money comes at the expense of public school funding.

But the plan was likely never going to become reality with Republicans in control of the state Legislature — a fact Evers acknowledged in the September survey.

Republicans have voted multiple times to increase the number of school vouchers in Wisconsin, where the nation's first program was created in 1990.

A spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union, did not respond to a request for comment.

Jim Bender, the president of voucher advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin, called Evers' comments "good news for families across the state."

"Let’s focus our energy on improving educational outcomes for all kids in Wisconsin," he said.

The Department of Public Instruction, which Evers oversaw until his election as governor, in September warned that ending the Milwaukee and Racine programs would be difficult without a plan, given the percentage of students living in the district who attend private schools using a voucher.

The statewide program, which has been in place since 2013, has drawn the most criticism because of the large percentage of students who were already attending private schools before receiving vouchers. DPI said halting the statewide program would be easier because there are fewer students.

"We'll be looking for more accountability and transparency," Evers said Tuesday. "That's always been the goal whether as state superintendent or now as governor to make sure that people understand the successes and failures of that school system just like in the public school system."

Evers to add staff at DNR

Evers' pledge Tuesday to add personnel at the DNR comes as the agency has faced a series of budget cuts.

In 2015, Republicans used an impending financial shortfall and tapped long-standing frustration with the agency in some quarters to cut funding for conservation programs and exert more control over environmental regulations.

With growing staff shortages, a 2017 reorganization of the agency eliminated the Bureau of Science Services — a move Evers on Tuesday called a "mistake." Today, the agency says the ranks of research scientists have fallen to about 18 employees.

Environmentalists say the cuts, especially in science, have weakened the intellectual rigor of an agency where research is the underpinning of everything from setting deer regulations to controlling invasive species.

Lee Bergquist of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.