ANTIGO — At a special meeting Monday night, the Antigo school board learned the results of a survey sent to the community in late May that aimed to gauge support for a possible capital building referendum on the November ballot.
Perry Hibner, lead survey strategist for the public relationships firm the Donovan Group which has been consulting the district on the possible referendum, provided analysis of the results. That particularly related to the three most specific questions which spelled out the costs of various project options under consideration.
For the first such question, which read, “I would vote ‘yes’ on a $46 million capital referendum question to build a new Unified School District of Antigo Elementary School, having a tax impact of $76 per year on each $100,000 of fair market home value,” roughly 65 percent of all respondents — as well as 58 percent of respondents in a comparison group made up only of residents who are not current parents of school-aged students, district employees, or students — indicated definite or probable support.
Nearly 59 percent of all respondents and more than 52 percent of the comparison group indicated support for a $54 million referendum question to build a new elementary school and fund the most urgent maintenance needs of the middle and high schools. Support for the last option being considered, a $61 million referendum, fell to 54 and 47 percent for all respondents and the comparison group, respectively.
Hibner characterized the results as encouraging for those that support a referendum, but said choosing the option that would gain support in November could prove tricky.
“The hard part about the data is — and I’ll just emphasize it one last time — there’s a bit of a conundrum for you,” Hibner said, referencing the $46 million project. “In your case, more of your community will support $46 million because they look at it from a tax standpoint and that’s what they can afford.”
“But families with middle and high school kids want at least $54 million because they want to see something for their kids as well, and that’s the challenge you’re going to have to wrestle with over the next few weeks.”
A total of 672 community members completed the survey, a number Hibner said was slightly lower than desired.
“We would also like to see about 10 percent of registered voters take the survey,” he said. “There were nearly 9,000 voters in the municipalities that make up the school district in the 2020 presidential election, so we fell a little short of that goal.”
Hibner also emphasized the importance for continued community outreach to those unsupportive of the project, a notion that school board member Angi Schreiber echoed.
“As a parent, and as a community member, I would like to see the how and why behind how this is going to help our students have better academic achievement,” Schreiber said. “What are the details of that? How is teachers having more collaboration space, how will that affect teaching? How will that affect my kid or future kid’s learning? It’s great if we build a shiny new school, but things internally can still be run poorly, so I want to know the details of how that is going to increase our outcomes. I think that’s something that’s really important. It’s easy to know that maybe if you’re in the educational world, but if you’re not, if you’re a parent or community member, we need to explain that and tell that very clearly to them and tell them examples.”
The community task force that has been considering the district’s facilities predicament will meet next Tuesday to discuss the survey results and forward a referendum resolution to the school board, which will then vote on the resolution at another special meeting Wednesday at Antigo High School.
A common refrain Hibner repeated near the close of his presentation about which referendum option would prove successful was “trust the data.”
“The other thing I often get asked, because I just want to be preemptive here, is, ‘Well, Perry, you do this all the time. What would you suggest we do?’” Hibner said. “I’ll tell you, ‘trust your data.’ That’s what I suggest you do. The data, that’s one reason we did this survey. Where some districts make a mistake is they really don’t trust their data. They really wanted something that the data didn’t support, and they go with something else.”
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