ANTIGO — At a special meeting Wednesday night, the Antigo School Board voted 9-0 to place a $54 million capital referendum question on the Nov. 5 election ballot.
If the referendum passes, the $54 million would fund a new, consolidated elementary school and address the most urgent maintenance needs at the middle and high schools, as well as have a tax impact of $100 per year on each $100,000 of fair market home value.
The board approved the $54 million referendum option over two others — one for $46 million that would have only funded the new elementary school, and another for $61 million that would have funded the elementary school and both immediate and future maintenance needs at the middle and high schools — in part because it had been recommended by the task force of community members that has been studying and considering how to address the district’s facilities deficiencies alongside district officials in recent months.
Corie Zelazoski, who read the task force’s recommendation to the board at the start of the meeting, said the task force selected the $54 million option after weighing the results of a survey mailed throughout the community in late May.
“I think that, when we were looking at the data and the decrease in support between the three options, that’s where the task force got held up,” Zelazoski said. “In an ideal world, we would have picked option three, but we also want to make sure this passes, knowing that we’re not going to have another chance down the road…I think the biggest thing that the task force focuses on is that we really need this new elementary school and want to get it passed. But we also recognize all the needs of the other facilities and buildings, and so we looked at the best option that was the most likely to pass.”
At a task force meeting Tuesday night, Zelazoski said she approved of the district’s plan to build a consolidated elementary school in part because it would likely be large enough to accommodate students in the 4th grade (4th grade students currently attend classes at the middle school building).
“Fourth grade at the middle school, from my perspective, from every parent I talk to — my kids don’t go here in the district because of that — 4th grade in the middle school is not OK,” she said. “I work with kids. I hear about the things that are happening with our 4th graders at the middle school — it’s not OK. And I don’t think you will ever be able to — even if, let’s say, we pull this rabbit out of our hat that we can renovate our elementary schools to get them to a good spot — that’s still 4K through 3rd grade at that elementary school, which still keeps our 4th graders at the middle school, and that is a huge problem for many people in this community.”
Gail Zaverousky, a task force member who has advocated for fixing the three existing elementary schools rather than constructing a new one, again voiced opposition to any capital building project.
“If we go all through Antigo and tear down every building that’s older than 1960, you won’t have a town. You fix a home. My home is from 1960. I’ve done a lot of remodeling — we keep up what we have,” said Zaverousky, who went on to criticize the district for spending money in recent months to consult outside firms as they have studied the potential project. “It’s being spent because, ‘We want to impress everybody because we’re going to have a big school, like we built this one. We thought we’d impress everybody with our big, new school.’”
Ginny Gregersen, another community member on the task force, which voted 17-1 that a new school had to be built several months previously, disagreed with this assessment.
“These are great questions that a lot of us have asked, and they have painstakingly gone through previously and addressed these. They’ve done side-by-side cost comparisons, rebuilding versus fixing. And I think that’s where we came to the conclusion that it’s going to cost more to repair,” Gregersen said. “Please don’t negate the fact that there has been a lot of work already done to do that workup and that homework and try to provide all that data so we do have that available to us.”
Just before the vote Wednesday, likewise, board member Jill Mattek Nelson said an assortment of individuals had now concluded that the elementary schools had to be replaced.
“In 2015-2016, there was a group that came in, did an assessment of the buildings, projections, costs for upgrades to the buildings versus a new building…now we’re in 2024, and we are coming with the same outcome,” she said. “So it’s a separate group, but professionals that came in to assess our buildings with the same outcome. So it is not [that] this board wants a new building, this administrator wants a new building. Again, I shared this at the last meeting: the task force started with our previous superintendent, Dr. Sprague, so this need has been identified for quite some time, and I’m hopeful that the community is willing to support it.”
Angi Schreiber, another board member, noted that while she had no great desire to have her taxes increased, improving the district’s buildings could have larger implications for the community.
“I think everybody in this community always talks about how we need this for our community to grow: this idea or that idea, we need manufacturers to come in, we need a better school, we need more housing, all this kind of stuff to actually keep Antigo growing and hopefully thriving,” Schreiber said. “Somebody needs to be the catalyst for that, and I feel like the school district is the perfect entity to be the catalyst to spark that outward trend.”
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