Wisconsin communities are digging deeper than ever to fund schools

State Superintendent Jill Underly with Madison La Follette High School Principal Mathew Thompson and Madison Public School District Superintendent Joe Gothard in the hallway at La Follette Thursday | Photo by Ruth Conniff

High school principals on the east and west sides of Madison beamed as they showed off gleaming technology centers, renovated classrooms, new theater spaces and music studios filled with instruments — all part of extensive renovations that were recently completed across the district, thanks to a 2020 referendum passed by local taxpayers who raised their own taxes to cover the costs.

Madison is far from alone in asking community members for help upgrading aging schools. This year Wisconsin has seen the largest number of school referendum efforts ever.

So far in 2024,193 school districts— nearly half of the 421 districts in the state— have gone to referendum at least once to ask local taxpayers to supplement the revenue they’re allocated by the state, according to data collected by the Wisconsin Public Education Network.

“The concern with that is we keep asking for more and more, and it’s because the state government doesn’t keep up their end of the bargain,” said state schools superintendent Jill Underly, who toured Vel Phillips Memorial and La Follette high schools Thursday afternoon with Joe Gothard, the new superintendent of Madison public schools.

“I came here sophomore year from Mississippi,” said Jonathan Saloni, a senior at Vel Phillips who plays the French horn. He spent one year practicing in the school’s old, cramped band room before the renovation. “This is such a step up,” he said, standing in a big, airy new music studio surrounded by instruments. “We just have to organize the sheet music library.” Saloni enjoys playing in a collaborative ensemble organized by the music teacher to bring together orchestra and wind ensemble students. “We play really fun music — it’s great,” he said.

Underly, a pianist herself, lingered in the music room and pulled out a keyboard in a nearby professional recording studio, stroking the keys admiringly. “The opportunities that you offer the kids are so impressive,” she told principal Matt Hendrickson and the music staff. “Thank you guys.”

After peeking into the professional-looking auto shop, where students were learning how to get a car up on a lift, Underly didn’t have time to check out the planetarium before speeding across town to La Follette.

There, principal Mathew Thompson came out to greet her wearing a fluorescent yellow vest that made him look like a very tall crossing guard. The vest was part of a community-building effort, he explained, making all staff visible and available to students for the first few weeks of class. As he walked through the halls giving out high-fives he occasionally stopped to direct a lost teen to one of the renumbered classrooms in the newly renovated building.

Thompson’s first stop on the tour was to show off the brand new center for students who need help getting food, clothes and other supplies. “We have the highest rate of poverty and the most beautiful diversity in the district,” Thompson said. The new center, stocked with food and other necessities, also has a shower room and laundry, he said proudly, so kids can get their basic needs met.

“These are some of the filing cabinets we purchased in 1963 that we’re getting rid of now,” he told Gothard, the Madison superintendent — a La Follette alumnus who was wowed by the improvements to the building, including a library with skylights and matching furniture, Promethean boards in classrooms and a fancy new spectator gym. A health science classroom with mannequins in hospital beds is special to Thompson, he said, since his daughter graduated from the program and became a nurse. Another special stop: a giant, colorful mural of Madison all along one wall in the hallway. “I wanted a city feel,” Thompson said.

“We had the pandemic and then we had the construction and now we’re finally able to have some consistency and develop our school culture,” Thompson added. At the front door, he buttonholed Underly to ask her to push to change the state’s school funding formula. Wisconsin’s low special education reimbursement rate is crushing school programs, he said, since he and other administrators must take money from the general fund to cover federally mandated special ed costs.

Underly agreed with him.

As cheering as it is to see the transformative effects of the 2020 referendum on Madison high schools, constantly asking local taxpayers to cover for underfunding by the state is a terrible way to pay for education.

“Every time a referendum passes, it’s pitting neighbors against neighbors and people who have kids in school against people who don’t have kids in school, and people who can afford it against people who can’t afford it,” Underly said. “It’s like a vicious cycle. So if we were to get more funding into the school system, for example, by increasing the amount of special education reimbursements [from the state], that would take so much pressure off the schools.”

Local  taxpayers have reached into their pockets again and again over the last decade and a half, while the state’s commitment to fund education has failed to keep pace with inflation .

“It’s hard not to feel depressed as once again, for the 16th year in a row, Wisconsin students are going back to school this fall with less than the year before,” Heather DuBois Bournenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network told me. She called the record number of districts going to referendum this year “mind boggling.”

“And yet we have so many reasons for hope,” she added. “People are getting organized and fighting back against attacks on public schools, privatization scams and threats to public school funding.”

At the national level, defenders of public education got a boost when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris picked former teacher and public school booster Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate over private-school voucher advocate Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

The threat of publicly funded private-school vouchers, which are increasingly draining public school resources in Wisconsin, is now on the national news radar.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona kicked off a back-to-school bus tour in Green Bay this week, writing a tough opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in which he took Wisconsin’s powerful “school choice” lobby to task for promoting a system that takes public money away from public schools — which serve all children — to pay private school tuition at religious and other private schools that simply reject kids they don’t want to educate. That’s a far cry from the pro-privatization message not just from President Donald Trump’s anti-public-school education secretary, Betsy DeVos, but also from President Barack Obama’s education secretary, school-choice champion Arne Duncan.

Underly called Cardona’s point “100% on the nose.”

“We are funding two systems. We are funding a system that accepts every kid, and we are funding a system that doesn’t accept every kid, or only accepts kids for a little bit and then turns them away,” she said. “If we didn’t have to use taxpayer dollars to fund a second system, think about what we could do. These communities wouldn’t have to join a referendum as much as they do. It’s that easy.”

At the end of the tour, Underly reflected on the “really nice spaces” she’d seen. “ You can see the pride that these kids have in those spaces,” she said, “and the opportunities that come out of these spaces. And you want that for every single kid in Wisconsin. Every kid should have these opportunities.”

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX