The Referenda
For the second time in six years, an upscale suburban school district in Wisconsin is asking residents for millions of dollars to keep the lights on. This is the story of how we got here, and what we can do about it.
Episodes
The district has drawn up some options, a community committee has been poring over pros and cons for months, and we're going to get a survey to take in late October. So what should we be thinking about? What are our choices?
LINKS:
1.) Ad-Hoc Committee page, with a list of proposed models to consider.
2.) In-depth description of each model
3.) What "modernization" means in these models
DEPT PRESENTATIONS:
LINKS:
Onward Tosa piece on our reassessments
WSD 2024 referenda tax impact calculator
Wauwatosa's post-reassessment 2025 tax estimator
WSD Strategic Plan (feat school-engagement indicators)
SP podcast interview on board-supt relationships
*Corrected an editing mistake in an earlier version*
In which I’m joined by Anne Chapman, the leading expert in Wisconsin school finance, the research director of the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, to talk about the impacts of state budget changes on school funding decisions and community conversations. In this episode, we’ve got:
A recap of Wisconsin school finance basics, featuring an extended shandy metaphor
A ...
I originally intended to fit something like this into the previous episode, but it clearly is too big. But here I'm talking about why local control of schools matters for us as citizens, what the state ought to be doing to invest in the cultivation of civic virtue, what districts can be doing to facilitate good conversations about schools, and ultimately, our own obligations as citizens to participate in the good governance of our ...
So, I got mad, and I had to use the bleep button a few times.
Here, moving backward through time, is media coverage of the budget as it has developed:
Today's update. (July 1)
Budget negotiations reach an impasse (June 4)
JFC starts over from scratch (May 9)
Evers's budget proposal (Feb 26)
Links!
First, just put down your name and email here if you're interested in participating in the book group at all. I'll follow up with details. Here are the two books:
Manny Teodoro's Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government, and
Amanda Lewis and John Diamond's Despite the Best Intentions (2nd edition)
2030 Task Force links:
I kept trying to get my thoughts down to 3 minutes in order to deliver them at public comment on June 9th 2025, but I, um, overshot it a little.
LINKS!
Secondary School Ad Hoc Committee (including application)
A couple of colleagues from School Perceptions join me to talk about what we saw with the 89 school referendum questions on the ballot April 1st!
Here's the blog post breaking down referendum results, including graphs and everything.
Here's the info on Tosa's Secondary Ad Hoc Committee.
And here's a link to the School Perceptions podcast, for any school leaders out there!
In this episode:
- Meet Vlad Kogan
- Learn about quality measures that isolate school effects from out-of-school effects.
- Understand some of the factors that impede school board accountability.
- Hear a bit about Vlad's forthcoming book
Sara Lerand comes on the show to talk about the local referendum question on our ballots in April, which would change the way local school board elections run -- undoing a decision that Tosa originally made in 1994.
LINKS:
The text of the referendum question
Wauwatosa News-Times pre-election coverage from 1994
Wauwatosa News-Times post-election coverage from '94.
For Public Schools Week, here, I got a little worked up.
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