The Wausau School District referendum failed - so what's next?
The Wausonian sat down with Superintendent Cale Bushman to find out what the impact will be and what the district will do next
The Wausau School District took to two public meetings prior to April’s election to sell the voters on the idea of a referendum.
What was the ask? The district wanted an extra $8 million per year, including $3 million toward an operating budget shortfall and $5 million toward maintenance it had deferred. That was to go on for five years.
But, district leaders told the public, that wouldn’t increase tax dollars. Why? The district was planning to take the money from extra funds it was paying toward its debt service in order to reduce the amount of interest the district was paying. They just needed permission from the public to exceed state limits in order to do it.
They didn’t get that permission. Voters on April 1 by a margin of 350 votes rejected the referendum. And that leaves the district in a pretty tight spot.
Wausau was hardly alone as 89 districts held referenda on April 1, and many of those in large districts didn’t pass. Racine and Oshkosh passed referenda by tight margins, but others such as in Sheboygan, Baraboo and Beloit failed. Beloit’s failed by only 150 votes. Overall, of the 89 districts that held referenda, 51 of them — or 57% — passed on election Tuesday. Of those, 29 passed by single-digit margins, according to Civic Media.
So The Wausonian sat down with Wausau School District Superintendent Cale Bushman this week to talk about what the next steps are for the district.
Bushman says it’s disappointing, of course. But Bushman says he also sees a silver lining, as the district been working toward rebuilding trust with the community. “So to have that many people who voted yes for us is encouraging in some aspects, because it means people are wanting to see what's best for the industry looking forward with things,” Bushman says.
But that said, the district will now have to make some very difficult decisions. “I sometimes use the phrase ‘what's the least bad decision that we can make’ as we move forward with things because everything's important,” Bushman told The Wausonian. “What are we going to learn to live without?”
The Wausau School Board will ultimately make those decisions, and they likely won’t be easy ones. The district earlier this year voted to close three elementary schools and convert a fourth to a 4K site — all that is in service of attempting to downsize the district’s building and operations to fit the number of students.
Why? The Wausonian has for some time been reporting on the decline in enrollments — not just in the Wausau School District, but statewide. Third Friday Counts that are conducted statewide to determine enrollment seem to be down across the board every year. That impacts state funding which is based on student counts (as former district finance guru Bob Tess used to say, it roughly translates to $10,000 per student, though the formula is much more complicated than that).
The elementary plan was the replacement for a district-wide campus overhaul that garnered public backlash and was ultimately scrapped by the board when Board Member Patrick McKee unveiled that it wouldn’t even save the district money.
The elementary school plan was meant to save money both in building space and numbers of staff members.
But that will take some time to pay off. In the meantime, that means some pretty serious conversations will need to take place at the school board over how to cut enough to balance the budget.
That comes as school officials point out another issue — if revenue caps had kept up with inflation, the district would have had $25 million more in state revenue, and the referendum would have been unnecessary.
What happens now?
Bushman says the district had been making cuts already and these next cuts won’t be easy. A lot of that comes down to “what’s the least bad decision we can make” as Bushman puts it — in other words, how can the district control costs while impacting the students the least? “I think what we've been challenged with is this is going to be reoccurring, so we have to make decisions, not just to triage for next year, but if we don't want to be in the same situations five years from now,” Bushman told The Wausonian. “What do we start putting into place, and what do we phase out over time so that we can be more solvent with things?”
Bushman says school administrators have been holding meetings to start coming up with a plan. Assistant Superintendent of Operations Josh Viegut says that administrators will start putting together proposals for the board to start looking at prior to June when the board starts looking at next year’s budget.
How does it break down? The district is facing a $3.7 million in operating shortfall for next year’s budget. The referendum was also supposed to help with more than $4 million in deferred maintenance for the district. That work simply won’t happen - it’s kicking the can down the road, as Bushman puts it.
Besides the maintenance not being performed, in a referendum meeting district leaders said the district might need to look at salary freezes and even potentially eliminating course offerings.
I asked Bushman if there was a possibility that the district would hold a referendum again next April. In other words, did he think the cuts the district will make might ultimately lead people to be more supportive of a referendum next year?
Bushman said that’s a possibility, and like all referenda would be up to the school board. For now, the district is going to try to operate as efficiently as possible for the next year, and it’s hoped that the elementary consolidation will help in those efforts. And the deferred maintenance could be an even bigger challenge, since even the referendum money wouldn’t have covered everything.
Bushman says the hard decisions facing the board are a couple of months away yet. In the meantime, Bushman says the administration plans to hold workshops with the board in order to dig into the details of the situation better and make sure they can come to the right decisions. “They're not going to go away,” Bushman says. “In fact, they're probably going to become more concerning moving forward. We're hoping that nothing happens with our buildings.”
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