If you live in Wis burbs, you're not likely to win under stimulus or WisGOP funding scheme

After WisGOPs on Joint Finance revised their K-12 spending plans to avoid blowing $2.3 billion in stimulus funds from DC, Wisconsin school superintendents were saying it's not enough. And that's because the added "state spending" to qualify for the stimulus isn't going to go for the schools.

Last week, GOP lawmakers on the budget committee secured federal relief aid for schools by cutting property taxes levied by schools/technical colleges. However that results in a flat increase since it doesn’t pump extra $$ in the school funding formula. https://t.co/JkH8HOdRKh

— Emilee Fannon (@Emilee_Fannon) June 21, 2021

Here's more detail from a Capitol rally in Madison demanding more for K-12 in 2021, to make up for years of underfunding.

“All students and staff across our state deserve better than zero," Verona Area School District Superintendent Tremayne Clardy said outside the Capitol "This budget simply does not meet the needs of students and families across the state."... Per-pupil spending on public education nationwide grew by 23% from 2008 to 2018, but only 15% in Wisconsin, an increase that places the state 38th in the nation in public education spending, according to a September report by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum. According to the report, Wisconsin’s overall per-pupil K-12 spending levels have lagged well behind the national average in recent years. Between 2011 and 2018, Wisconsin’s per-pupil spending increased by 4.3% (from $11,774 to $12,285). That increase ranked Wisconsin 49th in the nation in terms of percentage change during that period and compares to 18.9% nationwide.

Combine the spending limits with a crazy COVID year for schools, and Wisconsin schools are slated to be the next group of workplaces where it might be difficult to retain and hire staff.

Nathan Knitt, director of business services with the Columbus School District, said his district has already seen at least three recent teacher resignations, vacancies the district has decided not to fill due to budget concerns. The district has roughly 1,300 students enrolled in grades 4K-12, and its student-to-teacher ratio has seen a steady increase over the years. Knitt said it’s becoming more difficult to retain teachers with highly sought-after skill sets in the district.

“We were in the high teens, now we’re about in the low 20s, about 21 students per teacher,” he said. “For Columbus, we’re going to see negative effects if the budget passes as is.”

So how is the stimulus not taking care of all these problems? If you take a look at the projected list of funds that would go to districts from March’s ARPA package, there are huge disparities among Wisconsin districts in terms of how much they will get.

It is true that some districts will be getting a lot of money per student. This includes the largest district in the state, but otherwise includes small, rural districts in low-income areas.

Top stimulus funds per student
Washington Island $12,766
Granton $9,256
Milwaukee $7,127
Menominee Indian $7,021
Norway Joint District $6,522
Hillsboro $6,547
Goodman-Armstrong $6,122
Dover $6,061
Phelps $5,825
Linn Joint District Number 4 $5,714

But others don’t, especially if they are in affluent areas that often have higher property values. While the Department of Public Instruction put together a distribution plan that tried to guarantee that each district would get $600,000 of stimulus funds, that doesn’t go far in some larger suburban districts that weren’t getting much stimulus.

Districts receiving less than $200 per student
McFarland $98
Elmbrook $129
Waunakee $139
Sussex Hamilton $149
Kimberly $153
Kettle Moraine $172
Mequon-Thiensville $172
Mukwonago $177
Germantown $178
Hortonville $181
Slinger $182
New Berlin $184
Monona Grove $191
Hudson $191
Cedarburg $195
De Pere $199

While the WisGOP Legislature manipulated $114.6 million of the stimulus funds to try to raise that number to $781 a student for schools that had more days of in-person instruction in this school year, it is still possible that some small districts won't get the $600,000 minimum that Evers' DPI planned to give.

Oh, and the WisGOPs also earmarked $781 per student in stimulus funds to end up at Beloit’s Lincoln Academy, a charter school that's opening next year and is run by....GOP mega-donor Diane Hendricks.

It’s a Big Club, and you ain’t in it.

What the WisGOP Legislature didn't do in their K-12 budget motion was to redistribute state aid over these next 2 years to make up for these big disparities, and they didn't raise the revenue limits. Which means a lot of districts in Wisconsin are going to continue to struggle despite billions in stimulus coming to the state overall, unless changes are made by the full Legislature in the next 10 days.

If nothing is changed, many districts could be stuck having to go back to referendum and/or make budget cuts in the next year or two, bause they are not receiving enough to make up for the double-duty that teachers often had to pull in 2020-21, or in upgrading their school buildings to lessen the chance of having viruses fly around their school and infect people.

Maybe WisGOP politicians who get a lot of money from Betsy DeVos and Diane Hendricks might be fine with that, but I'd hope that a whole lot of Wisconsinites won't accept us falling even further behind. Especially when it's happening in a time when we have plenty of money available to re-invest in a public good that we used to take pride in - something we used to use as an advantage in getting people to want to come to and live in our state.

But attracting talent might be something else that the WisGOPs don't want.