One year of stimulus won't cure underfunding of Wisconsin's public schools

Last week, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released the enrollment and funding figures for all Wisconsin school districts (you can click here to find yours). Those figures show that the amount of Wisconsin kids in public schools continues to shrink, both due to demographics, and due to the odd circumstances that 2020 and 2021 have brought.

Annual statewide numbers released Friday showed a 0.5% drop in students attending public school districts, down 4,000 students from 2020, when enrollment was down nearly 26,000. In total, there were about 814,000 students in public school districts during this year's September headcount, down from 844,000 in 2019, before COVID-19 led schools to close and change their methods of instruction. The number of students attending independent charter schools or receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools, meanwhile, continued to climb. The data released Friday by the state Department of Public Instruction doesn't include most private school students or homeschooled children — data that will be released in January, the state Department of Public Instruction said in a news release Friday.

Independent charters had a notable increase in enrollment this year, with headcount up by more than 1,400 after a couple of new schools with sizable enrollment got certified for this year. And voucher schools outside of Milwaukee and Racine had more than 2,300 additional FTE of students for this year in September (partly because another class of voucher students gets added to go along with the students already in the program).

While public schools had a significant decline in enrollment for the 2020-21 school year, you'll notice that the number of Wisconsin kids in school in general went down at that time, and hasn't recovered.

As the former Superintendent of Schools, Evers knows well the harm that happens to a district’s finances if there is a decline in enrollment, and with the disruptions of the COVID World, Evers wanted to keep districts from being punished for the decline in enrollments that happened in Fall 2020. Which is why he included this provision as part of his K-12 budget in February.

Specify that for calculating a school district's revenue limit for the 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24 school years, the number of pupils enrolled in the district in the 2020-21 school year is the sum of the following: (a) the greater of the number of pupils enrolled in the district's September enrollment count in the 2019-20 school year or in the 2020-21 school year; and (b) the greater of 40% of the district's summer enrollment in the 2019-20 school year or in the 2020-21 school year. For revenue limit purposes, a district's enrollment is the sum of its pupil count taken on the third Friday in September plus 40% of its full-time equivalent summer enrollment. A three-year rolling average of a district's enrollment is used to calculate its revenue limit.

For example, for the 2020-21 revenue limit, the average of the 2017, 2018, and 2019 enrollments is used to calculate the 2019-20 base year revenue per pupil. Then, the average of the 2018, 2019, and 2020 enrollments is used to calculate the 2020-21 current year revenue per pupil.

The WisGOP Legislature didn’t go for that plan, so that means there may be districts facing significant cutbacks in resources if they lost students last year, and could well be facing further declines next year.

Then remember that the GOP Legislature didn’t allow for any increase in the revenue limit whatsoever in either of the next 2 years, which means that the minor increase in general school aids (2.2% this year, 3.7% next year) only goes toward reducing property taxes, and not into the classroom.

While stimulus funds from DC will help for this year, Marquette faculty member and ex-Journal-Sentinel education writer Alan Borsuk had an article today that recapped a recent meeting of the Southeastern Wisconsin School Alliance. Borsuk reports that many districts say they won’t get that much assistance in 2021, and are fiscally imperiled for 2022 and beyond due to the lack of state funding.

Many expressed concerns about their schools’ financial future, given that the revenue cap on per student spending was left unchanged in the state budget passed in June. Republican legislative leaders cited a large influx of federal pandemic money as a reason for granting no increase. But that money went heavily toward districts with many low-income students. Some of those responding in this informal survey were from districts that were getting little federal money while facing inflation and other financial challenges.

Asked about the impact of the federal money, one answered, “Virtually none, since the bulk of the funds went to urban districts.”

“Planning for the fiscal cliff that will be faced due to absence of inflationary increases in revenue limits in the 21-23 state budget,” another listed as a major concern.

One wrote, “Funding is not aligned to the needs of children, families, staff, and school communities.”

Another wrote, “It is terrifying. Money that should be used to help students overcome the educational gaps from the past 18 months has to be diverted in part to operations. We could face an economic budget cliff like never experienced before the next school year.”

And most of those federal funds are supposed to be targeted toward learning loss and other COVID-19 related mitigation. And as mentioned, much of this fills budget holes that happened over the last 2 years as schools had to take on some of the installation costs for virtual learning and other COVID-related adjustments.

Evers did reveal plans to give $100 million in additional stimulus funds for all schools after the budget was signed, which comes out to around $100-$120 a student. But that’s also short-term.

If you look at the projected breakdown of where ARPA school funds would go, the average payment per student for public districts, independent charter schools and specialty schools was $1,721 per student. But some districts got much less than that.

Even with the adjustments made by the GOPs on Joint Finance to give more money to districts that had more in-person school days last year, the minimum payment was only raised to $781 per pupil for those districts. It still was a solid boost for property-rich, mostly suburban districts (at least the ones who kept their kids in the classroom during the COVID year of 2020-21), but again, that’s only for this year. And the space adjustments and enrollment changes that the COVID era has brought on isn’t going to make up for that.

But it’s intriguing that the 2021-22 distribution of state aids seems to give notable boosts in aid to those same suburban and/or property-rich districts. I don’t see a reason why, as it doesn’t appear the way they hand out the aid is very different, but it’s definitely noticeable.

Largest % increases in state aid, 2020-21
Lac du Flambeau +244.15% (+$1,338,535 vs 2019-20)
Elmbrook +178.76% (+$5,932,056)
Woodruff J1 +82.08% (+$90,086)
Washington-Caldwell +52.13% (+$242,154)
New Berlin +48.93% ($3,587,933)
Siren +45.27% ($272,412)
Turtle Lake +43.30% ($366,692)
Erin +37.94% ($119,031)
Arrowhead +37.82% ($1,828,128)
Brighton +33.48% ($73,121)
Germantown +31.91% ($3,423,280)
Menomonee Falls +27.93% ($2,451,562)

Maybe there was a huge one-year bump in vouchers/online schooling in those districts for one year (which would reduce funding for the district in that year) and then they came back or something. But much like a lot of things in the COVID World, while things aren’t as distorted as they were this time last year, it's also not the same as it was in October 2019. And likely never will be.

And 1 year of stimulus won’t change the damage of a decade of underfunding public schools and attacking teachers. If this state and this country wants to be economically competitive in the coming years, it needs to be going forward and encouraging education and creative thinking, and not having MAGAts suppress those skills and goods out of fear and arrogance.