Why are there 140 school referendums on Wisconsin ballots? Check your local Republican legislator.

They’ll tell you it’s a sign of local overspending, but the truth is that lawmakers have been strangling school districts for more than a decade—choosing to look frugal when they’re really passing the buck to property taxpayers.

There were already 103 school referendum issues on ballots around Wisconsin this past spring. In November, there will be 140 more. Why?

There are two factors that explain why local property taxpayers are feeling overwhelmed by referendums, and they both show how the conditions that led to this endless cycle of referendums could have been fixed long ago by Republicans who have controlled the Wisconsin Legislature since 2011.

If your time is short, here are the two main points:

First: Schools have to live under budget limits that Republicans never loosened—having taken advantage of a Democratic budget decision made back during the Great Recession when faced with a multi-billion dollar shortfall. As a result, even with a multi-billion dollar state surplus all these years later, school districts have to ask local voters to hike their own property taxes because the Legislature won’t close a gap between school costs and inflation—a gap that has grown year by year for more than a decade.

Second: Rather than restore funding for public schools, Republicans have grown the voucher school program from a small, experimental program with private, mostly religious schools to the point where taxpayers are now funding two parallel school systems in the state, to the detriment of public schools that are forced to go to referendums more often.

What to Do? – Public education advocates have an easy solution: Say yes to the referendums, say no to the legislators who created the mess, so that next year’s Legislature can reform school funding by balancing property tax support with a more responsible level of state support.

Here are the details.

Fighting a Recession, But Never Making Peace

The first factor that led to 2024 being a Year of Referendums was actually started in 2009 by well-meaning Democrats who controlled the Assembly and the Senate, and held the governor’s office during debate over the 2009-11 state budget. The Great Recession was in its early stages. The markets had plunged. An estimated 140,000 jobs were lost as manufacturing activity plummeted. The state budget was facing a $6.6 billion deficit. By and large, there were across-the-board five percent cuts for state agencies, but Democrats managed to reduce the damage to a cut of about three percent. 

Still, a decision was made that prove fateful. For the ten years prior (or five two-year state budgets), school districts lived under revenue limits that were designed to hold a line on tax increases—but the limit was allowed to go up by the rate of inflation. In 2009, the Legislature removed the inflation adjustment, with lawmakers —including me, a state senator at the time— deciding there needed to be flexibility: an adjustment less than the inflation rate back then, due to the recession, with adjustments upward once the economy recovered.

The economy recovered, but Democrats lost control of the Legislature in the 2010 elections as Republicans pledged to keep taxes low. The GOP has held both the Assembly and Senate since that time and never restored the adjustment that allowed school district revenue limits to keep pace with inflation.

Of course, after one year, the difference was minimal. The revenue limit set by legislators “only” trailed inflation by $75 per pupil ($275 vs. $200). But the next year it trailed by $81 more. And year after year, the gap grew larger.

The lag is now about $3,300 per pupil behind what school districts could have been raising to keep up with inflation. Republican-written state budgets could have closed that gap at some point, especially last year when the state enjoyed a multi-billion dollar surplus. They chose not to.

That left it up to school districts to make cuts or ask local voters to hike their own property taxes to make up for the Legislature’s deficiency. And as that gap grows, more school districts have had to turn to voters more often.

It’s as if the Great Recession was a war and martial law had to be declared (within the state budget) to wage it properly. But after many years of peace, the people in charge still refuse to end the martial law taxpayers have to live under.

Paying for Two Parallel School Systems

The fiscal crisis for public schools only grew worse as Republicans, protected from voter oversight by gerrymandered maps, cleared a taxpayer-funded voucher school scheme for takeoff. When Wisconsin’s voucher school program began in 1990, it was small and experimental and limited to lower-income families. Today it is a statewide behemoth that cost taxpayers $700 million in the last school year and could cost more than $770 million this year, according to the Wisconsin Public Education Network, an increase of 22,500 percent from its original price tag. 

And it may not even be constitutional, depending on the latest legal challenge to its existence.

With these two factors contributing to nearly half of the state’s school districts going to referendum at some point in 2024, taxpayers may interpret this as school districts being fiscally irresponsible. Advocates, on the other hand, say each referendum is proof that Republican legislators have refused for more than a decade to do their share to fund education in Wisconsin, and they have set up local school districts to be the bad guys.