Krueger: State Aid Cuts Leave Schools Choosing Between 'Core Functions And Aspirations'

WAUKESHA — I spent 31 years in the Department of Public Works deciding which potholes got filled first when the budget didn't cover all of them. It's not a complicated skill. You rank the holes by how many axles they've broken and you start at the top. I mention this because the state of Wisconsin has just cut general school aid to districts by 15%, and nobody up in Madison seems to know how to rank potholes.

The cut lands on School District of Waukesha the same month three area districts dropped a combined 48-page referendum packet on voters, asking them to color-code their way through three separate ballot questions. I wrote about that packet last week. I did not expect a sequel this fast.

A Methodologically Dishonest Number

District officials put the shortfall at $4.3 million for this school year alone. I called that figure 'methodologically dishonest' on a call-in radio show Tuesday, and I stand by it, even though the host cut me off at the 90-second mark to go to a Culver's ad. The dishonesty isn't in the math. The dishonesty is in pretending a 15% aid cut and a 48-page referendum packet arriving in the same mail cycle is a coincidence.

I am not an economist. I am a man who once reallocated three snowplow routes during a budget shortfall in 2009 and got hate mail from Frame Park residents for two winters. But I know what it looks like when a bill gets handed to someone standing closer to the register.

"We're being asked to choose between core functions and aspirations, and I don't think most taxpayers understand that's the actual choice on the table this fall."

— Pam Dolinski, treasurer, Waukesha schools budget advisory committee

Dolinski's committee meets in a conference room above the district's bus garage that still smells faintly of diesel no matter the season. She told me the $4.3 million gap, if unaddressed, would mean cutting one full busing route per high school and eliminating the district's seventh-grade intramural program, which she described as 'the only extracurricular nobody fights over because nobody wants it enough to fight.'

The Referendum Overlap Nobody Asked For

Waukesha North, South and West all feed into the same aid formula, which means a 15% statewide cut doesn't discriminate by mascot. Northstars, Blackshirts and Wolverines alike are getting the same haircut, proportionally, which I suppose is the one fair thing about an otherwise unfair arrangement.

Voters, meanwhile, are still working through that 48-page packet, which I'm told has a glossary in the back explaining the difference between an operational referendum and a capital referendum, printed in 9-point type. Add a state aid cut to that packet and you get a ballot question that functions less like democracy and more like a pop quiz nobody studied for.

I asked Dolinski whether the district considered pushing its own response into a fourth referendum question, just to round out the set. She said no, 'mostly because the printer quoted us for a 52-page document and the committee vetoed it on cost alone.' That's the kind of detail that tells you everything about where things stand.

Outsourcing The Problem

What the state has done, in my non-economist opinion, is take a structural funding problem it created and hand it directly to property taxpayers with a bow on it. That's not reform. That's outsourcing, the same way the DPW used to 'outsource' pothole repair to whichever driver hit the hole hard enough to call it in.

I don't have a tidy fix. I spent three decades filling literal holes, not fiscal ones. But I'd ask whoever designed this cut to spend one afternoon in that conference room above the bus garage, smelling the diesel, and explain to Pam Dolinski which core function she's supposed to call an aspiration.

Until someone does that, I'll keep ranking this the way I ranked potholes: by how many axles it's already broken. Right now that number is climbing, and the paperwork hasn't even stopped arriving.