Wisconsin Superintendent Urges Voters To "Just Vote Yes On All Of Them" To Spare Communities Referendum Exhaustion

WAUKESHA — I've read a lot of school referendum language this year, most of it in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly on Sunset Drive because that's where I have cell signal and time to sit with something. I'm not proud of that. But I'll tell you what stopped me cold, more than any of the ballot text itself: a superintendent from central Wisconsin, unnamed in the coverage I saw, stood up at a state education board meeting on Sept. 19 and told the room that voters should "just vote yes on all of them to end the confusion." Not a policy argument. Not a funding formula. Just permission to stop.

Wisconsin has 79 school referendums on the ballot this fall, a record, up from the previous high of 68 in April 2024, according to Department of Public Instruction figures this paper has already reported on once this month. Declining birth rates, state education funding that hasn't kept pace with inflation, and aging buildings that need roofs and boilers whether or not the state formula accounts for them, that's the engine behind all 79. Most voters do not know that engine exists. What they know is a mailer arrived, and it has three questions on it, and the questions are worded like each other on purpose.

Waukesha Already Said The Quiet Part

This paper reported earlier this month that Waukesha School District Superintendent Dr. Robert Chen made nearly the identical point to district staff at an Aug. 27 planning meeting, telling the room that if every resident just voted yes on the district's three questions, "we could probably fund schools like they're actually supposed to be funded," before adding that he wasn't officially saying that, he was just noting that it had occurred to him. Chen later confirmed the remark when asked directly and said he stands by it as a private observation, not guidance, because the district legally can't tell anyone how to vote.

I called Chen's office this week to ask whether he'd heard the central Wisconsin superintendent's version of the same sentiment, the one that made it into an actual public board meeting instead of an internal planning session. A district spokesperson said Chen "was aware of the comments" and had no further statement, which I read as a man declining to say out loud, a second time, the thing he already got caught saying once.

"Just vote yes on all of them to end the confusion."

— unnamed central Wisconsin superintendent, to the state education board, Sept. 19

The Cheat Sheet Was Never Going To Work

Waukesha's own district spent four drafts on a one-page referendum cheat sheet this year, with a fifth in progress ahead of an Oct. 1 mailing deadline, because the first four were rejected internally for still reading like legalese with a checkmark stapled to it. I don't doubt the district worked hard on that document. I doubt any document like it can do what a plainly stated "just vote yes" can do in one sentence, because the cheat sheet's whole design assumes a voter has the patience to sit with three nearly identical paragraphs and tell them apart. Most people don't have that patience on a Tuesday. I don't either, and I write about this for a living.

A survey of 310 Waukesha School District parents this paper covered a few weeks ago found 67 percent couldn't identify, unprompted, which of the three district questions funded facilities work versus operating costs, and 22 percent believed a "no" vote on any single question would cancel all three, which isn't even how the ballot works. That's not a failure of those parents. That's a failure of asking 310 people to become part-time school finance analysts in order to participate in local democracy.

What I'm Actually Arguing

I'm not telling anyone how to vote, and I want to be as careful about that as Chen has been. What I'm arguing is that the central Wisconsin superintendent's advice, stripped of the fact that it's a little scandalous for an educator to say out loud, is functionally the same message the state has been sending districts for years by underfunding the general aid formula and letting referendums pick up the difference: stop trying to evaluate school funding question by question, because the state has already made the aggregate decision for you and called it optional.

Waukesha voters are being asked to decide on three referendum questions of their own this cycle, on top of whatever their neighbors with kids in Muskego or Mukwonago are being mailed about theirs. Parent advisory council chair Denise Aldrich told this paper that "everybody's cheat sheet starts to blur into everybody else's cheat sheet," and I think that's the most honest description of this fall's ballot I've read anywhere, official or otherwise.

Bob Krueger, who writes for this section more often than I do and attended one of Chen's forums out of what he called general civic interest, told me afterward that he left with a headache and a plan. "I'm voting yes on all of it," Krueger said. "Not because I understood the third question. Because the superintendent understood the third question, and he's the one who has to live with the roof." I don't know that I'd put it exactly that way in print under my own name. I've just done it anyway.