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Stu Fraundorf, Rhonda Loeffelholz (center), Becky Cohen
and other members of the Cuba City Education
Association are fighting to preserve their schools.
By Terry Lawler
UPDATE On Tuesday (October 4, 2005), Cuba City School District voters approved a referendum to spend another $600,000 for each school year from 2005-06 through 2008-09. However, even supporters said that while that will ensure the district's short-term survival, its long-term viability is still in question. |
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It’s rapidly becoming an all-too-familiar litany in Wisconsin: declining economy, decreasing enrollments, rising costs, failed referendums, and an education funding system that fails to address those critical situations because of revenue controls.
Rhonda Loeffelholz, a 4th-grade teacher in Cuba City, fears that litany is really a dirge as she sees “many Wisconsin school districts dying a slow death” similar to that of the Florence County School District, where the school board has voted to dissolve its own district.
“There are a lot of similarities between Florence and Cuba City,” she said somberly.
Becky Cohen, President of the Cuba City Education Association, agrees. “We’re a rural, blue collar community. The school district is the town’s largest employer. Over the past several years our enrollment has gone down. Employment has gone down. It’s hard to get the public to say ‘yes’ to a referendum. We’re very near the point at which we will have to close down this district and consolidate.”
Cohen’s statements are backed up by Cuba City’s voting record. Since 1998, five years after the current state funding system was put into place, Cuba City has had 13 referendums, 10 of which have failed. Many of the referenda have addressed the need for repairs or additions to existing buildings. The rest have asked for funds to help with operating expenses.
Stu Fraundorf, a social studies teacher in Cuba City for 35 years, can remember better days. “In 1993, we were in good shape,” he said. “Our enrollment was higher than at present.”
However, Cuba City has always been conservative when it comes to spending, and that conservatism has resulted in less state funding.
“Our community has always felt that that was the way to do things. No one knew what would happen because of the levy limits. No one knew how difficult things would become.”
“Difficult” is an understatement. Last September, Cuba City voters approved a $4.7 million referendum to remodel and upgrade the high school and grade school. However, they turned down a referendum for $750,000 over two years for operating expenses. The upgrades are appreciated, but they were long overdue.
“We had ‘brownouts’ in the grade school because our wiring was so poor,” Loeffelholz said. “The fuse boxes would smoke. They were so old that the electricians had trouble finding a way to replace them.”
The loss of the operating expenses referendum pushed the Cuba City School Board to the wall.
Cohen said the board has always been “fiscally responsible” and board members felt that they had cut as much as they could.
“Any further cuts would result in the loss of quality education for our students,” he said. “And they felt that no quality education meant no school district.”
Over the past four to five years, the board had made several painful cuts: a technical education position; half-time social studies, math and English/Spanish positions; a part-time music position; 25% of the physical education positions; three elementary teachers; and the entire driver’s education program. Also, the Learning Center in Dickeyville, which once housed pre-K though 8th-grade classes, was closed last year.
“We’re down to the bare bones in every department,” Cohen said.
Fraundorf adds, “When last fall’s referendum failed, the board refused to make any more cuts.”
What the board did was call a meeting last spring of township and village board members from the municipalities that the Cuba City School District serves and open the district’s books for all to see.
“The board showed that even though property taxes had gone up between 1994 and 2005, the percentage of those property taxes going to the schools had declined,” Fraundorf said. “The board also insisted that any more cuts would drastically take away from the overall quality of Cuba City’s schools.”
So the board announced, in effect, “We’re going to take it on the chin,” Fraundorf said. “They declared that rather than making further cuts, they would use their Fund 10 (reserve) money until the district became bankrupt.”
Cohen said that 80% of the people at that spring meeting declared they did not want the schools to close. Since that meeting, concerned voters have formed a Futures Committee to secure support for another referendum on October 4 which asks for $600,000 for each school year from 2005-06 through 2008-09. Tteachers felt positive about its chances of passage.
“The outlook now is much more positive,” Cohen said.
“Two hundred concerned citizens have each vowed to convince five other people to vote for this referendum,” Fraundorf said. “That should secure enough ‘yes’ votes to pass it.”
“If this October referendum does not pass, most will see it as a decline in the general community,” he said. “If the district declines any further, many parents will take advantage of the open enrollment law to send their kids to nearby districts. That, of course, will only hasten the demise of our schools.”
The district’s financial problems are so severe, however, that even if the referendum passes it will provide only a Band-Aid, not a cure, Fraundorf and Cohen said.
Referendums will have to be held on a regular basis to keep the district alive, they said.
“The board has somehow managed to maintain programs that are important to this community, like our agricultural classes. I don’t know how much longer they can do that,” Fraundorf said.
Loeffelholz is also apprehensive. “If the referendum doesn’t pass, we’ll close,” he said. “We just don’t have the funds anymore.”
Resource page on school funding
Posted September 29, 2005