Revenue Controls Overwhelm Menasha

Forced to slash popular math mentoring program

By Joanne M. Haas

Elementary school students in the Menasha Joint School District have lost their math mentoring program – and its three staffers – due to school district revenue controls.

Wisconsin has one of the best school systems in the nation. The Great Schools project is focused on identifying factors in every community that contribute to that success. It also is focused on identifying barriers to that continued success. Repeatedly, communities are pointing to school district revenue controls as being harmful to the quality of education they can provide their children. Revenue controls are causing damage throughout the state. This article examines their impact on one district – Menasha.

The Board of Education’s February decision to recommend the administration slice the roughly $78,000 math mentoring program – with its one full-time equivalent teacher and two part-time teacher aides – was a tough one, officials said.

“The needs of our population have grown. ... We just don’t have the dollars to deal with them any longer. So then we look at what programs we can provide or not provide,” said Mark Van Der Zee, the district’s director of business services.

Supporters pleaded to keep the program aimed at helping students reach their potential. But in the end, the money wasn’t there for the tutoring service known as HOSTS.

“This year, HOSTS is the casualty program,” Van Der Zee said.

Menasha, with a population of 16,000, spans Winnebago and Calumet counties – which ranked 9th and 10th of the 72 Wisconsin counties for per-capita adjusted gross income in 1997. Yet, the district is finding it difficult under revenue controls to provide needed education services, officials said.

And it can’t blame declining enrollments, which are a key factor in the financial problems many other districts are experiencing under revenue controls.

“We’re fairly stable,” Van Der Zee said of the student population.

It’s just that revenue controls are putting the clamps on virtually every district.

As bad as the financial situation is in Menasha now, the district is preparing for it to become even worse. The school board has called for a cost-benefit analysis to prepare for future budget cuts.

“This was done to give the board a better frame of reference,” Van Der Zee said, so there would be no “knee-jerk reaction” down the road. “We had to look at the programs we could continue, what the enrollment increases might be and what programs might be affected by our estimated revenue limits,” he said.

The Menasha district operates with a $32 million budget – that includes all funds – to run one high school, one middle school, five elementary schools and an administration building which also houses some classes. The district also offers a day care program as well as an alternative high school. Its 262 full-time equivalent teachers – members of the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers – serve 3,667 students. The school district has cut and pasted about as far as it can before it begins to hit what Van Der Zee labeled the “untouchables.”

“We don’t have any weight to cut any further. We have huge needs in our (buildings), but those needs have been set aside for quite a long time. We need to somehow maintain the buildings we now have,” he said.

The oldest buildings in the Menasha district are two elementary schools built in 1927. The high school was built in 1937-38.

“Geographically, we are fairly small compared to other districts. We don’t have the growth. But we have a transient population,” Van Der Zee said.

For example, the number of students served by the English as a Second Language program has swelled from 100 to 300 in recent years as more Hmong and Spanish families move to the area. So district leaders must find other ways to provide teachers and staff with the tools to meet the mission of helping students achieve and grow.

“We were able to outsource our 4th- and 5th-grade basketball program,” Van Der Zee said of one creative response. The local YMCA is providing the service at no cost to the district, which saves about $13,000.

The board also authorized placing on the April 4 ballot a referendum asking permission to spend an additional $103,500 beyond the revenue cap limits for continuation of the police-school liaison program.

Another budget hurdle will be finding funds to hire a third teacher for participation in the SAGE (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) class-size reduction program. The district has three – possibly four – schools identified as potential participants in SAGE.

“However, the money provided (by the state) under SAGE will not be enough for the required 15-to-1 student ratio. We’ll need more district dollars to get there,” Van Der Zee said. The district has enough for two of the three teachers required to reach the ratio to ensure the return of state aids to run the program.

Van Der Zee said he expects a lot of continued debate and rewriting of the budget between now and September.