Phillips schools under the gun

By Joanne M. Haas
Teri Hanson can’t believe seven years have disappeared since she joined the fight to change Wisconsin’s public school funding system. Sadly, and with a dose of tired surprise, she said she thought some improvements would have come long before her own school district would bleed from the budget knife. But that time has come.

Teri Hanson was a leader of the annual Walk on the Child's Side from 1999 to 2004.

“I have talked to so many people over the years who have been in the same predicament and seen the pain in their faces and heard it in their voices,” said Hanson, a German teacher and special education secretary for the Phillips School District in far north-central Wisconsin. “But even with all that, nothing could prepare me for how truly awful this is.”

It’s an extremely frustrating situation for Hanson, who has devoted much of her time over the last seven years to battling for a fair and adequately financed state school funding system in an attempt to avoid the dilemma she and her colleagues, students and parents now face.

Hanson has been a key player in Price County Citizens Who Care, a group that organized and implemented the Walk on the Child’s Side in June of 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2004. This 240-mile march from Butternut in Price County to the State Capitol was designed to draw attention to the damage that school district revenue caps are inflicting on schools. The event was an outgrowth of a well-publicized protest at the Butternut boat landing in 1999 when then-Governor Tommy Thompson was engaged in an Opening Day fishing event on the lake.

During those years, Hanson and many of her colleagues in Phillips devoted a big chunk of their summers to marching through small towns in northern, central and southern Wisconsin warning that unless the state’s school funding system is changed school districts would be in crisis. They picked up support in every community, and organized large rallies at the State Capitol at the conclusion of each walk.

Now Phillips schools are face to face with the serious financial problems their most avid supporters had warned about.

Following four years of district cuts totaling $1.8 million – including the elimination of 27 staff members in nearly every category – the district asked the public on September 13 to approve exceeding state-imposed revenue caps by $830,000 for five years. That referendum was defeated by a crushing two-to-one margin. The district now must slice another $500,000 each year for the next five.

As bad as that is, Hanson said the district’s predicament is not as dire as that of the Florence Area School District, where the school board has voted to dissolve (although a scheduled November 8 referendum may rescue that district, at least temporarily).

“We’re not going to close the doors this year,” Hanson said. “But we certainly are looking at a different district as time goes on. And I don’t know what it is going to take to convince the public that the schools need their support.

“We shouldn’t be closing any district,” said Hanson, who also serves as the vice president of the Northern Tier UniServ and as the unit director for the district’s teacher aides.

Hopefully, she said, the Florence crisis will draw the attention needed at the state level to prevent more districts following Florence’s dire path.

“I know there are districts in a very similar situation as Florence,” she said. “It is a statewide problem. Florence is just the first. You can’t always just send your kids to the next district.

“Hopefully, the people who make those decisions (state policies) will be taking close notice and be brave enough to stand up and say we really do need to fix the formula.”

The back bite of frugality
Like many other districts, Phillips was a thrifty district in the early 1990s. That frugality turned into an extended punishment when the school district revenue caps were implemented in 1993. Under that law, the 1993-94 school budget served as the base for all future limited budget increases.

Phillips has one of the lowest mill rates and lowest rates of spending per pupil among the northern rural districts.

Superintendent Jerry Trochinski referred to the Wisconsin Atlas of School Finance, published by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, and said Phillips is among the 48 rural districts reeling from the “Lake Effect of Northern Wisconsin.”

These are the districts, according to the institute, with declining enrollments and low state aid. They have high property values due to attractive lake vacation lands owned by largely absent landowners. As a result of the inflated property values, the districts receive less state aid and they are forced to rely heavily on property taxes even though most residents live in modest homes and have relatively low incomes. Those residents are squeezed financially and are reluctant to approve spending referendums that will raise their taxes, even though they recognize that their school districts desperately need the money.

Declining enrollments also lead to reductions in state aid, although the districts are unable to reduce costs proportionate to the enrollment declines because of fixed costs.

Trochinski said the Phillips district has lost an average of 2.5% enrollment per year in the last few years. State aid dropped $380,000, or 7.2%, from 2003 to 2004.

Last year, the school district budget increased less than 1%, but because of lower state aid school officials had to increase local taxes by 16%.

Trochinski referred to a report from Governor Jim Doyle’s blue ribbon panel that studied the school financing formula and identified yet another issue that is raising property taxes and putting enormous pressure on schools: State tax breaks for businesses and agriculture and changes in the state’s economy have shifted the burden of funding schools to homeowners.

“When business stopped paying 12% of the K-12 education costs and when agriculture’s share dropped from 10% to 1%, someone else picked up the tax for all of that,” he said. That someone is the homeowner.

In addition, Trochinski said Phillips, like other districts, faces higher costs for educating students with special needs and students who live in poverty. This is where cost estimates for educating the average child are not applicable, he said.

According to DPI records, in 2003-04, Phillips spent an average $9,552 on the total education package, including transportation and food service, for each student.

Transportation and energy costs are other major factors contributing to the district’s financial stranglehold. Trochinski – in his third year leading the 1,085-student district – said Phillips is the state’s fifth largest in square miles. And, like other rural schools, a sprawling district not only makes for long bus rides for students but may cause even more financial heartache as fuel costs skyrocket.

According to Trochinski, the first child boards a district school bus at 6:18 a.m. in order to arrive for the 8:10 a.m. start. Another way to look at that trip? Trochinski likens it to the ride from Oshkosh to Milwaukee. “And these are gravel roads,” he said.

Changes needed in state law
What is needed are changes in the state financing formula, Trochinski said.

The problem, he said, is that “children don’t pay lobbyists, and lobbyists are very influential in the decision-making.”

Trochinski and Hanson also lamented a change in society’s attitude about education.

“We’ve lost the intergenerational link,” Trochinski said, “where the working community members recognize ‘I got my education and now it is my turn to help educate someone else’s children.’”

Now, both say an attitude abounds akin to “I got mine and I’m going to keep it.”

Painful cuts loom
The Phillips School Board was meeting in October to review a new list of potential cuts. Although it has yet to be prioritized or approved (as of OnWEAC In Print’s deadline), it includes closing Catawba K-8 School, and ending co-curriculars such as driver’s education and the gifted and talented program. Also on the chopping block may be cuts to the guidance counselor services, the Phillips Community Pool (housed in the district) and ending the block schedule system at the high school. Other potential cuts would be to eliminate specialty teachers in areas such as the arts, cutting other teaching positions, eliminating administrators, and swelling class sizes to around 28 in grades 4 and up.

The district already closed the elementary school in Kennan, which turned the Catawba School into a K-8 school. And there also have been rumblings from some Catawba parents about moving their children to other districts should Catawba close.

Hanson said if the board must go ahead with the cuts to make ends meet the district could become “not a place that I’d want my kids to go to school.”

“It is not good for education,” Hanson said of the troubles at Phillips and how the school funding formula currently works. “Phillips has really had a proud tradition of excellence in education.”
Still, the current situation is no surprise.

“We could see this coming a long way off, but I always thought if I worked long enough and hard enough we could change the funding formula before it really hit Phillips hard.”

Resource page on school funding

Posted October 21, 2005