Shibilski a Warrior for Education

State Sen. Kevin Shibilski makes no bones about it: He is on a mission to preserve quality public education in Wisconsin and restore respect to the teaching profession and to education support staff.

Sen. Kevin Shibilski of Stevens Point speaks frequently to educators. Last summer, he fired up the crowd at WEAC’s Solidarity Ground Zero rally in Whitewater.

The Stevens Point Democrat doesn’t just talk about support for public education and the people who work in the schools, he takes direct, affirmative action on their behalf.

In what some are calling an act of courage, he recently broke party ranks on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee and voted in favor of a state budget package that protects funding for K-12 education in the face of a projected $1.1 billion state budget deficit.

“My Number One priority is education. It always has been. When I saw an opportunity to protect our investment in K-12 education, restore cuts to technical colleges, and dramatically improve higher education access to disadvantaged students, it was an easy decision,” Shibilski said.

Shibilski said although his Democratic colleagues disagreed with his vote, they all share the same goal.

“I know my Democratic colleagues all care deeply about education,” he said. “There may have been some interest in spending more time in the Finance Committee looking at options. But when I saw the opportunity to protect K-12 funding, I felt it was important to seize it.”

Shibilski helped craft a pro-education version of the budget adjustment bill that moved the process forward and out of the Joint Finance Commit-tee. If the bill had stalled in the committee, the education funding component might have come under attack.

With his support to move it forward, education funding survived both in the committee and in the Assembly. In March, the budget debate moved to the Senate.

The Joint Finance Committee version of the budget contained several priorities for great schools:

• Preserved funding for K-12 education by not cutting the state’s commitment to two-thirds funding of school operation costs.
• Established a victory for Wisconsin's technical colleges and the thousands of people who depend on the schools for job training and advancement by restoring state aid to technical colleges and removing the harmful revenue cap on technical colleges.
• Restored funding for the Youth Challenge Academy, a residential program for high school dropouts. Teachers at the academy are members of WEAC Council #1.
• Preserved funding for the SAGE class size reduction program, 4-year-old kindergarten and other categorical aids to schools.
• Added $500,000 to minority pre-college scholarship grants.
  

The action by the Joint Finance Committee was especially important to school districts faced with uncertainty over the future of their state aid payments. The state has announced that local school districts might not receive their anticipated aid payments on time in June.

The Assembly made many changes to the budget but left K-12 funding intact. Shibilski said the Senate is working from the Joint Finance package rather than the Assembly package.

“There is just too much wrong with the Assembly package that is hard to fix,” he said. “They left K-12 alone, which is important. But they disassembled a lot of important environmental programs like Stewardship, villainized the UW System and made draconian cuts to higher education.”

Shibilski, who has introduced legislation three times to repeal the Qualified Economic Offer law, said he is also pushing a budget amendment to repeal it.

“It is a priority for me, and always has been, and I will continue to push hard until we win,” he said.

Shibilski, who comes from a labor family, said, “The QEO flies in the face of our collective bargaining traditions.”

He also wants major changes to ease school district revenue caps.

“We desperately have to provide greater revenue cap flexibility,” he said. “Even if we preserve two-thirds funding, we have to deal with the caps that continue to slowly strangle our public schools.

And believe me, without cap flexibility we will slowly destroy the finest K-12 public education system in the nation.”

But Shibilski believes that neither revenue caps nor the QEO are likely to be repealed until there is a change of leadership.

“Until we can provide new leadership,” he said, “we must look at ways to provide life support to our schools.”

Resource page on the 2002 state budget crisis
Profile of Sen. Shibilski

Posted March 28, 2002