School board member Mike Meier sees budget problems on horizon, questions decisions he made 18 years ago.

Other board members mostly change the subject.

The school board met on Monday, January 9th, to discuss the superintendent’s proposal to add 74 open enrollment slots for the 2023-2024 school year. Last week I wrote:

Open enrollment is contentious. On one hand, my impression is that some parents feel certain schools get a disproportionate share of non-resident students, that those students are responsible for many of the behavior problems and violence at schools, and so there should be fewer open enrollment students or they should be more evenly distributed. It’s unclear how accurate these perceptions are. Do they end up disproportionately in some schools but not others? Are they responsible for the disciplinary problems that many parents seem worried about? I’ve not seen a very convincing answer either way.

On the other hand, open enrollment is a source of students to fill classrooms and provide revenue. Without them, schools would be less full and have less revenue. If you have too many schools, too little revenue, and too few students then you can either close some schools and redraw school boundary lines, try to increase resident enrollment, or pass another referendum to supplement operating expenses. Many parents would probably be unhappy with some of these alternatives.

These seem like difficult tradeoffs worth speaking frankly about, but board members and administrators often appear rather reluctant to do so.

I’ll elaborate on the first paragraph by trying to answer the questions I posed and then explaining where these impressions come from. Then I’ll elaborate on the second paragraph by talking about how open enrollment relates to school revenue, how the school district said they would do one thing to balance the budget but then appear to be doing the opposite, some implications of this, and why one board member is concerned. I’ll then restate my encouragement to the superintendent and the school board to address this openly instead of holding their hands over their eyes and talking in circles.

Do open enrollment students end up disproportionately in some schools but not others?

Yes. In the days leading up to Monday’s school board meeting, an FAQ document included on the board’s agenda was updated that provided the breakdown, by school, of the number of open enrollment students as a percentage of that school’s total population:

Percentage of student population that is open enrollment by school. Source.

The clear outlier is the west side’s Underwood Elementary school at 47%. I don’t have much insight into how it got that way, though you could make up stories for why it might stay that way or get worse. One story is that if residents think, rightly or wrongly, that the quantity of open enrollment students is causing a decline in the quality of the school, then some will send their kids elsewhere—a private school, another district, etc. As resident parents defect, enrollment is backfilled with even more open enrollment students making the problem worse and causing even more resident parents to defect, and on and on.

I think this was the story one mother during public comment might have been trying to tell, although admittedly, she was a bit circumspect about it:

I feel there have been some half-truths spoken about Underwood and some really important things that I think that you guys need to consider when you're looking at this. And let me start by saying that I am also a supporter of open enrollment, I think it's a great program and I welcome the diversity that my children are surrounded with [in] that program. […]

We have a situation where folks in my neighborhood who don't get into the USTEM [Underwood STEM] program are leaving the district. And not because of their strong religious beliefs that they want to go to a private school or because of their dislike of the Wauwatosa School District. It is because the experiences that their students are having aren't…it's not a good experience. So when you talk about all these neighborhood schools and how that's so amazing—well, my children don't walk to school with their neighbors because their neighbors are going to other schools if their children don't get into USTEM.

We are in the USTEM program, we're having an amazing experience, but I will tell you that the experience that folks are having in the traditional program is not a good experience.

[She shifts to talk briefly about open enrollment for students with disabilities]

So I think there's a lot of smoke-and-mirrors and a lot of spins on the truth. And these are important things—and again I support it—but we have got to figure out a way that we are better distributing everybody and the resources and that my neighbors can actually go to this neighborhood school and have this amazing experience that you talk about of walking to their neighborhood school and not just shifting it all into Underwood because we've got the space. […] It's a serious problem, and it's not talked about, and it needs to be addressed.

Similar comments came from two parents during the December 19 policy committee meeting when they claimed that Underwood was half open enrollment and that it was driving parents in the neighborhood to other schools.

Are open enrollment students responsible for the disciplinary problems that many parents seem worried about?

I don’t know. Multiple board members mentioned that open enrollment student are just like any other resident student and often come from just outside district boundaries. When one individual during public comment said it would be useful for the district to present data on “the disciplinary actions related to resident students versus non-resident students” if even just to refute claims that there is a disparity, Mr. Means responded that they could provide that information but state law prevents them from making admissions decisions based on it, and “once a student is accepted in the non-resident program they are then a Wauwatosa student and so for us to use that designation could have adverse impact on those children.” I thought this answer was a bit of a non-sequitur.

With respect to claims by some parents that there are lots of kids in the neighborhood but they’re being pushed into other schools, board members and Mr. Means mentioned that they need more data and would like to work with the city¹ to determine how many resident students are going to private schools, and “what percent of resident students go to Tosa schools.”

While I agree that it might be useful to coordinate with the city to develop better populations projections that account for all the new apartment buildings being built (some of whom will presumably contain families with children), we did just complete a census. And looking back to 1990, the number of school-aged children has moved up and down within a 10% band for the last 30 years:

• 1990: Total pop. - 49,366. Age 5-18 pop. - 7,553 (15.3%)

• 2000: Total pop. - 47,271. Age 5-18 pop. - 7,941 (16.8%)

• 2010: Total pop. - 46,396. Age 5-18 pop. - 7,245 (15.6%)

• 2021²: Total pop. - 47,752. Age 5-18 pop. - 7,640 (16.0%)

It seems straightforward to figure out what percentage of them go to Wauwatosa schools. But maybe they would like this information by neighborhood or census tract. I’m not sure what exactly they’re looking for.

What about the financial aspect of open enrollment?

You can read my earlier article on school financing for more detail, but very generally, school districts receive most of their funding from two sources: local property taxes and state aid. State law also limits how much money the district can get from the combination of these two sources through a “revenue limit” that is partly a function of resident student enrollment. The more kids that live and attend school in Wauwatosa, the higher the revenue limit and the more money the district is allowed to receive from property taxes and state aid.

Kids that attend Wauwatosa schools through open enrollment don’t increase the district’s revenue limit, but the “receiving” district does get some money from the “sending” district. According to Wauwatosa School District administrators at Monday’s board meeting, this amounts to $8,224 per open enrollee compared to the average cost per pupil in Wauwatosa of $12,313. Despite receiving only a fraction of the average cost per pupil, adding open enrollment students can still be profitable because the marginal cost to add an additional student is often much less (because, for example, you are already paying for the teacher and the building whether you add one more student or not).

In May, 2022, both the outgoing and incoming CFOs presented the proposed budget and 5-year financial projections with revenue, enrollment, and spending estimates to the school board. Mr. Meier said afterward:

There are six to seven fundamental assumptions here which run contrary to everything I have come to understand while serving on the board. So, with that out there—other board members, you will think what you think—but I'm shooting off a big distress flare here. A lot of things have to go perfectly for this whole thing to work, and some of these things have never happened before—realistically. We would have non-resident enrollment at the highest level ever. We would have resident enrollment at the highest level in over 20 years. We would have an increase in pupil aid which we've been praying for for many many years. It has cuts in health care benefits, decrease in base wages. I don’t know how.

I think he was partly referring to this slide during the presentation which lists total enrollment (resident and non-resident) and revenue limit membership (more-or-less the resident enrollment but with some adjustments³ ) over the next several years.

I am not trying to draw your attention to the circled numbers. That was part of the presentation. Ignore the circled numbers.

In May, the district projected total enrollment in 2022-2023 at 7,101 with revenue limit membership at 5,883.

However, actual enrollment in October, 2022, was only 7,006 students with revenue limit membership at 5,879. So the district took in many fewer open enrollment students than planned and had (slightly) fewer resident students enroll than they expected.

For 2023-2024, they project even higher total enrollment at 7,115 with 5,994 resident students. This would imply adding an even larger number of open enrollment students. But based on Monday’s meeting, the district is actually planning to decrease overall open enrollment. They want to add only 74 new open enrollment slots even as they graduate 157 non-resident students in June 2023 (for a net decrease of 83). Additionally, Mr. Means said that the Wauwatosa Virtual Academy, an alternative traditionally offered to open enrollment applicants waitlisted for a spot at a physical school (and an easy way for the district to take on more open enrollment students), needs to be reevaluated since the kids that attend don’t do that well academically and the financial return is diminishing.

To balance the budget over the next 5 years, the district projected increasing resident and non-resident enrollment. Yet they are not even planning to add enough open enrollment students to do this.

On Monday, Mr. Meier reminded the board that “when I voted ‘no’ on the budget last fall I pointed to my concern about some of the assumptions” and that he wonders if his “support for open enrollment 18 years ago was the right thing to do.”

As far as I can understand, his primary worry seems to be that elementary schools currently generate more revenue than they cost to operate and that those excess revenues go toward funding “central services.” (I’m not positive what he means by this, but maybe athletic fields, district administrators, and things like that.) However, if you reduce open enrollment or even shut down an elementary school entirely, those costs for central services will not decrease commensurately and the district could be in worse financial shape than before. In fact, closing an elementary school will even incur additional costs as you’ll need to start busing students to and from their now-more-distant schools.

I guess if I squint hard enough this makes sense, although I’d still like to see an example with numbers. But I think the more general idea is that as the district enlarges, certain changes and additions take place that become the foundation for future changes and additions and that this makes it increasingly difficult to remove them if the need arises.

For instance, you could imagine that as a district grows, many specialized professionals are hired to handle individual tasks that might have previously been handled by a single administrator or as an ancillary duty of teachers. These specialized professionals, perhaps because they’re asked to or simply to go “above-and-beyond,” take on additional responsibilities and make their own jobs increasingly complicated and burdensome. Expectations rise. Policies are created that codify and require the increasingly complicated and burdensome tasks they’ve created for themselves. Bosses and colleagues wonder how they ever got along without all the extra things this person now does.

If suddenly you need to shrink your organization, you can’t just eliminate the person and give their responsibility back to the person who did it before because they wouldn’t know how to do it any more, and there are rules and policies that demand it be done in complicated ways by specialized professionals.

You can also imagine analogs when it comes to physical assets or services. Office space gets built that now must be maintained, multi-year contracts get signed that must be honored even if they become more superfluous as you downsize. You have complex, expensive software to help coordinate and manage all the complicated things you’re no longer doing. While it might be cheaper in the long-run to transition to something simpler, it would be costly in time and in money over the short-run and the reason you’re trying to downsize in the first place is because there’s not enough money.

As I describe this, I realize these are not just the problems that a shrinking school district faces but probably illustrate some deeper truth about human organizations and how and why they are always easy to expand and complicate but painful and nightmarish to shrink and simplify.

Nobody during the meeting directly responded to Mr. Meier’s concerns, and they immediately moved on to a different topic. It might have been because they didn’t understand what he was saying or because they didn’t think his fears were warranted, but it also might have been because the idea of closing schools or redrawing boundary lines will be messy and complicated and probably piss everyone off.

During a policy committee meeting on December 19, the superintendent, describing the community’s response to shifting school boundary lines 25 years ago, suddenly grew still and stared blankly into the middle distance as if reliving some long-forgotten horror. He said, trance-like, that it was like a “bomb dropped.”

At another policy committee meeting on January 3rd, when Ms. Hoag mentions they can use better population projections to redraw school boundary lines, Mr. Means goes:

Whoa, whoa, whoa! We’re looking at “potential growth” but not in the “name of redrawing boundary lines.”

And when Ms. Hoag says, “But isn’t that [redrawing boundary lines] a consequence of doing this [projecting future growth],” there’s a long pause before Mr. Means says cryptically that he doesn’t “presume to know” and “perhaps” and that all he’ll say “publicly” is that they should work with the municipality to get better projections.

I think the clearest articulation of all this actually came during the November 28th board meeting when they discussed hiring a consultant to do enrollment projections. Board member Sharon Muehlfeld didn’t want to do it all she was so worried about the hell it might unleash:

We have a lot of work to do on student achievement, and I feel the risk to having this data and working on it is to go down a path and focus on a path that we may not be ready for. And that means restructuring.

So right now our footprint is two high schools, it’s neighborhood elementary schools, and that's what Wauwatosa values […] Any changes to that structure which likely would be the result of decisions based on data out of this report—to me—it [gets] the community focusing on something negative when it it could be very positive […] I personally believe our city deserves two high schools, and if we change our structure that might not be the case, so I want to see us focusing on innovation [and] improving student achievement.

[…]

I just have for 18 years heard people being very upset about the boundary changes.

But it seems like the district is already heading that direction. They’re taking fewer open enrollment students than they projected they would need to balance the budget. The superintendent would like to eliminate the Wauwatosa Virtual Academy. They want to complete enrollment projections that—“perhaps”—might lead to redrawing school boundary lines.

“Perhaps” they might not, but it would be nice if everyone could at least be honest about what’s at stake. Because one way to avoid nightmares is to keep your eyes open.

1. This did not occur during the January 9th meeting but during the December 19th meeting.

2. The link lists populations for 2020, 2021, and then several adjusted population numbers. Then it gives demographic breakdowns as a percentage of one of those numbers. But I’m not sure which one. In the end, it doesn’t make a big difference.

3. Resident enrollment is not the same as revenue limit membership which incorporates 3-year rolling averages (to prevent sudden, large decreases in revenue) and other adjustments (like partial numbers for summer school).