School district proposes $8 million budget deficit

Highlights from the May 31 and June 12 budget presentations, more parents speak about problems at Eisenhower, Task Force 2075, and Megan Fox sues the school board.

I. Less money, more problems

My preferred model of bureaucratic lethargy is that it’s not so much the result of indifference or malign intent but the product of reasonable people pursuing incompatible objectives. They want less red tape but also more oversight; more community engagement but quicker solutions. Sometimes it’s not that people want completely contradictory things but that they simply want things that pull in vaguely different directions. The result is a sort of ponderous and slug-like mass seemingly beholden to nothing but its own inertia. We call this government. Some time ago (a year!), I mentioned this in the context of public education financing:

It is helpful to keep this in mind when trying to understand school finance, because it turns out that the state, and often by consequence the school district, wants not only to educate its residents but to do many other things as well: to provide property tax relief, to encourage direct democracy, to be just and egalitarian by helping poorer districts more than wealthier ones.

It wants not only to educate the most motivated or most capable residents but the blind, the deaf, the mentally disabled, the malingering, the criminal, the hospitalized, and…those secluded on islands among vast lakes of ice.

It wants to do these things not simply because some bureaucrat thought it’d be a great idea but because at some point, somewhere, some member of the public or some constituency group righteously and perhaps justifiably demanded that the government also consider this other righteous and perhaps justifiable goal, and the government, because it is ostensibly democratic, complied.

This multiplicity of vaguely antagonistic objectives is true not just at the state-level but at the district-level as well. And it’s even more painful when there’s not enough money to go around.

On May 31st, Chief Financial Officer Keith Brightman delivered a presentation on the school budget to the “public” (public attendance: approximately 12) and offered two scenarios with different state funding assumptions. Both were rosy and neither came true.

From Monday’s Budget Presentation. Source

The optimistic scenario was that the state legislature and Republican-dominated Joint Finance Committee would see the error of their ways and embrace public education with cash-filled arms. Over the next two years, school districts would get an extra $1,400 per student. The pessimistic scenario was that the school district would only get an extra $1,000 per student. Still not bad. With 7,000 students, that’s another $5.8-$7 million per year¹.

On Monday, the same presentation was delivered to the school board with the added wrinkle that none of the projections were right because actually the state would be providing much less funding than even the pessimistic scenario anticipated.

Rather than an additional $1,000 per student over the next two years, schools will get $650. The district was also hoping to receive reimbursement for 60% of the costs for special education but will only receive 33% (resulting in $3.5 million less in revenue). The end result is a deficit for next year of $7.9 million dollars.

So money is tight. And everyone wants new things and better things and no one wants to give up the things they already have. The school board on Monday discussed several of them.

Special Education

School Board President Eric Jessup-Anger told the assembled crowd (by this point in the meeting just me and one other individual) that he was “flabbergasted at the lack of resources the state is choosing to put toward special education reimbursements” but didn’t see a way the school district could legitimately try to rein in those costs:

We are both, I think, legally and morally obligated to make sure that our special education students have the resources they need to be successful. There's no question about that. There's no debate on whether or not it's the right thing to do. It’s just the right thing to do.

We saw our budget is going up about two million dollars in staffing for special education and there may be more in terms of additional services needed. We know that we had a huge influx of students—increasing levels of eligibility in the district—for special education this last year². So more students screened, more students identified. And that's good. Students are getting the services and supports they need.

For every dollar that goes from our budget to those students is a dollar that isn't going to the full student population³. It's a zero-sum game right now in the state of Wisconsin.

But I think you could imagine debating this. Reasonable people can debate the definition of “need” and what’s considered “successful.” There are limited resources X that must be divided between groups Y and Z. How do we make this allocation? One way would be to give group Y as much as they say they need while Z gets whatever remains, but reasonable people might disagree.

Theater

Superintendent Means presented several slides highlighting the need for increased funding for educational assistants, professional learning, transportation, touchscreen Chromebooks for students, iPads in elementary and secondary schools, document cameras and interactive whiteboards for teachers, school buses, a field house, “student-centered cafeteria and recreation areas at the middle school level,” and a performing arts center [My note: I don’t think any of these things were actually part of the budget, they were just sort of extra hopes and dreams.]. Residents have high expectations for the district, he said, and we need to live up to them:

We have Broadway-caliber performances happening at Tosa West, but I think Mr. Stefan would say—I shouldn’t say—he’s told me, ‘here’s the list of things that needs to happen in this facility.’

So next year Wauwatosa West is representing the state of Wisconsin as the only high school that can perform Disney's Frozen. And I think if he had his druthers there are areas where we can fix things. I just think we, as a community, there are greater aspirations, and I think that's a source of the tension and the frustration that we hear. That people know we need to be at a certain level; we're just not living it out.

Or as Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire said, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”

Resources for Eisenhower

Also at Monday’s board meeting, the president of the Eisenhower PTA read a long statement describing parents’ concerns about the school (which I described last week). He said that “Eisenhower Elementary School has had a catastrophic failure this year as shown and demonstrated by the mass exodus of trained and generally beloved teachers and staff.” Before this year, teacher turnover was 20%, 12%, 25%. This year it’s 45%. He said he looks forward to the release of a third-party report on June 30th investigating the reasons so many teachers resigned and that he hopes it prevents similar problems from happening in the future.

Another mother of a student at Eisenhower said, “The refrain that we've heard from you is that you didn't know what was going on. That's fair. We didn't understand the magnitude of the problem until May 23rd when we saw the same document that you were shown on May 22nd.”

And yet, she added:

The people elected you to know where the larger problems are and to be making sure the district is addressing them. You are making the policy for the district to execute. You need to know this stuff well before the general public does and have a better answer than that.

She asked the superintendent and the school board to deploy more resources to the school and provide transparency on the status of hiring.

Another mother told the board that she doesn’t “buy the fact that nobody knew what was going on.” In fact, she says, on “May 8th I stood up at this board meeting virtually and I read a letter to everyone stating the fact that that teachers are having issues with students in the classroom and they are having problems getting through to the district leadership for assistance.”

She told the board that “teachers were left to fail and they were set up to fail” and that “emails and strategies don't do a lot for a teacher in a room of twenty-four students with one chucking stuff at their head.”

Board Member Liz Heimerl-Rolland thanked community members and parents for contacting her about their concerns but asked them to maybe not be so mean and angry about it:

I can promise you, I have thought about Eisenhower for hours every week and what we can do differently or better. So it's good to see all of the support coming from the parent population at that school.

I want to try to lower the temperature, because I've gotten many tones in the phone calls and emails that I've gotten. It is difficult to have parents tell us that the board isn't doing anything or that the staff isn't doing everything that they can do, because Dr. Means and this district staff—they're amazing and they want 100% of our students learning in safe, inclusive environments every day.

She asked community members to assume best intentions and said that it’s “a difficult place to start when someone's telling us that we're not trying our best when I can promise you I spent all weekend like racking my brain and putting together these timelines to say ‘what did we miss?’”

Mr. Means reiterated that a number of changes have been made in response to the mass of resignations, including:

• An additional full-time SEL specialist and a full-time social worker for Eisenhower

• Smaller first-grade classes,

• More special education teachers,

• A dedicated substitute teacher,

• An additional educational assistant for playground supervision, and

• A coach for Principal Sumeera Mansukhani and more money for team building efforts. [My note: Although as I was writing this, the Superintendent sent a letter to parents saying Ms. Mansukhani has resigned and would be replaced by the current Assistant Principal at Wauwatosa East high school, Jordan Stein.]

He also added that a lot of the problems in the district did indeed take them by surprise, that surveys completed in December 2022 had mostly positive comments, and that only in the follow-up survey completed in March did they see the extremely negative comments about the principal.

Finally, Mr. Means said that what he really needs is for teachers and school administrators to follow the disciplinary framework⁴ and make sure kids are being suspended when it’s called for. “Do we have children who are exhausting their 10 days or 15 days? Respectfully, because then that's going to put pressure on Mr. Pinion [Chief of Pupil and Family Supports] and his team to say, ‘Well maybe we need to find another placement.’”

What I just shared may not be in total alignment with where our Division of Pupil and Family Supports would land, but I'm also a former principal. I'm a former principal—as I speak to the Eisenhower Community—who did lunch duty at Eisenhower this spring and had to say, ‘Here's the order that we need to follow.’

So, sometimes for elementary-age students—and it's a hard message to say— sometimes to regain the trust of the faculty and the students and the parents, sometimes you have to ensure that students who are chronic challenges are receiving the right placement and the right services that they need. And sometimes they may not be in that school at the time.

Looking forward to the next year, Mr. Jessup-Anger said that, “Eisenhower has an exceptionally high level of resourcing. More than any other school I believe in the district going into next year.”

At the end of the meeting, Mr. Brightman, summarizing the preceding debates said that, “These are all competing interests. So we kind of heard that tonight. Of needs that we have. But then what are we going to do to help fund it? Something may have to go away to fund something else and that becomes a difficult process to go through.”

No one took him up on that suggestion.

The budget will be voted on at the next school board meeting. Public comment will be taken. The final tax levy will be approved in October.

II. A 21st Century School District

In an attempt to look further than one year ahead, Superintendent Demond Means has also put together Task Force 2075—a group of community members, staff, and other stakeholders who will answer questions and make recommendations on things like:

• What are the district’s long-term facility needs (over the next 5 years, not the next 50)?

• How much classroom space should be set aside for open enrollment students, how many open enrollment students should the district have, and how should they be selected?

• How can we increase resident enrollment?

• What should the district's long term financial strategy be and how should we make sure it’s working?

• How should we assign students to schools within the district?

• Should we have school buses?

The task force will meet twice a month beginning June 27th and present its recommendations in May of next year.

Mr. Means, during the public budget presentation on May 31 said that the district and the task force also need to be thinking about “what type of 21st Century Learning environments” they need to provide:

Building a budget is about building a vision and and recognizing where we want to take a school district into the future and so these items are things that we continue to hear people discuss and talk about and have excitement around we know that these are areas where our children need us to continue to wrestle with and find ways to finance.

Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride, who also attended the meeting, then asked whether the school district was planning on closing schools.

Mr. Brightman responded that a recent demographic study found that unlike some neighboring municipalities which may may shrink, Wauwatosa’s future is rosy and the city can expect consistent student populations going forward.

Mr. Means, referring to the fact that the district has reduced open enrollment slightly in each of the past two years, added that “our open enrollment strategy for the last few years is not a preamble—if you will—to us looking to reduce our footprint [or] our number of schools,” and that according to the demographic study, “we're going to keep pace.” He then shifted to emphasizing the need for “21st Century-ready schools” and the work of Task Force 2075.

Mr. Means finished by saying, “It's great question I think. [It’s] a very direct question. Now we're giving you a very direct answer.”

But I didn’t think it was so direct. If open enrollment decreases and resident enrollment stays the same, how will you keep all the schools open?

III. Journalist/Talk-show host sues school board

The school board met in an emergency closed session last Tuesday to discuss a lawsuit. No, not that lawsuit. Megan Fox has sued the Wauwatosa School Board. No not that Megan Fox. Megan Fox, the journalist. Megan Fox, who is friends with Gays Against Groomers⁵ co-founder Jamiee Michelle who spoke against the district's proposed Human Growth and Development Curriculum in August, 2022. Megan Fox, who later called into the same meeting to harangue board members for asking the Gays Against Groomers-lady to state her name and address which she said is not required, and to say that it was unfair they withheld public comment until the end of the meeting and that they better listen to her for the full three minutes because that's her First Amendment Right. But then they muted her! Before her three minutes were up! She was mad!

So she crowdfunded $12,000 for a lawsuit and filed it in April. She said that the request for commenters to state name and address for the record chills free expression, that she was muted not for being obscene or indecorous but because they didn't like what she had to say, and that the board violated her constitutional right to free speech.

From the complaint:

The School Board’s policies (1) prohibiting personally addressing by name or questioning individual school board members, and (2) allowing the censorship of speech deemed “lengthy,” “personally directed,” “abusive,” “obscene,” and “irrelevant,” violate the First Amendment right of free speech on their face by impermissibly discriminating against speech on the basis of content and viewpoint.

She’d like a letter of apology and some money:

WHEREFORE, Plaintiff respectfully prays for the following relief:

a) A declaration that the School Board’s actions constitute a violation of Plaintiff’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights;

b) A declaration that the School Board’s address announcement provision and restrictions on speech made during public comment are unconstitutional;

c) Injunctive relief precluding the School Board from restraining Plaintiff’s speech;

d) Injunctive relief enjoining the School Board from restraining speech based upon its overbroad, vague, and content-based rules;

e) Compensatory damages;

f) An award of reasonable attorney fees;

g) Litigation costs and expenses;

h) A grant of any such further actual damages or equitable relief as the Court deems necessary and proper in the public interest.

My fifteen minutes of internet searching suggests that Wisconsin open meetings laws don't require elected officials to allow public comments at their meetings and federally there's a difference between a public forum (e.g., a town square or a street corner) where you're free to fully exercise your first amendment rights and a "limited public forum" like a council or board meeting where the the council or board can set rules for participation and speech like not letting people hoot, holler, whistle, stomp, curse, or be exceedingly rude. Some articles cite Steinburg v. Chesterfield County Planning Commission (4th Cir. May 29, 2008) where the judge said:

Officials presiding over such meetings must have discretion . . . to cut off speech which they reasonably perceive to be, or imminently to threaten, a disruption of the orderly and fair progress of the discussion, whether by virtue of its irrelevance, its duration, or its very tone and manner.

I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems silly. When she called in I thought—to echo Ms. Heimerl-Rolland—that she did have a bit of a tone. But we all need a cause. For Megan Fox the actor it was saving the earth from Decepticons. For Megan Fox the journalist it’s getting her full three minutes to yell at some school board in a city and state she doesn’t live in.

1. The uncertainty is because about 1,200 students come through open enrollment and I’m not sure how much of the additional per pupil aid the district would get for them.

2. According to Superintendent Demon Means during the information session for Eisenhower parents last week, the district usually sees about 150 children referred for testing and evaluation but saw 300 this year.

3. I think it’s more like $1 for special education is $0.70 less for everyone else. The total cost is about $9 million (my estimate).

4. Although one parent did email me to say that many teachers were unfamiliar with the disciplinary framework, so maybe there’s a training issue.

5. From the complaint: "Jamiee Michelle, founder of the organization Gays Against Groomers, a coalition of individuals who “oppose the recent trend of indoctrinating, sexualizing, and medicalizing children under the guise of ‘LGBTQIA+’.”