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Neal's avatar

Ben, as an engineer I love the use of excel. I completely agree with the idea of identifying the question and figuring out how to best capture the information and what specifically in the data we need to look at. Perhaps there is some good that comes from having a vision to guide you but without identifying and maybe solving some of the underlying things it doesn’t seem to make sense

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TosaJim's avatar

Ben, I could respond in another thread but I would like to focus on the open enrollment issue before adding a second comment about other issues raised by you in this post.

It is natural for people to ask why there are more OE students in particular schools. They asked similar questions when the chapter 220 program originated. To make sense for either program, a suburban district would not accept additional non resident students for a school if it meant that another section would have to be created in that school which would mean hiring an additional teacher. It would seem that this would be a more important concern now since there were no state imposed revenue limits when the chapter 220 program started. In your summary on open enrollment, Dr. Means seemed to talk about this when he discussed Wilson school.

When you look at the location of the majority of elementary schools with a higher percentage of OE students, they are located on the south side of the district. It would seem to be impossible to move some of the OE students in those schools to the four elementary schools located north of the village and east of the parkway without causing an increase in class sections in any of these schools. That would seem to be a non starter for a variety of reasons. I am sure that there are additional reasons why this issue is occurring.

One other quick point. There seems to be some belief that people are leaving the district because of this issue and several others. You indicated that there did not seem to be any reliable information indicating that this was true. Let me give you one data point that I hope indicates something different.

When I sold my house in Wauwatosa after living in it for 42 years, the main reason people gave for wanting to buy my house was that they wanted to move there so their children could attend the Wauwatosa schools. I hope things have not changed in the last few years.

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