This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/former-mps-superintendent-critical-of-252-million-referendum/

“At some point, don’t you have to say ‘No’?”

How in good conscience, former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent Bill Andrekopoulos wonders, can the school district ask taxpayers for $252 million without considering closing a single school?

The district’s School Support Referendum website can tell you why district leaders say the money is needed and, generally, how and when the money would be used. The site also tells voters who are being asked on April 2 to support the referendum how much of a tax hit they will take, $367 on a home assessed at the $170,000 median price of a home in Milwaukee.

Everything in the pitch to taxpayers down to the penny is predicated on the status quo, as schools across the district are grossly under-enrolled and enrollment continues to sink, he says.

Add to that the district’s almost total lack of accounting for the $87 million referendum voters approved in 2020, with the final $3 million payout this year. Or the $772 million the district received from three COVID “emergency” bills, $506 million of that from the American Rescue Plan Act, which will allow the district to spend federal dollars through 2026.

“It’s like they looked at it and said ‘Let’s just shoot for the moon’ with this referendum, Andrekopoulos told the Badger Institute. “At some point, don’t you have to say ’No’?”

Milwaukee Public Schools operated 136 school buildings in 2023, according to figures from City Forward Collective, up from 132 in 2015. Many of those schools are operating at less than 70% capacity, according to a report MPS was required in August to submit to the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance.

At least 14 schools are at less than half capacity, according to the building inventory report cited by CBS 58. Madison High School has a capacity of 1,629 and an enrollment last year of 762, according to the report. North Division can hold 819 and enrolled 489 a year ago. Morse Middle School’s capacity is 1,012 but served 491 last year. GreenTree Preparatory Academy has room for 860 students and had an enrollment last year of 355.

In a recent interview with the local TV station, current Superintendent Keith Posley said the district has not completed a new master facilities plan but suggested that even if the district were to right-size, the savings would be paltry compared to the $252 million in the referendum.

He also suggested that closing schools is complex because students from all over the city commute to some of the schools with low enrollment on the North Side.

“Most districts can just say, “Hey, we’re gonna right-size because everyone in this area goes to this school.’ That ain’t the case in Milwaukee,” Posley said in the interview. “You may live here, and you go to school in another area.”

MPS did not respond to questions submitted by the Badger Institute.

“I think the district says it is going to close and consolidate schools but that’s been going on for 10 years now with no real action,” Andrekopoulos says. And as for Posley’s claims of North Side considerations, all the more reason for the “consolidation of those schools on the North Side to put more resources in those consolidated schools and to better support the students,” he says. The same with those large high schools with barely any students in them.”

Resistance to closing or consolidating schools was just as strong in Andrekopoulos’ day. School unions, activist groups, teachers and parents have a stake in preserving the status quo. There is a fear that rather than concentrating resources, closing schools is an excuse for the state and the city to take away resources, Andrekopoulos says.

City Forward Collective, a public education advocacy group, agrees with Andrekopoulos that MPS should have presented a closing and consolidation plan to taxpayers before coming to them asking for money.

“The district itself acknowledged the need to right-size the district,” Colleston Morgan, executive director of City Forward Collective, told the Badger Institute. “And it’s entirely reasonable for voters to ask for that analysis before they are asked for money.”

In its analysis of the referendum, City Forward was also sharply critical of the example the district set in handling the 2020 referendum funding and the nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in COVID relief funding.

After all of that, the district projects that without a new infusion of cash their budgets for the next five years will be short more than $1.2 billion, $200 million of that for next year. The Badger Institute foresaw this fiscal crisis in a detailed report as far back as two years after Andrekopoulos retired.

“Rather than utilizing the referendum proceeds, and the more than $700 million in one-time COVID recovery funding MPS received, as a bridge to a right-sized and sustainable budget, the district instead elected to provide subsidies for both staffing under-enrolled schools and for maintaining underutilized school facilities,” the analysis says.

“The evidence is clear: more money alone will not fix the challenges facing MPS, its schools, and most importantly, the students and families they serve,” the report concludes. “As the district again comes to voters to request another tax increase, MPS needs to explain how these additional resources will yield significant improvement in student achievement — because Milwaukee’s students and families both demand and deserve more.”

MPS is asking taxpayers to allow the district to exceed its existing revenue limit by $252 million a year, phased in by $140 million this fall, $51 million next fall, $47 million and $14 million in the two following school years. The total $252 million above the current baseline would remain every year thereafter.

The School Support Referendum website says “There should be only a one-time increase in property taxes if the referendum passes. No additional increases will be associated with the referendum based on the design of the phase-in.”

What the district does not say is that if approved the MPS share of local property taxes will have doubled in less than a decade if the referendum is approved, a 15% increase for the coming school year alone, according to the City Forward analysis.

Four former colleagues of Andrekopoulos who still live in the district and have homes more expensive than the median calculated that the referendum passing would mean property tax hits of $675, $778, $881 and $1,633 in the first year, he says.

“What I don’t understand is MPS saying that the tax impact would be flat after the first year,” he says. “I don’t understand it. I don’t think that’s true. But no matter how you shake this, that’s a pretty big hit the first year.”

Public school spending advocates blame the state’s longstanding revenue limits, a statewide decrease in school enrollment and a failure to keep up with inflation for the sharp increase in referendums.

From February 2022 through April 2023, state taxpayers voted on 248 school spending referendums, passing 178 of them and rejecting 70, according to a Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction tracker. So far this year, two have passed and four have failed, including two votes to issue more than $92 million in debt in the Waterford UHS School District.

If there is a common thread among the bigger city school districts whose voters approved referendums, it’s right-sizing their districts. Voters in Green Bay in November 2022 approved taking on $92.6 million in debt for overall district improvements after closing three schools. The Kenosha School Board in December voted to close six schools and is considering further budget cuts before considering any spending referendum.

This is the part Andrekopoulos doesn’t get. How can MPS promise more music programs at 90 schools, more wellness activities in 57 schools, more art offerings at 56 schools and 48 new library employees, as it says in its referendum fact sheet, if it has no idea how many schools or libraries it will be using?

“They should be designing the district on what it’s gonna look like 10 years from now, not what it looked like 10 years ago,” Andrekopoulos says. “You have to build for the future. But that is going to take a lot of energy and I think the energy has been focused on a lot of other things.”

Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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