What is the cost of school in state?
Breaking down numbers one student at a time
So, how much does it cost to educate a child in Wisconsin?
Well, that depends on where you live.
On average, when you include state general aid, local and federal dollars, school districts spent about $13,500 per student in the 2017-18 school year, the latest available from the state. In southeastern Wisconsin, that ranged from just under $11,180 in the Holy Hill Area School District in Washington County to almost $22,000 in the Nicolet Union High School District in suburban Milwaukee County.
Milwaukee Public Schools spent about $15,250. That’s more than the state average. But it’s less than 11 other districts in the region, including six in Milwaukee County: Nicolet, Maple Dale-Indian Hill, Glendale-River Hills, Fox Point, Shorewood and Cudahy.
Why the disparity in school spending?
Lots of factors go into how much a school spends. Among them: enrollment; the number of children living in poverty or diagnosed with special needs; high transportation costs; the age and condition of facilities; stateimposed limits on the revenue they can raise; whether they’ve gone to referendum to exceed those limits or incur debt.
Why revenue limits matter
A critical piece of that — a starting point, really — is revenue limits. They are the reason MPS and many districts, large and small, argue that their students are valued less in the eyes of the state.
Here’s how that works: Revenue limits essentially cap how much money in total a district can collect from the state’s general fund and the local property tax levy. They were imposed beginning in the 1993-94 school year after years of soaring local tax increases.
The rub? Schools were locked in at their previous year’s spending. So, if they were frugal, low-spenders, they were locked in at the low number. If they were high-spenders, they were locked in there. And that disparity has remained.
In 2017-18, the revenue caps in southeastern Wisconsin ranged from just under $9,300 at Slinger to about $18,500 at Nicolet. MPS’ limit was about $10,500, solidly in the bottom half. More than 45 districts have higher revenue caps.
So, what does this have to do with the rise in referendums?
When the Legislature imposed the revenue limits, it told school districts if they didn’t think they could live with those caps they could go to referendum to ask local taxpayers to pay more.
In the beginning, the caps rose with inflation. But in recent years, the caps have remained flat or not kept pace with inflation.
And so school districts have turned to their taxpayers for more money, in record numbers.
Since 1990, Wisconsin school districts have passed more than 1,600 referendum proposals totaling $12 billion. Most of those have been to acquire debt for capital projects, but a growing number are to exceed revenue limits for operating costs to maintain programming.
In 2016 alone, voters approved referendum questions that authorized borrowing $1.35 billion, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayer Alliance, a predecessor to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. That was 10 times more than in 2011 and the most since the alliance began tracking the data in 1993.
In southeastern Wisconsin over the last decade, voters approved operating referendums totaling almost $245 million.
Because they’re more likely to pass in affluent districts than poorer ones, there’s a concern that they exacerbate inequities among school districts.