Education gets funding boost
Milwaukee will get more than one-third of $2.2 billion in federal relief funds for Wisconsin schools.
Milwaukee’s public schools will receive more than a third of the $2.2 billion in federal relief funding being sent to Wisconsin classrooms to navigate and recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The $797 million allocated for Milwaukee amounts to $11,242 per student — the second-highest distribution of COVID-19 relief funding. On the lowest end, the McFarland School District in suburban Madison will receive $107 per student, according to an analysis released by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Republicans who control the state’s budgetwriting committee pressed state education officials Tuesday on the dispensation of federal relief, which was made under a formula that relies heavily on the concentration of children living in poverty — which is 83% of Milwaukee’s student body.
Joint Finance Committee co-chairman Sen. Howard Marklein compared Milwaukee’s massive allocation for its nearly 71,000 students to what was received by school officials in Lancaster, which is receiving $2,213 for each of its 962 students.
“Is that fair?” Marklein asked State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor, who oversees the DPI and testified before the finance committee on Tuesday.
Stanford Taylor noted the formula required by members of Congress and the federal Department of Education to allocate relief dollars relies heavily on an existing process to distribute federal funding based on the concentration of students living in poverty under a program known as Title I.
The state Department of Public Instruction has little control over how much each school receives, with 90% of the funding determined through the federal formula. DPI officials used the remaining 10% of funds to devote to districts that did not receive much funding comparatively, Stanford Taylor said.
She said Milwaukee has more than 160 school buildings and school district officials “have to try to figure out how they’re proportionately addressing needs in every building.”
“It’s a larger lift for a Milwaukee than perhaps for a Lancaster,” Stanford Taylor said.
Committee co-chairman Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, questioned whether that task was five times more difficult than in Lancaster, based on the difference in funding per student in each district.
Stanford Taylor said by using the Title I formula, federal officials used a process to get the funding to the neediest children.
Other large school districts with a substantial number of students living in poverty are receiving much less per student. In Racine, where about 63% of students are considered economically disadvantaged, the district will receive $5,138 per student. Green Bay will receive about $3,820 per student and Madison will receive $2,720 per student.
The Granton Area School District in central Wisconsin will receive the highest distribution in the state at $14,576 for each of its 217 students totaling about $3.2 million. About 70% of the district’s students are living in poverty.
Sen. LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat who represents a portion of the Milwaukee school district, noted that in one ZIP code within her Senate district the average resale value of a home is less than $5,000 and that 70% of the state’s poor residents live in Milwaukee.
Stanford Taylor, who is the first Black leader of the state’s education agency, said she believes the effects of the pandemic have widened the state’s already massive racial gap in academic achievement.
“It has highlighted inequities that existed within (the K-12) system,” she said.
The discussion took place during the first meeting of the Legislature’s budget-writing process, when members of the finance committee heard testimony from DPI officials.
Lawmakers on the committee will hear testimony from some agency officials as they wade through Gov. Tony Evers’ two-year budget proposal that the GOP-controlled committee will rewrite before sending the spending plan to the full Legislature for a vote later this year.