Commentary on Madison Government Schools’ Tax & Spending Growth (Lacks total expenditures)

Christ Rickert

As a Madison School District taxpayer, I appreciate the School Board’s careful consideration of whether the Nov. 8 election would be too soon to ask voters to approve a referendum.

When you’re an elected official overseeing a $376 million operating budget and the educational lives of some 27,000 students, you can’t take the public — or its money — for granted.

Luckily, I’m no elected official, and I can say what the elected school officials probably shouldn’t: Any halfway reasonable request from the Madison schools is almost certain to get approved, and by a large margin.

So far, a November referendum is just a gleam in certain School Board members’ eyes. District administrators haven’t come up with options for how much they might want, or when.

But as long as district officials don’t ask the average taxpayer for, say, more than a hundred bucks more per year, or to outfit every board member with a Lincoln Navigator and a Caribbean timeshare, voters will comply.

The District’s 2016-2017 “budget book” mentions spending $421,473,742 “excluding construction”….

I sent a note to Michael Barry on 10 July 2016 requesting the District’s construction budget, which I could not find.

One thought on “Commentary on Madison Government Schools’ Tax & Spending Growth (Lacks total expenditures)”

  1. Why no complaint about Walker’s appointed Charter Czar, Gary Bennett, who we’re paying $95,000? Or the million$ stolen by vouchers from public schools over the last 25 years, especially since Scott Walker became governor 5 years ago. A couple of years ago, the owners of one voucher school took their $2M in taxpayer money and ran off to Florida in the middle of the year, leaving the kids with no school to go to.

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