TJ Mertz:

In this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal there is a story that again misrepresents the place of Madison School Community Recreation and Fund 80 in the district and the community.
The chart comparing Fund 80 levies in Madison to those in other districts ignores the fact that most or all of those locales have municipal recreation programs paid for by municipal taxes. Due to a historical quirk, Madison has very little in the way of a municipal recreation department and programs and services that other locales fund via municipal or county taxes are funded and governed by the school district via Fund 80. In order to get a realistic comparison of Madison’s spending on recreational and community education programming one must look at total levies devoted to this. The last time I did this (early 2006) I found that the combined spending on MSCR and the Madison Parks Department was about $20 million. De Moines, IA (about the same size) has a parks and recreation budget of about $20 million. Ann Arbor, MI is about half the size of Madison and has a Parks and Recreation budget of $12 million. Green Bay, also about half the size has a Parks and Recreation Budget of $8 million. In other words, the spending in these areas is very much in line with what others spend.

There’s been no shortage of discussion on Fund 80 here. 2006 / 2007 Madison School District $333M+ Citizen’s Budget.
Related:

• Amy Hetzner: Community Service Levies Climbed Since Revenue Caps Lifted:
  

  But once the Legislature removed the caps on the community service levies for the 2000-’01 school year and gave school districts an opportunity to keep their recreational activities from conflicting with educational programs, more took advantage of it.
  “I think – when you look at districts across the state – that’s really what caused the jump,” said Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, which in 2005-’06 had the largest community service levy in the state.
  Like some of the bigger community service funds, Madison’s supports a full recreation department with adult and youth programming. But it also helps pay for television production activities, after-school activities, a gay and lesbian community program coordinator and part of a social worker’s time to work with low-income families, Rainwater said.
  The School District’s community service levy is expected to grow to $10.5 million in the coming school year. In contrast, the same levy for Milwaukee Public Schools – which serves nearly four times as many children in its educational programs – is expected to reach $9.3 million, said Michelle Nate, the district’s director of finance.
  Although the state Department of Public Instruction has issued guidelines to school districts on how they should use their community service levies, it leaves it up to local residents to decide whether their school boards do so wisely and legally.

• Carol Carstensen: Fund 80 is Worth our Support.
• Lucy Mathiak: Community Service Fund 80, Can We talk?
• Ruth Robarts: A Tale of Two Budgets: the Operating Budget for Madison Schools versus its Budget for Community Programs and Services
• A look at the City of Madison’s parcel count growth.

The charts are from Lucy Mathiak’s post:

Help! I’m getting a major headache. I’ve been trying to track some changes in the MMSD budget over the last 5-10 years, and I have noticed that the numbers aren’t always the same in the different places that I have been looking. At first, I figured it just me and that definitions for budget categories change from year to year. However, I decided to look at something simple and straightforward: What was the total MMSD budget for 2004/2005? I have included the sources of this information for anyone who wants to check my work, but I tell you it’s driving me nuts.

• $370,226,157 – This number comes from an April 2006 Executive Summary
• $363,366,630 – This is from a 10/24/05 Budget Amendments and Tax Levy document and this budget number includes interfund transfers.
• $320,039,617 – If we remove interfund transfers from the budget, the above document lists this number as our total budget.
• $316,822,781 – I found this budget amount listed twice: in a five year budget forecast from 2/14/05 and a preliminary budget forecast dated 3/7/05
• $317,695,011 – On 5/3/05, the 2005-06 Budget and Financial Summaries document listed this amount for the 2004/05 budget.
• $317,163,034 – this amount is similar but not identical; it comes from page 233 of the 2005-06 Budget Book released on 5/17/05
• $318,789,509 – this is the MMSD 2004/05 budget according to DPI’s website
• $334,626,013.5 – this is a final guess at a budget number and it comes from the Five Year Financial Forecast document that the District had prepared by PMA Financial Network. This number is based on FY2004 and FY2005 data for Fund 10 ($265,678,423; $272,015,465) and Fund 27 ($66,148,621; $65,409,518). I just added the amounts for each fund for each FY (2004: $331827044; 2005: $337424983) and then averaged them as I wasn’t sure what the relation was of a FY (fiscal year) to a school budget year. I should also state the obvious that I know the MMSD budget includes expenses beyond these two funds, but that was all that was in the document.

I realize that some variability can be the result of numbers computed before the end of the school year, but shouldn’t all of the numbers computed after the end of the 2004/05 school year be the same? I have to be honest, this doesn’t make me feel very confident about the District’s money management abilities.

(This letter is being distributed to parents of Franklin-Randall students, but should concern everyone in the MMSD and Regent Neighborhood)
SCHOOL FUNDING CRISIS:
Don’t get mad, get active!!
March 16, 2007
The School Board recently announced sweeping budget cuts for the coming school year that will have a severe impact on Franklin-Randall, as well as other schools in the district. Following Tuesday’s PTO meeting, parents in attendance agreed that we must act QUICKLY to address this crisis. Below, we have summarized the funding crisis, and how cuts to our and other schools will affect our children’s education and safety. Most importantly, we conclude with specific ideas that we can all implement, to positively address this crisis.
Brief overview of the FUNDING CRISIS: Wisconsin has placed an indefinite “Budget Cap” on all additional funding towards schools. Every year there are increased costs to our schools to cover teacher salaries, increased student numbers, and increased maintenance costs. Without intervention and change, Madison’s reputation for excellence in education is going to change significantly, and with that, so will the diversity, appeal, and attraction of our city.
How will current district recommendations directly affect the education and safety of your children in the Franklin-Randall community?
*As a result of the “SAGE” program being cut from our schools, Franklin-Randall class sizes will rise from 15 to 22 for Kindergarten and First grade, and from 15 to 24 for Second and Third grades this Fall.
*Franklin will lose 5.1 teacher allocations; this most likely means that 3 classroom teachers will be laid-off, and there will be reductions throughout Art, Music, PE, and Reach.
*Randall will lose 1.6 teacher allocations.
*Randall will lose the 5th grade strings program (last year 4th grade strings was cut).
How will cuts at OTHER schools affect the education and safety of your children?
All of our city’s elementary school children come together in middle and high schools; sub-standard education in any one of these schools will therefore affect all students eventually: a loss for one school will become a loss for all.
What can I do NOW?
1. Talk to people at your bus stop, in your neighborhood, and in the hallways at school when you’re there– work together to come up with at least one idea to present at the Rescue Our Schools brainstorm session. This meeting will follow the monthly PTO meeting (Tuesday, April 10th at 6:30) in the Randall Library.
2. Talk to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors who DON’T have children about how these changes to our schools will affect them. One key point to address is that our city is only as appealing as its future, and our children are the future. Everyone, with or without kids, will be affected. Wisconsin has a history of valuing education and performance; if this changes, we are giving up a source of identity and pride!
3. Attend the Information and Advocacy Session at the Doyle Administration Building, Thursday, March 29th at 6:30pm
4. Form shared child-care groups with friends and neighbors to allow for more parental presence in the schools. Make it a goal to do this in some capacity weekly. These cooperatives will allow you to watch or volunteer at more school functions, participate in school trips, or attend school board meetings. Education research definitively shows, that the more YOU are involved, the more success your child will have in school!
5. As you are able, contribute with time or money to the PTO! $100 can buy a violin that will last 10 years! Commit to a half-hour stint helping on the playground weekly — this equates to invaluable community-building, camaraderie, injury prevention, as well as much-needed breaks for our teachers.
6. Attend the MMSD School Board Meetings, held on Mondays at the Doyle Administration Bldg at 545 W. Dayton St, next door to the Kohl Center. Beginning at 7:15, any person or group can make a “Public Appearance” (up to three minutes each) to deliver opinions / make arguments about any school-related topic. To find out more, go to www.madison.k12.wi.us : under “District Information” click on “Board of Education”, then under “Meetings”, click on “Board of Education Calendar”.
7. Become active in the you school PTO!!! Sign up to be on the Franklin-Randall List-Serve — This is a fast, easy and inexpensive way for people to notify each other about F-R events and news. Simply send an email to: F-R_pto-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, with “subscribe” in the subject line. To find out about all the up-coming meetings and events, go to the F-R PTO website. Site address is www.franklinrandallpto.org
8. Don’t forget to VOTE on Tues, April 3rd, during Spring break–And if you’re not in town, vote ABSENTEE! To vote absentee, go anytime within one week before the election, to the City-County Building at 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Rm. 103. 8-4:30pm. Alternatively, by calling 266-4601, you may ask the city to mail you a ballot (English, Spanish or Hmong), or simply go online: www.cityofmadison.com/clerk/voterabsentee.cfm (also downloadable in English, Spanish or Hmong)
What can I do long-term?
Ultimately, we have to address long-term changes to school funding at the State and National level. Through grassroots organizing directed at raising awareness of the issues, we can make a change. We must reach out to like-minded groups (other PTO’s, PTA etc.), and legislators around the state. To this end, following April’s PTO meeting, we will meet to collect ideas, and organize our strategies —
*PLEASE come to the PTO Meeting, April 10th at 6:30pm (Randall Library)!! *
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for taking action in whatever way you can!
Concerned Franklin-Randall Parents
For further information, please contact any of us:
Sari Judge 233-1754, Megan Brown 250-0552, Kate Zirbel 661-9090,
Mollie Kane 232-1809, Erika Kluetmeier, 238-6209

Waukesha Taxpayer’s League:

alaries and benefits are by far the largest portion of the School District budget and the increases dictate what the School Board must do with programs and corresponding reductions in programs. During the ’90’s, negotiations used to begin with presentation of proposals of both sides, the EAW (Education Association of Waukesha) and the Waukesha School Board (the elected body that should be working on behalf of taxpayers to provide the best education possible). This was done so that negotiations was a give/take process (taxpayers usually gave more than they received in return). Recently, a couple of WTL members had a three way conversation with Bill Baumgart, President of the Waukesha School Board. In that conversation, the WTL verified that the School Board does not vote or have an acceptable QEO done prior to negotiations as a basis to work from. The School District also hasn’t filed with the appropriate Schedule D required by law at the close of negotiations for previous years. Following is the ‘proposal-less non-protection’ contract used by the School District of Waukesha (ie. Waukesha School Board) and the EAW. Is there a difference between the two groups??

Paul Soglin:

I met with some special education teachers on Tuesday and wish to share my observations about the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). These are my observations and conclusions, not theirs.

• For the 1996-97 school year the State of Wisconsin paid 40.223% of the cost of special education. For 2006-2007 the state paid  28%. (Here is a MMSD memo on the subject from 2005)
• The MMSD cannot lower the expenditures for special education and so the lost state revenues must be made up by cuts in general education.
• The lost funding amounts to about $8 million dollars this year.
• In the 2001-2002 school year the MMSD enrolled 197 children with a Primary Disability of Autism. That number rose to 303 for this school year. Twenty five years ago that number was less than five. If one out of every 166 children are autistic, there should be 150 autistic children in the MMSD.
• A 2003 district study showed that 93 of the autistic children enrolled that year moved into the district from not just Wisconsin and the United States, but all over the world. That number does not include the children of families who moved to Madison prior to their child’s fifth birthday.

My conclusions: Special eduction is just one of several factors driving the cost of educating our children. More significant is the cost of educating so many children enrolled in the MMSD who’s families are below the poverty line.

There is no question that the original outstanding commitment to special education of the MMSD in the 1980’s combined with the high level of services (Waisman Center, etc) attracted a significant number of families to the MMSD.

More on state K-12 finance from Paul here:

he Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) struggles to make budget cuts. Some taxpayers are assuming that if they, as students, could get a quality education twenty or forty years ago, then, with a little fine tuning, it can be today’s students.
The world and Wisconsin education has changed. Here are some of the differences from thirty years ago:

Carol Carstensen circulated the e-mail below and gave permission to post it here:

Amy Hetzner:

About 500 parents, students and spectators packed a school auditorium Monday night, pleading for help from local legislators in dealing with a financial situation that some predicted would devastate the School District.
“If we can pay for a stadium for a bunch of overpaid baseball players, we can certainly pay for an education for all of our children,” Heyer Elementary School parent Cheryl Gimignani told the six legislators participating in the forum in North High School’s auditorium.
The event came just two days before the School Board is set to approve $3.4 million worth of program and service cuts to balance its 2007-’08 budget.
Administrators have recommended eliminating the equivalent of 62 full-time staff positions, which would raise class sizes, delay band and orchestra instruction and nearly eliminate elementary guidance, elementary library and gifted programs in the district.
They blame the school system’s financial woes on perennial discrepancies between what the state allows the district to raise under revenue caps and its actual expenses. A separate law, the qualified economic offer, virtually guarantees teachers annual compensation increases of 3.8% while revenue grows by about 2%.
But the legislators offered little hope that much will change, at least in the near future, and said the school system would be better off looking for cost savings than expecting more money from Madison. Any change to the state funding system for schools likely would not benefit residents in Waukesha County, who already pay more in taxes than they receive back in aid from the state, they said.
“I do not want to change the formula,” said state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), “because if we tamper and change the formula, the school districts that I represent will lose, not gain.”

Lazich’s comments illustrate the unlikely nature of significant state K-12 finance changes that would benefit property rich school districts like Madison and Waukesha.

Andy Hall:

The Madison School District’s struggle to handle a $10.5 million budget shortfall moved into a new stage Monday night, as 17 people spoke out against proposed cuts and a School Board member urged her colleagues to turn to voters for more money.
The School Board began struggling with the budget cuts following Superintendent Art Rainwater’s announcement Friday of his plans for addressing the shortfall, including consolidation of schools on the city’s East Side, increases in kindergarten through third-grade class sizes at seven elementary schools and changes in how services are delivered to students with speech and language problems.
The district’s budget next year will rise 1.9 percent to $339.1 million. But cuts are needed because that increase, which is limited by state revenue caps, isn’t enough to allow the district to continue all current services.
At the School Board meeting, five parents of Crestwood Elementary students protested Rainwater’s proposal to remove the school next year from the state’s Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) program, which limits class sizes in grades K-3 to 15 students in order to aid low-income students.

Doug Erickson:

Madison School District administrators are scheduled to announce today their recommendations for millions of dollars in program and staff cuts, a grim step in a budget process that typically consumes the School Board’s attention each spring.
Larger class sizes at the elementary level and bigger caseloads for special education teachers likely will be among the proposals.
Consolidating schools on the city’s East Side also is a strong possibility – parents there already are mobilizing to beat back the idea – although district officials would not confirm that such a proposal will be part of today’s announcement.
The district’s most recent budget forecast in January put next year’s shortfall at $10.5 million. That number was being refined Thursday but is in the ballpark, district officials said.

Related:

• Concessions in advance of negotiations.
• Citizen’s version of the MMSD’s $333M+ budget for our 24,342 students
• Beth Swedeen on why this year is different for state funding.
• Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater on Budget Season
• Doyle budget maintains status quo by Joe Quick
• Peter Gascoyne:
  

  “[Ask] what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year. Start with a completely clean slate. Identify your primary goals and values and priorities. Determine how best to achieve those goals to the highest possible level, given a budget that happens to be $40 million smaller than today’s. Consider everything – school-based budgeting, class sizes, after-school sports, everything.”
  

• Channel3000: Parents Respond to Proposed East Side School Closings

The MMSD’s budget increases annually. A variety of perspectives on enrollment, spending and staff history can be found here.
Those interested in school finance might check out Monday’s brown bag lunch meeting “Financing Quality Education“.

Beth Swedeen:

Many people in Madison continue to say that the district and its leadership (including the Board of Education) are helpless in changing the revenue caps and the way public education is funded in Wisconsin. They point out that the revenue caps have been in place for 14 years and at least during in the last three budget cycles (since 2000), districts have been screaming for help. I’m not a political insider, but here’s at least some reasons that this year (and definitely the budget cycle in 2009) is significantly different:

Steven Walters and Stacy Forster along with numerous notes & links:

Despite Gov. Jim Doyle’s public – and repeated – promises that his budget proposal would pay for two-thirds of public education costs, an analysis released today showed that it falls short of that goal.
In a 624-page summary of the budget that Doyle gave legislators last month, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau said the state would pay 65.3% of public school costs in the year that begins July 1, and 65.5% of those costs in the following year.

[JPG | PDF | .xls versions] MMSD Statistics.
Paul Soglin’s observations on the MMSD’s funding issues, special ed and our politicians.

Avrum Lank:

Per capita income will continue to grow in Wisconsin through 2009, but at a slower rate than in the nation as a whole, according to an economic outlook released Friday by the state Department of Revenue.
Employment also will grow, but manufacturing jobs will decline, the report said.
Even so, corporate income tax collections are growing about four times faster than all state tax revenue, reflecting robust business profits.
“The U.S. economy is expected to slow this year,” the report said. The state’s economy also will slow “before returning to stronger growth in 2008.”
Jobs in the state will grow 0.8% this year to 2,892,800 – less than the 1% growth last year. Growth rates of 1.3% in 2008 and 1.2% in 2009 will bring the job total to slightly fewer than 3 million, the report said.
However, manufacturing jobs will fall from 507,300 last year to 502,900 by 2009.
Per capita personal income will rise about 8%, to $33,174 in 2009 from $30,706 last year, using constant 2000 dollars.
That is a decline to 96.2% of the national average in 2009, from 96.7% last year.

Wisconsin Department of Revenue Economic Outlook 292K PDF
Changing state K-12 funding to benefit Madison (perceived as a rich district based on property values and spending growth) will be difficult given our higher than state average per student spending and some of the issues noted above. The politics of this issue can be seen in those who have supported (and those who have not, including our own Senator Fred Risser) the Pope-Roberts/Breske resolution. Senator Risser’s bills.

Financing Quality Education: A Five-Year Look
March 12, 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.
Lower Conference Room
222 South Hamilton Street, Madison
Bring your brown-bag lunch and join others concerned about Madison schools to discuss long-range plans to help the district meet the financial challenges created by the state-imposed revenue limits.
The meeting and discussion will help identify the stakeholders and possible steps needed to begin and shape long-term view of the MMSD and its budget.
Some ideas were laid out on schoolinfosystem.org:
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/03/a_5_year_approa.php:
“[Ask] what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year. Start with a completely clean slate. Identify your primary goals and values and priorities. Determine how best to achieve those goals to the highest possible level, given a budget that happens to be $40 million smaller than today’s. Consider everything – school-based budgeting, class sizes, after-school sports, everything.”
Everyone and all ideas are welcome at this brown-bag discussion in the lower level conference room at 222 S. Hamilton Street.
For more information, contact Ed Blume at edblume@mailbag.com or by phone at 225.6591.

Andy Hall on local referendums:

Layoffs and pay cuts are looming in a western Dane County school district, and officials in the Adams-Friendship area are contemplating closing two elementary schools after voters rejected two school referendums last week.
Voters also approved referendums Tuesday for a $14.68 million elementary school in Sun Prairie and $2.48 million to avert school cuts in Pardeeville 30 miles north of Madison.
But ballot measures were narrowly defeated in the Wisconsin Heights School District, which includes Mazomanie and Black Earth, and Adams-Friendship, 75 miles north of Madison.

Student population, expense and tax revenue growth all affect local school district budgets.
Andy also posted an article on a survey conducted by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators:

Twenty-seven percent of superintendents said their school boards have held discussions during the past few years about the possibility of dissolving or consolidating their school districts. Among those districts, more than 90 percent said the talks were prompted by financial problems.
Increasing portions of districts report changes that could reduce the quality of educational services. Since the 1998-99 school year, for example, the percentage of districts increasing class sizes grew from 48 to 74 percent. The percentage laying off teachers during that period rose from 36 to 62 percent.

Wistax reported recently that Wisconsin residents paid 33.4% of income in taxes, up from 30.7% in 2003. Decisions like this do not help pass referendums, much less build confidence in our $331M+ local school district.

Financing Quality Education: A Five-Year Look
March 12, 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.
Lower Conference Room
222 South Hamilton Street, Madison
Bring your brown-bag lunch and join others concerned about Madison schools to discuss long-range plans to help the district meet the financial challenges created by the state-imposed revenue limits.
The meeting and discussion will help identify the stakeholders and possible steps needed to begin and shape long-term view of the MMSD and its budget.
Some ideas were laid out on schoolinfosystem.org:
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/03/a_5_year_approa.php:
“[Ask] what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year. Start with a completely clean slate. Identify your primary goals and values and priorities. Determine how best to achieve those goals to the highest possible level, given a budget that happens to be $40 million smaller than today’s. Consider everything – school-based budgeting, class sizes, after-school sports, everything.”
Everyone and all ideas are welcome at this brown-bag discussion in the lower level conference room at 222 S. Hamilton Street.
For more information, contact Ed Blume at edblume@mailbag.com or by phone after March 1 at 225.6591.

Jim Doyle:

First and foremost, this budget maintains the state’s commitment to fund two-thirds of the cost of our kids’ education.
Especially when you consider how much more it costs just to fuel the busses and heat the schools, the funding I’m providing is hardly extravagant. Schools will have a modest, 3 percent increase to keep up with inflation – so that our kids continue to get a great education.
Second, we should make a major new investment in school breakfast, four-year-old kindergarten, and smaller class sizes from kindergarten through third grade … because getting the right start is so critical to our kids’ education.
Third, we must reform the school financing formula to make it fairer, more flexible, and more focused on the needs of our kids.
We can start by helping rural districts with transportation costs, providing relief to schools with declining enrollment, and continuing to address the disparity faced by our lowest spending districts.

WisPolitics budget blog.

Bonnie Jenko:

What’s needed now in terms of facilities wasn’t even an illusion 50 years ago. How many of us would like to have heart surgery in a hospital built in 1950 but never upgraded? How about taking the car to a repair shop that looks just like it did in 1955? Comparatively, schools built in the 1950s cannot provide the educational facilities needed for a 21st-century education.
Yes, property taxes will increase. Until there is reform on that front, that’s how we provide for education in Wisconsin.
A significant motivation for today’s families moving to the suburbs is the potential of better schools. The taxpayers of yesterday built and paid for the schools that today’s students attend. Now it’s our turn to continue the strong academic tradition of quality schools in our communities.

Jason Stein:

s part of his two-year budget proposal to be unveiled Tuesday, the Democratic governor said he will pay for prenatal visits for poor expectant mothers, expand 4-year-old kindergarten classes and help provide in-home care for the elderly. The plans will help students succeed and frail seniors stay in their homes while saving the state money over the long run, Doyle said.
“I believe really strongly in good early childhood development and I think everybody who is involved in education understands how important it is for kids to get off to a good start,” Doyle said in an interview. “To me, this is one of the best investments that you can make and the payoff comes in very many ways.”
But unlike his previous two budgets, Doyle has an ally in the state Senate, now controlled by Democrats. Political observers said at least some of Doyle’s ideas could pass, including proposals to expand 4- year-old kindergarten and send more money to struggling rural school districts, often represented by Republican lawmakers.
“We need to set our priorities, and one of the priorities is our children, and we’ve just got to find the funding for them,” Senate Majority Leader Judy Robson, D-Beloit.
Doyle has not said how he would pay for the programs.
Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said it was unclear whether Doyle’s proposals actually increase spending or redistribute existing money for schools or other items.

Wisconsin Department of Revenue [300K PDF]:

Based on the current economic forecast and recent collection experience, General Purpose Revenue (GPR) tax collections in fiscal year (FY) 2007 will increase 3.8% relative to FY 2006 to $12.491 billion. This Department of Revenue (DOR) estimate is $69 million (0.6%) below the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) estimate for FY 2007 collections issued in January 2006.
GPR tax collections are estimated to increase 3.6% in FY 2008 to $12.941 billion and 4.0% in FY 2009 to $13.462 billion.
GPR tax collections by DOR during the first four months of FY 2007 increased 3.6% over the comparable period of FY 2006 from $3.322 billion to $3.443 billion. During this period, individual income tax receipts increased 4.3% to $1.888 billion; sales tax revenue increased 2.8% to $1.111 billion, and corporate collections increased 12.5% to $261 million.

The Doyle Report:

This week, House and Senate Democrat Appropriators agreed on a long overdue funding resolution for fiscal year (FY) 06 that provides $2.3 billion in additional funding over FY06 and includes an additional $1.17 billion for education over FY 06 levels.
Highlights from the House appropriations resolution include:

• Pell Grants: $13.6 billion, an increase of $615.4 million to increase the maximum Pell grant by $260 to $4,310.
• Special Education: $10.7 billion for IDEA Part B state grants, an increase of $200 million to help school districts serve 6.9 million children with disabilities.
• Title I K-12 Grants: $12.8 billion, an increase of $125 million to provide approximately 38,000 additional low-income children performing below grade level with intensive reading and math instruction.
• Title I School Improvement Fund: $125 million for this new program to target assistance to the 6,700 schools that failed to meet No Child Left Behind requirements in the 2005-2006 school year.
• Head Start: $6.9 billion, an increase of $103.7 million.

See also the Committee for Education Funding.

Allison Sherry:

Some of the Denver’s most popular public schools will get pots of cash this spring for attracting students from out of the district or from charter schools.
The move is designed to draw students back to Denver public schools, which have lost more than 8,000 students in the past six years.
Places like the Center for International Studies, the Denver School of the Arts, and East and Thomas Jefferson high schools will receive cash – from $20,000 to $156,000 – because they attracted “new” kids this year to their rolls, Denver Public Schools administrators said Thursday.
District leaders consider “new” students as those previously attending school out of the district or at a charter school.
Charter schools are public but are operated privately and get to keep the bulk of state per-pupil money. In Denver, that is about $6,500 per student.
For each “new” student, Denver schools will receive $1,395, but to receive the money, the school had to have a net gain of students.

Madison Metropolitan School District:

The state’s failure to pay for mandated special education and English Language Learner (ELL) costs reduced available resources to Madison Schools by over $11.6 million, according to information released to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB).
At the district’s request, Pocan asked the LFB to calculate the reimbursement for special education and ELL expenses comparing the level of state categorical aid during the 1993-94 school year (the first year of state-imposed revenue limits) and the 2005-06 school year. School districts statewide were reimbursed for special education expenses at nearly 45% for 1993-94. The reimbursement for 2005-06 slipped to below 29%, translating to a loss of over $9.4 million in resources for Madison Schools compared to 1993-94.
For ELL students, the 1993-94 state reimbursement to districts for expenses was 33.1%. Currently, school districts are reimbursed at 11.5%, a loss of over $2.2 million in resources for Madison Schools compared to 1993-94.
For decades the state had a statutory provision requiring reimbursement for special education to be 63%, but the statute was eliminated from law in the 1999-2001 biennial budget.

The State of Wisconsin has been increasing it’s overall K-12 funding during this time, including the much discussed commitment to fund 2/3 of school district budgets. It would be interesting to see a summary of the spending changes over time, including areas that saw increases, and like this example, decreases.

Sun Prairie School District:

On February 20, 2007, voters within the Sun Prairie Area School District will be asked to vote on a referendum to build a 7th elementary school within the school district.

Cliff Miller has more.

Maria Newman:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York said today that he would allocate more money to the state’s public education system in his 2008 budget proposal, but he said the increased spending would be tied to better results from schools, educators and students.
“There will be no more excuses for failure,” Mr. Spitzer said. “The debate will no longer be about money, but about performance.”
The governor, in office for less than a month, did not tip his hand today on how much the public school system will get in the budget that he will submit to the state Legislature on Wednesday. But in an address to school leaders and legislators, he said that every school district that receives at least $15 million more this year in his new budget, or 10 percent more than in the previous year, would be subject to a new “contract for excellence” that will dictate how they can spend those funds.
Schools that do not perform well, he said, would be shut down. Educators who do not meet performance goals would be dismissed. A new accountability system would monitor how schools are performing academically and whether they are making the best use of their money, he said. Also, the schools will be judged on whether their academic programming is helping students perform better.
“We should be ready to close more schools that fail — perhaps as many as 5 percent of all the schools in the state if we have to,” he said.

Spitzer’s Speech, “A Contract for Excellence” is available here.
Jonathan Mandell comments.

Andy Hall:

The revenue caps and QEO are transforming the operations of public schools, pushing school officials and the public into a never-ending cycle of cuts, compromises and referendums.
Most districts reduced the number of academic courses, laid off school support staff and reduced programs for students at the highest risk of failure, according to a survey of 278 superintendents during the 2004-05 school year by groups representing administrators and teachers.
Public schools, the most expensive single program in Wisconsin, account for about 40 cents of every dollar spent out of the state’s general fund.
In the old days, school boards wanting more money for school operations could simply raise taxes, and risk retribution from voters if they went too far.
Revenue caps stripped school boards of that power, requiring them instead to seek the permission of voters in ballot questions.
“We’re literally governing by referendum,” complained Nancy Hendrickson, superintendent of the Pecatonica Area School District in Blanchardville, 35 miles southwest of Madison.

Much more on the Madison School District’s $331M+ budget here and here.

Richard S. Davis, writing in the Spokesman Review:

What should the state spend on public schools?
In Olympia today, there is only one right answer: More.
And that answer has budget-busting consequences.
Gov. Chris Gregoire, the current education governor – when has the mansion not been occupied by an education governor? – has proposed increasing per student spending by 25 percent. Republicans don’t disagree, though they might spend it differently. And the governor has called her education budget, which goes a long way toward depleting a $1.9 billion surplus, just a down payment.
Not satisfied with promises, nine school districts went to court earlier this month, suing for more state money. They didn’t say how much they wanted, possibly to avoid low-balling the judge. The courts can be very generous with other people’s money.
But there are limits to how much is available. The current surplus will be spent in a few years. And when “more” means higher taxes, public support erodes quickly.
Perhaps, rather than focusing on how much we are spending, we should be asking how well existing money is being spent.

Joanne has more.

Lisa Sink:

Elmbrook School District officials have 10 weeks to persuade voters to make state history, after the School Board voted tonight to schedule an April 3 referendum seeking a record-setting $99.3 million to upgrade the district’s two high schools.
The board voted 6-1, with Patrick Murphy opposed, to approve the plan to substantially renovate and expand Brookfield Central and East high schools on their existing sites. They agreed to knock $500,000 off the formerly eyed $99.8 million amount, at the request of board member Steve Schwei.
His reason: “I want people to round down to $99 million (rather) than to round up to $100 million.”
Board members also agreed to add a second ballot question asking residents to allow the district to borrow another $9.5 million to add more gymnasium space to both high schools. That vote was also 6-1, but with board member Tom Gehl opposed.

Jennie Tunkieiecz:

But taxpayers across the western half of Racine County saw dramatic jumps in their tax bills as the result of the western county school districts taking on the full cost of special education, which had previously been paid for in the county portion of the property taxes.
The Village of Union Grove jumped from fourth to second place among cities and villages. Janice Winget, village clerk/treasurer, said she has been hearing the outrage from people coming in to pay taxes.
“The average hit was probably $500 to $600, if not more,” Winget said. “The schools tried to warn people it was going to happen, but no one had the idea it was going to have that effect on people.”

Ellen Gamerman:

Since its founding in 1970, Forsyth Country Day School in Lewisville, N.C., has built an idyllic campus and become known for sending graduates on to the Ivy League. Forsyth stands out another way, too: Its headmaster, Henry M. Battle Jr., received more than $300,000 in salary and bonuses in 2004-05, according to the school’s most recently available tax filings. That’s nearly double the national median salary for private-school chiefs — and above the pay at names like New York’s Dalton and Connecticut’s Choate Rosemary Hall.
Across the country, the job description for private-school headmasters is changing — and that is rapidly lifting their pay. With competition fierce for candidates who combine CEO-level business acumen and academic credentials, total compensation packages worth $400,000 or more are increasingly common. In some cases, candidates are getting new perks, from college-style sabbaticals to travel stipends.

Josh Kelley:

After decades of adding classrooms and teachers, school districts in some of the Valley’s more established neighborhoods are wrestling with enrollment declines.
The loss of students, which results in le ss state funding, will lead to tighter budgets and difficult decisions for large districts in Mesa, Phoenix and Scottsdale.
In the Paradise Valley district, enrollment dropped by 373 students last year. But district officials anticipate residential development, making it tricky to determine the need for a new high school.
“Up until you hit that peak, you’re growing and people are used to, ‘Hey, we’ve got a thousand new kids,’ ” said Chuck Essigs, director of government relations for the Arizona Association of School Business Officials. “Those thousand kids are nice revenue generators for the district, and people get used to that.”

Barb Schrank noted the enrollment changes in public school districts around the Madison area last fall.

Laura McCallum:

A two-percent increase in the basic amount schools get for each student would cost around $300 million a year. Pawlenty told school board members he recognizes that school costs for fuel, salaries and health insurance are going up.
“I concede the reality, we have got to get you more money, we got to get you at least inflation and hopefully better, particularly when you look at all the variables. But we have a system where we are always in crisis.”
Pawlenty suggested that one factor for the constant school funding crunch is that school leaders can’t do much to control costs. The biggest expense for schools is salaries and health insurance for teachers and staff. Pawlenty says he doesn’t think teachers make too much money, but he has pushed for an alternative way of paying teachers. His Q Comp performance pay program is voluntary for districts, and 34 districts have signed up so far.
Pawlenty told school board members that while he supports early childhood education, he’s not sure the state should require every school district to offer all-day kindergarten. DFL legislative leaders have called for statewide all-day K, at a cost of $160 million a year.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

Gov. Jim Doyle – Democrat and ally of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s chief umbrella teachers union – has tried to rescind the QEO in the past. The Republican-controlled Legislature wouldn’t hear of it. Since then, one chamber, the Senate, has shifted Democratic. And rescission of the QEO is an idea whose time may be near.
But any such step mustn’t take place in isolation. The QEO is part of an intricate financing mechanism for schools, whose most troubling cost is health care, which is rising out of control. Any abolition of the QEO must be part of a plan that rethinks how schools, including health care, are financed.

Anita Clark:

adison public schools will allow advertising at athletic sites for the first time under a plan that has won unanimous approval from School Board members.
In its continuing search for new sources of money, the Madison School District said Wednesday it will begin accepting advertisements in its high school gymnasiums and other athletic locations.
The district hopes to make about $200,000 over two years.
“I really think we’re on the right track here,” said board President Johnny Winston Jr., a longtime advocate of finding new revenue sources who chaired a committee that studied the issue.

Susan Troller has more.

Jay Matthews:

U.S. public schools could have as much as $77 billion more a year to improve teaching if they reduced spending on seniority pay increases, teacher’s aides, class size limits and other measures often found in teacher union contracts, a new study contends.
he provisions include salary increases based on years of experience or educational credentials; professional development days; sick and personal days; class size limits; use of teacher’s aides; and generous health and retirement benefits.
Teachers union officials sharply disputed the report’s findings. School administrators and school board representatives said that although they would like more flexibility in the use of funds, there was little evidence that cutting such provisions would raise achievement.

250K PDF Report.

Education Sector Press Release by Marguerite Roza:

State and federal accountability systems are putting immense pressure on public schools to improve the performance of low-achieving students. To respond, schools must be able to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, strengthen curricula, and take other steps to provide struggling students with the help they need.
But such efforts are expensive and, as the nation faces the cost of caring for an aging population and other challenges in the years ahead, it is unlikely that education will receive a great deal of new funding. Education leaders, as a result, will increasingly have to scrutinize their existing budgets to find ways to fund their reform initiatives. One potentially valuable source of funds for reform are common provisions in teacher contracts that obligate schools to spend large amounts of money on programs that lack a clear link to student achievement.

Andrew Rotherham has more:

New ES report by school finance guru Marguerite Roza makes the uncomfortable but important point that there is a lot of money in education now that could be repurposed to greater effect within education. WaPo here. Similar to the point made by the recent Skills Commission report. To some this could appear as picking on teachers, and it will be framed that way, but the simple fact is that education is, by it’s nature, pretty labor intensive, and most of the $500 billion spent annually is tied up in labor costs. Consequently, pace our good friend Willie Sutton, that’s one place policymakers are going to have to look for funds. In other words, we need to get serious about financing education, but also about refinancing it as well. And, we have to take on what is a four letter word in many education circles, productivity.

Mike Antonucci:

Education Sector has released an exceptional report by Marguerite Roza that quantifies the costs of various standard provisions in collective bargaining agreements that have little or no connection to improved student achievement or even efficient distribution of resources. Items like automatic raises for experience, university credits, and paid professional development end up totaling almost 19 percent of all education spending, without any indication that they are giving us what we’re after: better schools.
Roza suggests more flexibility is needed:

A story by Kayla Bunge in The Monroe Times reports:

(more…)

Jay Bullock:

Here’s the short story on the QEO: Back in the early 1990s, when Tommy Thompson, et al., did their part to appease the anti-taxers regarding school costs and property taxes, they implemented a trio of reforms. The QEO (qualified economic offer) law allowed school districts to impose a 3.8% cap on increases in public school teacher salaries and benefits without bargaining, given that bargaining first comes to an impasse. The second reform placed caps on how much revenue districts could raise from the local levy. The third was a promise–not a statutory requirement like the other two–that a full two-thirds of funding for schools would be paid out of the state’s general fund, also to keep property taxes low.
District administrators and school boards hate the revenue caps; teachers hate the QEO; the legislature (when Republican-flavored, anyway) hates the 2/3 promise. And I’d bet 98% or more of the rest of the state probably couldn’t even tell you what any of the three things are.

EdTrust:

School finance policy choices at the federal, state, and district levels systematically stack the deck against students who need the most support from their schools, according to a report released today by the Education Trust.
The report, Funding Gaps 2006, builds on the Education Trust’s annual studies of funding gaps among school districts within states. For the first time the report includes data and analysis on:

• How federal Title I funds widen rather than narrow the education funding gaps that separate wealthy states from poor states; and,
• How funding choices at the school district level provide enhanced funding to schools serving higher concentrations of affluent students and white students at the expense of schools that serve low-income students and students of color.

Wisconsin’s Title 1 allocation per “poor child” is $1,577.00 [PDF Report]. One interesting piece of data: Wisconsin school district receipts from federal sources are 6.1% of total revenues. The state average is 8.9%. (Minnesota is 6% while Illinois is 8.6% and Iowa is 8.3%). The State of Wisconsin provides, on average 52.2% of district revenues (above the federal average of 47.1%). Local tax receipts are, on average 41.7% of district revenues (national average is 43.9%).

Larry Sandler & Sarah Carr:

Milwaukee taxpayers accidentally got a $9.1 million tax break – and city and Milwaukee Public Schools officials now have a $9.1 million headache.
Because of a paperwork snafu between MPS and City Hall, the property tax bills mailed this month inadvertently left out a tax increase that the School Board approved in October.
Now fingers are being pointed, the schools are demanding that the city come up with the money, and city officials are huddling in high-level, closed-door meetings to figure out what went wrong and how it can be fixed.
City officials aren’t saying what options are under study or whether they might include a special tax assessment or borrowing money to be paid back in future years.

Jason Stein:

To avoid arbitration, the QEO mandates that districts maintain the same increasingly costly benefits for teachers, Leistikow said.
“Districts are put in a terrible box,” Leistikow said. “Repealing the QEO will give school districts more flexibility in managing their benefits cost.”
The WEAC union, a staunch and powerful Doyle supporter, would like to see both the QEO and revenue caps eliminated, President Stan Johnson said. “It’s got to be part of a total package,” he said.
Doyle, however, favors keeping the revenue limits to hold down property taxes, Leistikow said.
Odden said repealing the QEO but leaving the revenue caps in place would leave school districts in a difficult position.
“Unless there’s a major change in the school funding formula, I wouldn’t predict that the QEO would be eliminated,” Odden said.
If it happened, the effect would probably be higher salary and wage costs at the expense of other programming and items in school budgets, including possibly job cuts, Odden said.

There will be no shortage of challenges dealing with revenue cap limits to growth in the Madison School District’s $332M+ budget during the upcoming 2007/2008 process, including the recently disclosed 7 year structural deficit.

J.H. Snider:

The signature feature of the SEC’s newest rules, effective Dec. 15, is that companies must add up all compensation in a single figure, which facilitates easy comparisons across time and companies. To derive a total-compensation number, the SEC made difficult and controversial assumptions about the present value of stock options, deferred compensation, and other uncertain future income streams. But the effort was widely defended because the health of financial markets depends on such transparency.
Similarly, the efficient operation of public school systems requires that the public understand how its money is being spent. Surprisingly, however, public school systems have far lower standards of transparency for executive compensation than public companies’.