February, 2007

Our lives are defined by seasons. We are now in basketball season and we just finished the holiday season. Of course many look forward to hunting season and all children look forward to the summer season. However, for superintendents and Boards of Education across Wisconsin, their whole lives seem to be consumed by budget season.

Budget season is not as much fun as the other seasons. We approach budget season with anxiety because each new budget season means that we will again reduce the services that our students need. Under the current revenue cap law, yearly service reductions are a fact of life for most school districts in Wisconsin. The demands for students to gain more knowledge and skills increase every year while resources to meet their needs decrease every year.

Budget season creates intense concern among staff and parents and makes adversaries among friends. Priorities must be set, and when all of the input has been gathered and discussion completed, it is the responsibility of the elected Board of Education to make those final priority decisions.

The anguish of that decision-making process is heightened by the fact that all of the parents and community members who support maintaining one of the services being reduced are right. For their child or their neighborhood the cut is devastating. Their needs are real and their lives will be diminished by the reduction. We serve fewer children well every time we finish budget season.

Our state legislators continually remind us that we do not have to make the reductions. We can always go to the people in a referendum and make our case for more property tax. The school districts of Wisconsin have years of experience with asking the public for revenue cap relief through referenda. However, even the successful results are devastating to a community.

We know that without exception these votes and the accompanying campaign split communities. There are always good reasons to oppose a tax increase just as there are good reasons to support the education of children. The very nature of the request pits children against elderly citizens on fixed incomes, and many citizens against the schools. Support and trust erode and after each referendum we are all less for the experience.

There is no question that our school systems should be operated efficiently. In the early years of the revenue cap, all Wisconsin school districts had to examine very carefully what was necessary to efficiently operate in ways that allowed us to fulfill our legal and fiduciary responsibilities and yet make as many resources available for our children as possible. We are long past the point of gaining more efficiency. Prioritization of services has become making sure that we provide the best education possible for the most children, not the best education possible for all children.

We as citizens of Wisconsin have to decide how important it is to meet the academic standards enacted by our legislature. If it is important to our future as a state then we have to provide the resources to make that possible. We know what those resources are and how they need to be used. If we can't afford to meet the standards we currently espouse for all of our students, then we need to say so and decide what standards we will meet.

Let's create a state that celebrates all those other seasons and bids farewell to the anxiety of budget season.