Our Schools, Our Community: Time for a New Plan
April 21, representatives from the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District joined other concerned parents, educators, business people, alumni, retirees, students, and school board members from around Wisconsin to ask their legislators to fix the state’s school-funding formula. Over 50 people took time off from their “regular lives” to share examples of how flaws in the current system hurt students and communities. We joined members of the School Finance Network to unveil a new plan that more adequately funds public education and better controls property taxes.
The School Finance Network is comprised of nine organizations that have worked for two years to find solutions and forward a new funding plan to state legislators for consideration. This plan attempts to fix the flaws in the present formula, while at the same time making public school funding more accountable, more effective, and more targeted. What is needed most is to make children and their education a state priority again
The current system has to be changed so that we can better serve all of our students, including those with disabilities and special needs, those in small rural school districts and those in both urban and rural districts with an increasingly high number of low-income students.
The School Finance Network plan is aimed at controlling local property taxes and reducing the local tax burden. Using this approach, most districts in the state would see a reduction in local tax money used to run schools.
School funding is not a partisan issue. It’s not conservative or progressive, right or left wing, Republican or Democrat. It is an issue about what is right for children and the future of our state. In school board meetings around Wisconsin, local parents have been warring with each other over whether to finance fine arts or foreign language, science labs or sports, alternative schools or gifted and talented, which schools to keep open at the cost of what programs.
These battles kept us from having a strong voice in Madison. No longer, though. We have come together and given the Legislature what it asked for: A school-funding plan that helps kids and protects taxpayers. Now, it’s up to them to do what is right.
Wisconsin public schools have been working under a convoluted, supposed temporary school-funding system which decided how much the school districts get based on however much they were spending in 1993. The system is complex, unfair, inadequate, and no longer works to ensure quality education for all children. It was simply a quick fix that no one has had the courage to change... yet.
The citizens of our community need to recognize the problems of the current system and help change things before it is too late. We can’t afford to lose the potential of bright young students simply by doing nothing or, worse yet, to allow the current funding system to cause more valuable programs to be cut. It is time for a new plan─the School Finance Network plan…that puts kids first.
Sincerely,
Kathy Zingsheim
12960 W. Ohio Ct.
New Berlin, WI 53151 (School District of West Allis-West Milwaukee)
262-789-1415
(The School Finance Network Plan is open for public view at www.sfnwisconsin.org)
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