Governor, legislature should fix school funding.

I read with interest the article about how the Menomonee Falls school district is slated to lose another nice chunk of money from the state of Wisconsin.  Interestingly enough, the very next article that appears when you “google” the district is an article about the record number of students that are taking Advance Placement (AP) classes in the Falls school district.  Clearly this doesn’t make any sense.  Cut the funding where the money is producing results?  I guess its par of the course in progressive Wisconsin.  Hold the phone on that progressive talk.  We have a Republican Governor, a Republican Senate and a Republican legislature.  What in the world is going on?

The State of Wisconsin this budget, has added roughly (the last I heard) $160 million dollars to the public education system in Wisconsin yet Menomonee Falls gets cut again.  If the cuts were about increasing property values and declining enrollment the mill rate would not be going up.  So what IS going on?  Where is this money going and where is our representation on the matter?  Every taxpayer in Menomonee Falls should be calling their legislator and the Governor for that matter and asking where the extra money is going? 

The problem is not school choice, I can guarantee that.  I recently sent a letter to the editor of the West Bend Daily News which read in part. 

“The amount of money school districts have saved because of the school choice program is not a matter of opinion.  In June of 2008, State Rep. Don Pridemore asked the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau (LFB) to run the numbers.  The report is available for public inspection.  In 2007, if the choice program was to be discontinued and all the choice students went back to MPS, school districts around the state would lose a significant amount of funding.  Hartford Union High School would lose $563,911 (every year)!  Slinger would lose $770,008 in funding and West Bend would have lost $1,952,747 in 2007 alone!  Since there are significantly more choice students now than there were in 2007, the affects of discontinuing the program on area funding would be enormous! “

The numbers for the Menomonee Falls school district were $1,619,942.  In other words in 2007 if there were no school choice program, the Falls school district would have received over 1.6 million dollars LESS than they did!  Even if those numbers would have not changed over the years (the numbers in fact went up) the district would have lost well over 9 million dollars since and that does not include this year.  However our area school administrators spent a great deal of time decrying the expanding school choice provisions in the budget while we continue to lose more and more money.  That was misguided effort at best and should not be tolerated.  It is time for our school officials to put down the old WEAC talking points and find out why our funding is going south.

Having that said, it is up to you as a taxpayer to demand that this problem gets fixed ASAP.  THIS year not next year, not two years down the road, NOW.  The Menomonee Falls area has some of the best representation in the state (in this Conservative’s opinion anyway).  From our Governor to Senator Darling, Rep. Knodl and Rep. Pridemore we should have no problem getting our message heard. Pick up the phone and make the call –

Governor Walker – (608) 266 – 1212

Senator Darling – (608) 266-5830

Rep. Knodl – (608) 266 – 3796

Rep. Pridemore – (608) 267 - 2367