Your Take: Beebe offers testimony to 2021-23 state budget committee for increased school funding

Editor’s note: The full narrative from the above video is here: 

My name is Tom Beebe and I live … in Fort Atkinson. I am a public school graduate, parent and grandparent, an ex-newspaper owner and editor, a former employee of the Department of Public Instruction, and a one-time school board member. I’m also the former executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools.

As I prepared my testimony for today to support changes and increases in the public education budget I started as I always have. I began taking notes on the history. I lined up the data and the facts and the studies. I found the recommendations of the numerous legislative task forces on public school funding.

Then I had a flash: I’ve done this before. I did it 20 years ago. I did it 15 years ago. I even did it 10 and five years ago.

Wisconsin’s public school-funding tragedy is nothing new. More frustrating is that very little—at least very little positive—has ever been done about it.

Here’s what we know:

• First, Wisconsin’s school-funding system is broken. It doesn’t work for public school children or property taxpayers. As the needs of children—educational, emotional and physical—have changed, the funding apparatus hasn’t changed with those needs. For example, the state reimbursement to local school districts for meeting the needs of students with special education needs has actually decreased as a percent of cost. Also, revenue caps have limited the ability of local school boards to fund local needs. And, the changes that have been made only resulted in a more complicated system that is wobbly, out-of-balance and impervious to any more tweaking.
• Second, resources to educate our public school children in the 21^st century have fallen far short of need, and, as a result, local property taxes have increased as more and more communities are forced into referendums just to keep up. Better learning options and more services are beyond most district’s wildest dreams. Again, let’s use special education as an example. At the very time we should be doing more, legislators and governors have done less. Not that long ago, the costs of special education programs and services were reimbursed at 70 percent. Since then, the number of students and the severity of their needs has grown substantially, but the reimbursement rate has actually dropped to as low as 26 percent. That’s pathetic. If referendums fail, the needs of children go unmet. Desperately needed resources are limited by revenue caps, reduced by political power games, and siphoned off to private schools in the voucher and independent charter school funding schemes.

Rather than hold sham public hearings with the cynical promise of doing something meaningful for the state’s 800,000-plus public school children, their schools, and their communities I urge you to just check the reports of past task forces, use some common-sense, and do the right thing.

Those reports will be easy to find ….. they’re still on the shelf gathering dust where previous Legislatures left them. 

Wisconsin deserves better than this.

Just do your jobs.