How many adults do we need to run Wisconsin’s public schools?
A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found that since 2010, there has been a 9% drop in the number of students attending public schools in Wisconsin.
In the same time period, there was a 7% increase in the number of staff employed in public schools.
Among those employees, there was much larger growth among classroom support and administrative staff. The number of paraprofessionals, program aides, and other classroom-based employees increased by 30.7%, the Wisconsin Policy Forum found.
Despite an ongoing workforce shortage, that leaves Wisconsin school's with an awkward reality: They may actually be overstaffed in some cases.
Sara Shaw is the the deputy research director for the Wisconsin Policy Forum and co-authored the report with researcher Don Cramer.
Shaw spoke with WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal about the findings and what they mean for the future of Wisconsin schools.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Katherine Kokal: As enrollment declines, your research found that schools in our state are now potentially overstaffed. What does that mean?
Sara Shaw: At its core, what we found is that there was a 9% drop in the number of students, and at the same time there was a 7% increase in the number of staff. So that point around overstaffing comes up when you say, "Well, we're losing that many students, how could we be gaining staff?"
Part of what we heard from administrators when we asked them about this disconnect was that student needs have been rising. So those are academic needs where we still have not fully recovered from the pandemic, those are socio-emotional needs. [Student] risk behaviors, as measured on statewide surveys, have been rising. Some of it is related to increases in the number and share of students with special needs or English learners. The way that districts have responded to those increasing needs has been by hiring more staff or by looking for more staff.
District leaders are saying they need [more staff] to be able to serve student needs, and yet we've got this decline in students, which means on the budgetary side of things — this is where we really raise a flag. There's a lot of cost pressures put on budgets by all of these staff. And as the number of kids goes down, revenue coming into districts is not going to be able to sustain that many staff in the long term.
What are schools to do as enrollment goes down but students' needs increase?
Any time we're thinking about budgets, that's a revenue question and it's an expenditure question. So there might be some wiggle room on the revenue side if districts are turning toward voter referenda, if anything changes in the next state budget cycle or before then to offer more revenue to districts. We do know, however, on that revenue side, that the revenue tied to students is probably going to continue decreasing because of this decline in enrollment.
The expenditure side is where districts have some more control. So we might look at things like closing schools, consolidating schools, trying to figure out how to rearrange staffing in a way that allows you to do more with less. That's easier said than done.
You can access the full report on the Wisconsin Policy Forum website.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
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