Joy Powers: This is Swing State of the Union - a podcast all about Wisconsin and why it’s so important to U.S. politics. I'm Joy Powers.
Sam Woods: And I'm Sam Woods — thank you so much for joining us. Nov. 3 is election day in Wisconsin, and in the coming weeks people in the state will hear a lot about property taxes, school funding referenda and what’s known as the “400-year veto.”
And it’s all related to one thing: how we fund public schools.
Powers: Wisconsin has a long history of trailblazing new ideas in education. The state is home to the nation’s first kindergarten. Since the state’s founding, its constitution mandated the funding of free public education. And it was the first state to create a voucher program for private schools, a system copied by many states today.
Woods: But increasingly, public schools in Wisconsin are asking voters for more money, and the state’s complicated funding formula is leaving many property taxpayers with the bill. Some school districts are so financially strapped, they’re closing buildings and cutting staff, and some are dissolving altogether.
So in this episode of Swing State of the Union, we’re looking at how we fund public schools, the financial realities they are facing, and why the state government has forced voters to choose between well-funded schools and lower property taxes.
The situation has gotten so bad that some teachers are suing the state over education funding. We start by heading to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to meet one of them.
One Green Bay special education teacher's story
Powers: It’s the first day of school at Green Bay Southwest High School. Students file into the gym for an all-school assembly, basking in the amber glow of the school’s basketball court.
The freshmen are new to this, and their school spirit leaves much to be desired. But the seniors know the drill.
The school has about 1,000 students, including around 250 seniors. A handful of them will be working closely with one person.
Shane McDonough: Hi, I'm Shane McDonough. I am employed by the Green Bay Area Public School District as a special education teacher.
Woods: A couple of decades ago, Shane didn’t think he’d be a teacher. He studied voice performance in school and was living life on the stage.
McDonough: And I lived out of a suitcase for a majority of my 20s. You know, I got a chance to be around some really talented, creative people. And yeah, it was awesome. I really enjoyed my time as an actor and a singer and a performer.
Woods: Shane grew up outside of Green Bay. But his journey back home was anything but linear — like when he met his future wife while working as a bartender.
McDonough: So I trained her how to pour a pint. And we were friends first. And we fell madly in love and ended up getting married and moving up to New York City.
Woods: But everything changed when his first-born son was diagnosed with a severe developmental delay at an early age.
McDonough: I'll never forget there was a doctor down there who sat us down and said, “Be prepared; it's likely your son will only have 16 to 20 words.” That he'll probably never say, “I love you.” He's not gonna show affection.
And I got really upset in that moment. And I basically got up, and I told the doctor that they didn't know what they're talking about. They weren't gonna limit my child or his trajectory in life.
Woods: Shane and his family moved back to Wisconsin, and he enrolled in Cardinal Stritch University to get a master's in special education. By the end of the program, Shane knew what he was called to do.
McDonough: For me, the reason I became special education teacher was initially to help my son. But I realized I had a chance to to make a difference in the lives of others.
Powers: 13 years later, Shane is heeding that call. He works one-on-one with students with disabilities who are close to graduating.
McDonough: So I'm delivering individualized instruction, a lot of times with accommodations and modifications to the existing assignments that every student is given. They're taking the same exams as any other student would take to earn the credits towards their high school diploma. But I'm modifying curriculum all the time, based upon the needs of the student.
Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), explained
Powers: The modifications are spelled out in what’s called an Individualized Education Program, or IEP. It’s a legal document that details what the student’s strengths and needs are, the support the school will give them and what their progress looks like over time.
These documents are written by a team of people that include special education teachers like Shane, other teachers, the student’s parent or guardian and sometimes the student as well.
McDonough: Example: for my son, who's on the spectrum, he's given accommodations and supports that allow him to access his education with equity, right? So he gets extended time on tests and assessments. He gets frequent breaks if he's feeling anxious or overwhelmed or nervous, where he can stand up and pace in the back of the classroom if necessary. He gets directions read aloud if needed.
Powers: Public schools are required by federal law to provide these accommodations. They’re not a choice, but a legal mandate that Green Bay Southwest High School, and all public schools, must provide each student. And an IEP is the binding contract meant to make sure that happens.
Financial challenges at Green Bay public schools
Woods: Schools have to pay for special education teachers, aides, technology and more to meet students’ needs. And the state of Wisconsin reimburses less than 40% of the costs school districts incur to meet this legal requirement. To pay for it, the Green Bay Area School District has had to make some drastic choices.
McDonough: You know, over the last decade in our district, we've had to move $35 million from the general fund to fund special education, meaning positions, right? My colleagues who teach special education are only still employed because we're pulling over $3 million a year, currently, to maintain that promise of educating all children.
Woods: And that’s just one of many financial challenges for districts like Green Bay.
There’s also the costs associated with maintaining buildings that are 60 years old or older, the cost of transporting kids to and from school, salaries for teachers and everyday costs to keep the lights on.
McDonough: How much have your utility bills gone up in the last five years? So think about what it costs a school to keep lights on, to heat a building, to cool a building. The state revenue hasn't kept track with any of that.
School districts, teachers unions sue Wisconsin State Legislature
Woods: Public school districts across the state are sounding the alarm. Many have resorted to referenda, asking voters to raise property taxes to help schools make ends meet. Five school districts and several teachers’ unions have sued the state legislature, arguing that the state’s school funding formula violates Wisconsin’s constitution.
Powers: And among the 19 plaintiffs in that case are the Green Bay school district, the Green Bay teachers’ union and Shane McDonough himself.
McDonough: The reason I signed to be a named plaintiff in this litigation was because we have a funding mechanism that is fundamentally broken. It's fundamentally broken in our state.
Powers: But this lawsuit is just one of many battles over how public schools are funded in Wisconsin. And that funding debate is on the minds of many voters ahead of the November election.
Wisconsin school funding & revenue limits, explained
Katherine Kokal: Imagine that school funding were a pie.
Woods: That’s Katherine Kokal. She’s our colleague, who covers education for WUWM, Milwaukee’s NPR.
Kokal: So if school funding in Wisconsin were a pie, it would be sliced in about four uneven ways. About 45% of that pie comes from state aid, which is money collected by state taxes and then redistributed to school districts across the state. About 7% of the pie comes federal aid, and the rest of it comes from property taxes and local revenue.
Woods: To some extent, individual school districts can decide how much they collect in property taxes from their community. But that too is limited by the state of Wisconsin.
Kokal: That funding formula has what's called a “revenue limit.” So, in any given year, that revenue limit can only go up by so much. And the amount of money that goes into that formula is also decided at the state level by legislators.
Woods: Essentially, the revenue limit restricts the size of a district’s funding pie. Revenue limits were put into effect more than 30 years ago. The idea was that they would control property taxes.
Kokal: In 1993, these revenue limits came into the state funding formula, and it locked high-spending districts at a higher level of funding and lower-spend districts at a lower level of funding. This was basically meant to be a check on property taxes, but a lot of school districts think that this created an unfair playing field, and they say that the state has not increased those revenue limits to keep up with rising costs. And that is true.
Woods: For about 15 years, the state raised revenue limits alongside the rate of inflation. Schools were still locked into different spending amounts, but it helped ensure that school funding kept pace with costs.
In 2008, Wisconsin Legislature “decouples” revenue limits from inflation rate
Powers: But then, the Great Recession hit.
Kokal: In 2008, in response to the recession, the legislature did what we call “decoupling." And they decoupled the amount that that revenue limit can be raised from the rate of inflation.
And as a result of that, school districts will say, “Hey look, our costs have gone up a ton since 2008, obviously. But the amount that our revenue limit can be raised has not followed.” And that gap, most education advocates say, is about $3,500 per student. So that is the rate at which the revenue limit has not kept pace with inflation since the recession.
Powers: So, if school funding were a pie, the size of that pie is the revenue limit — or how much a school is allowed to raise per student in its district. About half of the ingredients used to make the pie come from state taxes, with a little bit of federal aid mixed in. The other half comes from local funding, like property taxes — which districts can choose to levy to fill up the rest of the pie.
After the state decoupled revenue limits from inflation, it effectively made the pie smaller over time.
Classroom impacts
Powers: So, as schools try to stretch their dollars, what does that look like in the classroom?
Woods: The biggest cost is staff. Schools have to pay for general education teachers and special education teachers, like Shane McDonough.
There’s pressure to keep pay competitive. Nearly half of Wisconsin’s teachers leave the profession within eight years.
Transportation and fuel costs are a concern as well, especially for rural districts that are often bussing in kids from all corners of a county.
And for districts with older buildings, facility maintenance is increasingly a concern. This can include things like HVAC repair and replacement, recovery from natural disasters like floods or tornadoes, but also more dire improvements like lead remediation, asbestos removal or other things that weren’t considered when the building was built decades ago.
Kokal: For example, I just did a story. We had a school fire here in Milwaukee, and the building was built in 1917. It didn't have a modern sprinkler system, and that was a huge concern for parents. No one was injured or killed in that fire, but they were like, “Well, why doesn't our school have a sprinkler system?” And I ended up speaking with an EdWeek reporter who found that one in five superintendents in this country can say that none of their schools have sprinkler systems, because school buildings weren't required to have sprinklers until the ‘70s.
COVID-era funds offer some relief
Powers: As Kokal alludes to, the rising cost of maintaining old buildings is a nationwide concern, not unique to Wisconsin.
In part to address this, the federal government distributed about $190 billion dollars to districts nationwide. It was part of its COVID relief package, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER — earmarked money for school districts to spend annually until 2024.
Kokal: And school districts use that for a lot of things, but it was really a popular time to use that money to improve facilities and to do that kind of deferred maintenance that school districts had left on the shelf for a long time. I also need to mention that a lot of schools used that money to hire new staff: school psychologists, social workers, new program leads, literacy experts. So there was certainly a human element of that money, but a lot of the ESSER funding also went to doing long-deferred maintenance in schools in this country.
Powers: This was a big, but temporary, infusion of cash. While schools used the money for patching up buildings and hiring staff temporarily, they’re now facing more structural challenges that have come back since that money expired.
Wisconsin’s school voucher program, explained
Some schools are also facing competition: from private schools that get public funding.
Wisconsin is the birthplace of the private school voucher program, which allows parents up to a certain income level to get public funding to pay tuition at a private school.
While this program has certainly contributed to declines in public school enrollment, it’s not the only reason why public schools have lower enrollment than previous decades.
Declining enrollment in Wisconsin public schools
Kokal: In the time since we have established a voucher program, our state has also dealt with a declining birth rate. And so, at the same time that this is happening, our public schools have lost 9% of all of the students. And that is not because all of those students went to voucher programs and have gone to private schools. We just have fewer students who are moving through their program.
At the same time, though, our private school enrollment has not exploded in the last 10 years. We are now at about 126,000 students. That did peak in 2023. But in general, our private schools in Wisconsin have only gained 2,000 kids since 2010.
Woods: All these factors are leading to painful decisions for school districts and families.
Kokal: With the declining enrollment rate and aging buildings, those two things are combining to make the next 20 years very, very critical for school district leaders. And they talk about this all the time to me in my reporting, that we are going to seriously need to make some decisions about which schools to close, because all of the birth rates are trending downward. And so we're not only going to have older schools, we're going to have a lot of empty schools moving forward.
Woods: With public schools across Wisconsin facing existential threats, from aging buildings to declining enrollment.
Powers: And a federal mandate to educate students with disabilities without full reimbursement from the state.
Woods: And a revenue limit that hasn’t kept pace with inflation for almost two decades — many school districts are getting desperate.
Wisconsin school funding referenda in 2026
Powers: And that desperation may be on your ballot this November.
In the last election in April, 73 Wisconsin school districts put referenda on their ballots — a majority of which asked voters to raise their property taxes and allow the districts to exceed their revenue limits.
Meaning, their school funding pie would get bigger than state limits allow. All together, these referenda totaled about $1 billion dollars.
Dozens more referenda will be on local ballots in November, including in Green Bay.
Woods: After a short break, we’ll examine the politics of school funding referenda, and why this election may show us what voters value more: funding schools or keeping property taxes down.
Financial challenges at Dodgeville public schools
Powers: Ryan Bohnsack is the superintendent for the Dodgeville School District in SW Wisconsin. Over the last two decades, he’s risen the ranks from the gridiron to the board room.
Ryan Bohnsack: Been in this district since 2002 as a volunteer football coach, and then worked my way up through teaching mathematics, all the way through as assistant principal, high school principal, and then now that this is going into my third year as a superintendent
Powers: Bohnsack says those three years have not been easy — for many reasons.
First, enrollment. The entire district serves around 1,000 students — about the same amount that Shane McDounough’s single high school serves in Green Bay.
Bohnack: Over the past four years, I want to say our enrollment trends have been declining to the point where we've lost about a hundred students, a little over that, over that course of time. Which, as you're aware, in school funding, when you're losing students to declining enrollment, as go the funds that go with that.
Woods: Then there’s the federal requirements around special education. Like Green Bay, Dodgeville is borrowing from its general fund to pay what the state won’t reimburse.
Bohnsack: Every year, we're having to do a transfer from our general fund to pick up the costs, and that's right around $1.5 million dollars every year. Well, that makes up a good chunk of our difference, of being able to educate every child and ensure we're providing the education they deserve.
Woods: Bohnsack says the schools in his district are in good condition, thanks to money from a referendum about a decade ago. And local businesses have stepped up to help with utility costs. For example, a farm equipment supplier helped with solar panels.
Bohnsack: Hennessy Implement in town donated some solar panels, so that we could put some solar panels on our maintenance shed to reduce the overhead costs.
Woods: Even still, Bohnsack says the district will have to freeze staff salaries this year and will need to borrow money.
Bohnsack: Yeah, we're still going to have to seek loans to operate. And we'll still have to pay interest on those loans. Not the best business model. However, as we're looking at things, it's better than nothing, and we have to have quality education for our students.
Woods: The Dodgeville School District is in swing districts for both the State Assembly and State Senate. Voters there will help determine the partisan makeup of the next Wisconsin state legislature.
Powers: But Dodgeville area residents will have an additional, high-stakes item on their ballot. The School Board is asking voters to approve an operating referendum for about $2 million dollars. This means that voters will choose whether or not to raise their taxes to help fund local schools for three years.
Dodgeville has tried this before. Since November 2024, its asked voters to approve an operating referendum three times — and it’s failed every time.
But Bohnsack doesn’t see another option.
Bohnsack: If we don't figure something out in the next couple of years, we have to start talking about dissolution, or closing a school, or making cuts so significant that I don't know that I'd want to advertise to send kids to the district, because the programs are just not going to be there.
Powers: Even still, he understands that he may be asking for something voters just can’t give.
Bohnsack: We're an aging community, so we have fixed incomes. Sure, your property value goes up, but your paycheck didn't change. And that's a terrible spot to be in, because I think so many of them want to give to the school, but they also have to make a means to their ends here on a month to month. And unfortunately, there's just not enough to go around. And so it is a struggle. It's a real struggle for communities, and that's why I think it's so dire that the state helps figure out something that we can do differently.
The politics of school funding referenda
Woods: Remember our school funding pie. The state government sets a revenue limit, which is the maximum amount school districts can receive per student — the maximum size of the pie.
The pie’s ingredients include a mix of about one-half state aid and federal aid, and one-half local revenue, like property taxes.
But a referendum is how a school district can make their pie even bigger than the state allows — if it can convince voters to raise their own taxes. Sara Shaw is the deputy research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum, focused on education research. She explains that this type of referenda, to increase a district’s funding pie, has become more common.
Sara Shaw: There are two major types of referenda. You could do a capital referenda, in which a district is asking to be able to issue debt to do something related to construction. So that could be renovation. That could be a new building. But it's something related to the facilities. That's one category. The other category are your operating referenda, which is for the operations of the district. And those could be anything from wanting to invest in new programs, new things that we're offering, or being able to maintain what we currently have.
And part of what we see happening is, number one, a shift toward more operational referenda. So it used to be that on any given ballot, if 60% of the referenda were operating, we'd say, “Oh, that's a lot of operating referenda.” And this past April, we had 84% were operating referenda. In November, it's going to be 79%. And so, historically, those are very high percentages of districts saying, “What we're looking for is not money to build; what we are looking for is money to operate.”
Woods: Many of the districts going to operating referenda say it’s because they’re not getting enough money through the state’s funding formula. And it’s become an increasingly common tool for districts to balance their budgets.
Powers: This November, 61 school districts across the state are asking voters to approve operational referenda. Like Dodgeville, many are returning after previous referenda failed.
Shaw: We did an analysis of districts that had a referendum fail and then went and tried again. And we did find that the majority of those retries succeeded, eventually. But it could take multiple times of going back. And the number of retries has been increasing. So that suggests to us that districts are feeling increasingly desperate here — that if they lose one time, it's not just a, “Okay, we've got to just adjust internally and move on.” They're coming back and saying, “No, we can't adjust very easily anymore, not without compromising quality of education. And so we're coming back to you and asking again,” whether it's for less money or a non-recurring — rather than recurring — referendum, or however they think they can get it passed the second, third or fourth time.
Voters' referenda fatigue
Powers: And there is evidence that voters are starting to tire of referenda. In 2018, about 90% of referenda passed. Last April, only about 60% passed.
Shaw: What we do know is that this apparent decline in passage rates is corresponding with polling coming out from the Marquette University Law School, where they ask whether voters favor increasing spending on public schools or reducing property taxes. And in February of 2026, only 40% said that they favored increasing spending on public schools, which is the lowest percentage since the question was first asked in 2013. So there does seem to be voter fatigue here, potentially, that is directly tied to concerns around rising property taxes.
Powers: Last April’s referenda also came on the heels of a big property tax spike, which probably didn’t help.
Shaw: These April ballots and the April election happened right after December 2025 property tax bills showed a pretty big jump in K-12 levies across many communities. That makes some intuitive sense to me, that voters who are also property taxpayers in some form or fashion in many cases are putting those two next to each other.
Powers: But why did property tax bills jump so suddenly? Well, you probably have heard of the answer.
Gov. Evers’ 400-year Veto, explained
Powers: In 2023, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a $325-dollar-per-pupil increase to school district revenue limits, increasing the size of their potential pie. This increase was set to expire in 2025, just two years later.
Woods: But Democratic Governor Tony Evers used his partial veto power to extend that increase through the year 2425. It’s become known as the “400 year veto.” Unless other legislation is enacted, this means that a district’s school funding pie will increase annually for four centuries. Evers said schools need this kind of reliable increase in funding to deal with rising costs. His education funding proposals have been consistently blocked by Republicans.
JR Ross, editor at Wispolitics, explains that while the potential school funding pie got bigger, the fillings have to come from local taxpayers. That’s becuase the state did not increase funding for schools at the same level as the revenue limit increase.
JR Ross: They didn't put new money into that formula. So the capital you spend per student went up, but no new state aid went in. That meant each school district could raise their cap or their revenue by that much money per kid, all through property taxes. That's why you had a big jump in your bill on December.
Wisconsin’s budget surplus school funding deal, explained
Woods: With over 70 school districts going to referenda this spring, some state leaders attempted to take on a more direct role in school funding. They wanted to use some of Wisconsin’s $3 billion budget surplus. Shaw explains what was in this proposal.
Shaw: It had two major elements to it. The first was going to be a major increase in general state aid. Now, it doesn't touch the revenue limit. So if we remember, the size of the pie stays the same, but what it would have done is injected a much more state aid into that pie, so that less of a burden would fall on property taxpayers. While it's labeled as dollars for schools, what it amounts to is a reduction in property taxes. So that was one major element.
And then the other major element is that it would've increased the amount of funding the state would send to school districts to reimburse them for the additional costs they incur from students with disabilities, to whom they provide special education services. So there was also additional money in there for school districts. That special education reimbursement does not count toward the revenue limit. It is aside, next to the pie, as additional money they could get that wouldn't have affected this split between property taxes or state aid.
The deal falls apart
Powers: The proposal was negotiated between Democratic Governor Evers and Republican legislative leaders Robin Vos and Devin Lemaheiu. The deal fell apart, partly because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and partly because some legislators balked at its $1.8 billion price tag.
Tiffany vs. Crowley on school funding
Powers: With election day approaching, we’re back to square one. Taxpayers are picking up the bill to better fund schools, while state funding lags.
So what do the candidates in Wisconsin stand for, and who has the power to solve this issue?
Wisconsin’s current governor, Democrat Tony Evers, the one behind the 400-year veto, isn’t running for reelection.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany has seized on this jump in property taxes to position himself as a tax-cutter. He’s campaigned on “ending the 400 year property tax hike”, as he told the right-wing media network Real America’s Voice.
Tom Tiffany: Property tax. We have a 400-year property tax increase that was put in place by this administration. So the cost of living continues to go up as a result of governmental action. We're now in the bottom 10 states to start a new business. We need to get control of those costs that a governor can deal with. And that's the commitment that I make to the voters of the state of Wisconsin: we're gonna end the 400 year property tax increase.
Woods: To do this, Tiffany would need to either decrease the size of the funding pie or add more state aid into it, to offset increases to property taxes. On his campaign website, he says he supports raising teacher salaries and “supports additional school funding, but it must come with accountability for results.”
To raise teacher salaries and provide additional school funding without raising property taxes, he would need to add more state money to the revenue pie. It is unclear from his website what policies Tiffany supports to hold schools accountable.
Powers: Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley wants to reduce schools’ reliance on referenda by “investing in reliable K-12 funding year after year.” He also supports the state reimbursing districts at a higher level than it currently does for special education costs.
When asked during a Democratic gubernatorial debate whether he would have signed the $1.8 billion deal negotiated by Evers and Republican leadership, Crowley said yes. Remember: that deal provided more state aid to help fill the revenue limit pie, plus more special education funding.
David Crowley: I love the fact that we were going to give relief to our schools and property tax relief. And there were other things in this bill that I didn't like. At the end of the day, we know that there are many Wisconsin families who are desperate. We should be focusing on how we lift them up and not playing politics. And so I would have signed that bill, because that means it would have passed with bipartisanship.
Powers: So both gubernatorial candidates seem to support increasing state aid to schools in order to the bring down property taxes. But it’s not up to the governor alone. It’s a negotiation with the state legislature.
As Katherine Kokal, education reporter at WUWM, explains, this would require the state legislature to spend money in a way they haven’t consistently done for over a decade.
Kokal: The state legislature basically can choose whether to add more state aid to that funding formula, and they haven't. And I think the fact that this legislature has chosen not to expand general state aid for the last several budget cycles is indicative of a kind of shifting of responsibility. And the way that people describe that to me is that they are pushing this decision further and further down the food chain, to the point where individual voters are choosing whether to raise their individual property taxes to fund these referenda.
Shifting responsibilities
Powers: So the legislature and the governor have power over this issue. But right now, much of the responsibility is falling to local voters.
Woods: Since revenue limits were decoupled from inflation in 2008, the state legislature has not made the pie big enough to keep up with rising costs. This has pushed elected school boards in districts like Green Bay and Dodgeville to ask voters to make the choices that state legislators have not made.
Shaw: Arguably, referenda were kind of a beautiful way of putting power with people, to say, “Okay, the state is going to decide revenue limits; the state is going to decide state aid; but we're including a back door here so that if a local community disagrees with us... Like, we're trying to make whatever best decisions we can make for the state, but if a community at the local level disagrees, they can go around us and say, ‘Well, here's what we wanna do.’”
That was the theory. And for some number of years, that theory may have been playing out okay. Increasingly, that policy mechanism doesn't seem to be working the way it was originally intended to anymore. And I say that by looking at just how many referenda are we talking about, just how many are related to operations and just how many are really to operations that are about maintaining existing services, rather than being able to go above and beyond. If we're talking about basic operations that a district feels it can no longer sustain with its existing revenue, that is a different question that invites a different policy answer.
Woods: The way Wisconsin funds education is decades in the making, and it involves a complicated formula of checks and balances to make sure school districts don’t overtax their constituents.
Powers: But almost two decades after revenue limits were decoupled from inflation and state aid flatlined, public school districts are struggling to find ways to meet their obligations to students with disabilities...
Woods: ...repair their aging buildings...
Powers: ...keep staff salaries competitive...
Woods: ...and deal with declining enrollment.
Powers: It’s gotten so dire that some school districts are suing the state, along with teachers like Shane McDonough in Green Bay.
McDonough: It's a slippery slope. Once you start taking responsibility away from Madison, specifically the Joint Finance Committee and our state legislature, and saying, “We're going to allow the local municipality to determine whether or not they want to fund what is a constitutional obligation: to provide an appropriate and fair education for all its citizens.”
Woods: State leaders haven’t made any bold changes to fix the state’s school funding system. So for now, school districts and state legislators are turning to individual voters to say, “Fix this for us.”
Powers: Voters seem to be saying, “We are exercising our power, sometimes to say yes and sometimes to say no, perhaps because this feels like it goes beyond what is our responsibility to fund.” And school districts have been lobbying, saying to the state, “We do not want to be putting this all on our communities. We believe we should be getting more from the state.” You also have legislator saying, “Well districts, you are in a declining enrollment situation. We need to see how you are adjusting to be able to account for new realities, before we just throw more money.” So it's this hot potato back and forth around that touches on a lot of different legitimate issues, but ultimately comes back to not only how we divvy up that pie, but how big is the pie to start with?
Next time on 'Swing State of the Union'
Woods: Next episode, we’ll explore the shifting legal landscape for immigrants in Wisconsin and throughout the nation.
Hasnah Hussin: I do intake. I meet with clients, and you can see the fear. You can see their body shivering. You can see their body reaction, verbal and nonverbal cues. You can see there speech, mumbling when [talking] about agencies that [are] coming for them.
Woods: Immigrants’ dissapearing pathways — next time on Swing State of the Union. I’m Sam Woods.
Powers: And I’m Joy Powers. Swing State of the Union is produced by WUWM, Milwaukee’s NPR — a part of the NPR Network. Please subscribe to the Swing State of the Union podcast on the NPR app, or wherever you like to listen.
