Talking Back on Cutbacks; Opponents of Schools’ Budget Trims Try to Rally Legislators

By AMY HETZNER

Waukesha – About 500 parents, students and spectators packed a school auditorium Monday night, pleading for help from local legislators in dealing with a financial situation that some predicted would devastate the School District.

“If we can pay for a stadium for a bunch of overpaid baseball players, we can certainly pay for an education for all of our children,” Heyer Elementary School parent Cheryl Gimignani told the six legislators participating in the forum in North High School’s auditorium.

The event came just two days before the School Board is set to approve $3.4 million worth of program and service cuts to balance its 2007-’08 budget.

Administrators have recommended eliminating the equivalent of 62 full-time staff positions, which would raise class sizes, delay band and orchestra instruction and nearly eliminate elementary guidance, elementary library and gifted programs in the district.

They blame the school system’s financial woes on perennial discrepancies between what the state allows the district to raise under revenue caps and its actual expenses. A separate law, the qualified economic offer, virtually guarantees teachers annual compensation increases of 3.8% while revenue grows by about 2%.

The fear that those trims will become reality arose again and again Monday, as parents and students shared how they would be affected by the cutbacks.

“We are scared, scared about the future of our special-needs kids in the public school system,” parent Lisa Fusco said.

But the legislators offered little hope that much will change, at least in the near future, and said the school system would be better off looking for cost savings than expecting more money from Madison. Any change to the state funding system for schools likely would not benefit residents in Waukesha County, who already pay more in taxes than they receive back in aid from the state, they said.

“I do not want to change the formula,” said state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), “because if we tamper and change the formula, the school districts that I represent will lose, not gain.”

One solution each offered was a change in state law that would allow school districts to switch teachers’ health care coverage. State Rep. Bill Kramer (R-Waukesha) estimated that if the School District adopted the health plan offered to state employees it could save $6 million annually.

But Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson encouraged the crowd to find more permanent solutions.

“I think part of our jobs as citizens is to encourage our legislators to work with our governor, to work in a non-partisan way with their colleagues across the aisle and say, ‘This problem has reached a boiling point,’ ” said Nelson, a district middle school teacher who is on leave.

Alternatively, he told parents to get behind a referendum to provide temporary relief to the school system’s budget woes.

District voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum measure two years ago that district administrators say would have avoided the school system’s shortfalls.

Ruth Page Jones, president of parent group Project ABC, one of the sponsors of Monday’s event, characterized it as a “listening session.”

“This is the start of the dialogue,” she said.

Although they differed at times with their audience, the legislators said they appreciated their support of public education.

In a nod to the large crowd, state Sen. Ted Kanavas (R- Brookfield) rejected some claims he said he had heard recently comparing the fate of Waukesha schools to the Milwaukee Public Schools.

“Waukesha is nothing like MPS,” he said. “Good luck trying to get a crowd like this to come to any meeting in MPS.”

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