72 school districts have referendum questions on the ballot next week; less than two years after a record 148 did so in 2024. As Dan O’Donnell writes, taxpayers must finally put their foot down.
Six dozen Wisconsin school districts are heading to the ballot next week to ask voters to approve more than $1 billion in new property tax hikes with 72 new referendums. Just two years ago, in 2024, districts set a staggering record with 148 operating referendums alone; the most in state history.
This simply isn’t sustainable. And it certainly isn’t necessary.
Gov. Tony Evers used his partial veto pen in 2023 to dramatically expand school funding authority, extending an annual $325 per-pupil increase in revenue limits not for two years, but for 400—until 2425. The move, upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court last year, helped push state K-12 spending to all-time highs.
Not surprisingly, property taxes saw their biggest one-year jump in three decades.
That’s hardly relevant to school districts, though. They’re demanding more each year in referendum questions despite the fact that per-pupil spending has more than doubled since 2000, even as raw numbers show record totals flowing into public education.
Yet here we are again: districts lining up at the referendum trough, telling taxpayers they still need more despite fewer kids in the classrooms.
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce lays out the uncomfortable truth. Since 2000, public school enrollment has dropped by 65,000 students. The number of teachers has actually declined by 2,700. But non-instructional staff? That ballooned by more than 8,000 positions, with administrators alone up nearly 700. For every eight students lost, districts added one non-teaching employee. For every teacher cut, they hired three bureaucrats.
Funding crisis? Hardly. This is a priorities crisis.
Revenue limits were meant to force fiscal discipline after decades of unchecked growth. Evers’ 400-year veto may have loosened those limits, but it didn’t magically make declining enrollment disappear or control administrative bloat. Districts keep coming back to voters because they refuse to match their spending with the reality of consistently declining student enrollment.
Taxpayers aren’t bottomless pits. Property taxes already burden Wisconsin families heavily, especially in rural areas watching their schools shrink. Constant referendums shift responsibility away from school boards and administrators who should be streamlining bureaucracy, improving efficiency, and focusing resources on actual classroom instruction rather than growing the central office.
Next week, Wisconsin must say “enough is enough” and refuse to hand their school districts ever more money for bureaucrats. Next week, voters must force their districts to break the referendum addiction.
