| At the heart of the present controversy over the proposed cuts to the 2007-2008 Madison Metropolitan School District budget that may result in school closures, school consolidations and increases in class sizes are the state imposed revenue caps that were instituted in the early 1990s as a property tax relief measure. While their initial intent to force school districts to become more efficient and reevaluate what they were doing and how they were doing it may have had a positive impact on districts, revenue caps are now creating financial hardships -- some school districts have consolidated and others may be edging close to bankruptcy -- and causing the vast majority of school districts to implement budget cutting measures that may have a negative impact on their basic educational mission. Art Rainwater, the superintendent of Madison public schools, has been a superintendent or assistant superintendent for the district since the revenue caps were put in place. And while he admits that Madison started off in a pretty good financial place due to the value that the Madison community places on higher education, the revenue caps have caused a serious deterioration of that position because the school's real tax dollars have remained relatively flat while the cost of personnel and everything from utilities paper have been rising at the rate of inflation or better during the past 14 years. According to Rainwater, few districts have done okay under the revenue caps. "Under the revenue cap law, you have to be growing exactly at the right trajectory," Rainwater observed in an interview with The Capital City Hues last February. "If you're growing too fast, because the revenue cap is based on a three-year rolling average, you only get credit for a third of the new students. If you're growing too fast, you're not generating enough revenue to take care of the added expenses for the new kids coming in. Now there is a trajectory where you grow, gain revenue and don't have to add services. But if you go faster than that, you're in a situation of having more kids and still reducing services. Obviously, if you are staying flat or are declining, you're in the same shape. You're losing revenue faster than you're losing the ability to reduce services associated with those kids." Madison's schools have slightly declined in enrollment in recent years. Ironically, in a few years, it may face the rapid growth scenario that will also create severe financial problems under the caps. There are very few -- if any -- other places to cut after 14 years of continuous cuts. Rainwater noted that the administrative staff has been cut by 25%. Further cuts could endanger it's ability to fulfill its legal and administrative obligations. "We're a very large organization that you have to have people who manage payroll, who account for your money and fulfill your legal obligations and hire people," Rainwater said. "You have to have that corporate infrastructure just like any other corporation that is a $330 million per year organization We manage 4.5 million sq. feet of buildings, cook 18,000 meals per day, and manage a library system with over a million volumes." "While the district has done its best to protect its core services, the size of our classes, the support systems for our students, and our ability to provide professional development to our teachers," Rainwater said, these are now being looked at for cuts to get under the caps. "We're going to have to look at the student supports that we provide," Rainwater said. "We're going to have to look at special education. We're going to have to look at ESL because that's where the vast bulk of our money is and we've done as much as we can do in these other areas that now we're at a point in time that we're going to have to do that. The question is 'How creatively can we do that and still maintain some of the strengths that we have from small class sizes and highly skilled teachers and those kinds of things. Are there ways to structure that so it does the least damage possible?' This is a never ending process. As hard as we are struggling with it now, we're going to struggle with it again next year." And as these cuts are implemented, it will be a whole new day according to Rainwater, and that involves a lot of risks and unknowns. "We're going to be off into unknown territory," Rainwater exclaimed. "What we don't know is what happens as we make the changes. I think one of the public information issues that we deal with is that the results of changing what happens in the classroom at the primary grades doesn't show up for many, many years. The kids we have going through the system right now, the kids who are going to take the ACT test and the SAT test and apply to colleges and go into the trades benefited from this whole system. The result that you see in the things that are typically published whether that be test scores or college admissions or dropout rates, really the things we see measured right now had the system and so, it will be several years before we see the impact of not having the system we have right now. We could lose a part of a generation before we realize we messed up." The impact may have more far reaching consequences than a decline in educational quality. It may have a negative impact on Wisconsin's economic well-being for the rest of this century. Next issue: The long term impact on Wisconsin's future. |
| An interview with Art Rainwater The big squeeze By Jonathan Gramling Part 1 of 2 |
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| (R) Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater |
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