| Stan Johnson, the president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), is someone whom you feel you've known all your life although, more than likely, you've never met him in person before. For the past several years, Johnson has been featured in WEAC's television and print ads touting Wisconsin's "Great Schools." WEAC is the state's largest labor union with over 98,000 members, representing teachers and other education-related workers. Johnson is passionate about children and teachers. He taught for 25 years in the Stoughton school district and served on several WEAC committees before being elected president of WEAC in 2001. He was re-elected in 2004. Johnson is also very concerned about the revenue caps imposed on the state's school districts back in 1993. Johnson firmly believes that decisions concerning school districts and children's education should be about quality education. He feels that the revenue caps were not motivated by a commitment to quality education. 'We have a system that was put together not by any educational thinking," Johnson emphasized. "Our system has been the only property tax relief program since 1993. Unfairly what they have done is cast our members as the reason for property tax burden. Therefore, the way to solve it was through the QEO and the revenue caps with no understanding." Johnson feels the revenue caps are starting to affect the core mission of school districts. "What you are seeing is that districts, as seen through our reporting, are cutting programs," Johnson said. "Mostly, they have been starting around the edges, programs that aren't being tested. But now you are seeing them cutting into programs and what they can offer students." Johnson also feels that the true impact of the revenue caps has been blunted by the commitment of the teachers. "I talk about the small miracles that happen in classrooms all the time," Johnson said. "The problem is we have excellent staff, doing their job above and beyond. They go into their own pockets to subsidize what the district can't provide for them. We've done a fantastic job because the other side of the coin is everything seems to be going fine, the kids are still achieving." Recently, it was announced that Wisconsin placed second nationally in the ACT test scores of Wisconsin high school students. According to Johnson, the state is experiencing a brain drain of quality teachers. "What the revenue caps have really done is that we provide other states with quality teachers," Johnson asserted. "Our kids are not going into our school systems. They are going other places. People are coming and grabbing our kids who are just coming out of school and taking them to other states where there is a $5,000-10,000 difference in salary. Why go to a state where you have a cap on salaries, you have revenue controls, you have a legislature that is consistently telling the public what a terrible job teachers are doing, I can go somewhere else where the business and legislative leaders understand that in order for us to be competitive, we all have to work together." But while the Wisconsin school system has been held together through the individual effort of teachers and others concerned with education, Johnson predicts that it will not last this way indefinitely. "We haven't had any school systems close," Johnson said. "Some are on the verge of bankruptcy, however. I would say not in the upcoming budget cycle, but in the following biennial budget in 2009-2011, you're going to see districts just collapsing. People do what they have to. It's like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. They've been doing that for so long that pretty soon, I'm up to my neck in water and I can't throw another chair." While a professor at the University of Wisconsin is looking at the whole school funding issue, Johnson doesn't see any real effort yet to solve the school funding crisis and the property tax issue. "We haven't had the kind of discussion we need to have," Johnson said. "Those are tough discussions. It's hard to be able to have those discussions when you are fighting a 30-second sound bite as an answer. Quick things are said that sound good to the public, but are actually meaningless as far as doing something for the average citizen is concerned or investing in public schools. We've had the governor's task force. But what we need is a will for legislators to do the right thing. That's hard to do in an election year. You get lip service. I'm all for public education. My record doesn't show it. But I can tell you I did the best I could. If rational people can sit down and we've been trying to have that to be able to say 'This makes sense. This wouldn't work. And this is how you would have to fund it.' In that discussion, what comes out is 'The special interests who got me elected don't like this.' We need to decide what the outcome is that we want for our kids. Then we should provide the resources so we can reach that outcome." For the sake of the children, we need a discussion soon. |
| WEAC President Stan Johnson The impact of state revenue caps by Jonathan Gramling |
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