Children at the Growing Tree child care in New Glarus. Wisconsin is one of only six states that doesn't put any money into early childhood education. (Photo by Kate Rindy)

Children are born into this world innocent. They did not choose their parents. They did not choose to be born into poverty. They do not get to choose if a parent is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Children do not get a choice to be born into an environment of neglect. Children do not choose to grow up in a home with violence. Children do not get a choice to be abused or assaulted. Children do not choose to be born with a disability. Children do not get to choose if they can access medical care. Children do not get a choice on whether they are even wanted or loved. 

Adults do have choices. In Wisconsin, we  have chosen to have a state where children are the largest demographic living in poverty. We have chosen to allow some children to live with constant hunger. We have chosen not to support children with disabilities. We are still choosing not  to create systems to support children who have experienced adversity like abuse and neglect. We made the choice to create an education system based on the income of the people living in the community. We choose to allow children to be uncared for. We as a community have made these choices deliberately and without shame. 

Consequently, we have chosen for those children to be  less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to fail at a job, have poor health (which is connected to stress in the early years) and to be statistically more likely to be placed in the prison system. 

We, as a state, have chosen to prioritize funding for  prisons and spend nothing on early care and education, one of only six states that don’t invest a penny in early childhood programs, even though we know that when children have access to quality early education that they are more likely to graduate high school, have higher incomes, be healthier, and are less likely to enter the prison system. We have chosen to remove health care options for children by not expanding Badgercare. We are soon to be the only state that does not provide postpartum Medicaid, risking the lives of new mothers and  increasing the likelihood that children will have to grow up without them. We have decided that children with disabilities will receive services not based on their actual needs, but based on the budget  for special education, which our state keeps at the barest minimum. 

We have chosen to make the word “welfare” into a bad word. Welfare by definition is the health, happiness and fortunes of a person or group. And we have chosen to deny the health, happiness and fortune of children in our state. Referring to a bipartisan push for Medicaid expansion to cover postpartum care, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has said he  “cannot imagine supporting an expansion of welfare.” Why is providing welfare to support the health and wellbeing of children or anyone for that matter a negative concept? Why are we so afraid that if we support people in need  that it somehow takes away from us? For example, why would providing children with free lunches at school be a bad thing to do? Why would ensuring that children have access to medical care regardless of whether their parents can afford it or not be bad to do? Why would ensuring that children have access to quality care and education in their early years, regardless of their parents’ income, be a bad thing? Why would ensuring that children with disabilities have access to the services they need be bad? Why is it wrong  to have systems in our state that ensure we are doing everything we can to give all children the best opportunities to grow, thrive and become productive members of our communities? 

Rep. Vos and Joint Finance Committee co-chairs Sen.Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green), and Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam) all disagree with creating and funding policies that support our children. Time and time again, they have voted down policies that would have provided support to children. They have continued to forgo our future by not investing in our children. Instead,  they invest in the wealthiest in our state and invest in our punitive prison systems. They invest in large businesses with expensive lobbyists who demand tax breaks and deregulation. They invest in those most likely to donate to their campaigns. These grown-up white men cannot stand the idea of anyone, even a child, getting help from the state. If they had to pay for school lunch, they figure, so should  everyone else. If they had to pay for their child’s medical visit, then so should everyone else. If they had to pay for child care, then so should everyone else. They are incapable of seeing past their privileges. They cannot appreciate what it is like to be a child born into an environment that causes  harm and the trajectory that puts the child on. However, they will certainly be there when that child becomes an adult and enters the prison system. They are more than willing to pay for incarceration and punishment. 

That’s not just financially irresponsible — we spend about four times as much to keep someone in prison as we spend on education —  it’s inhumane, and it impoverishes our state and condemns children to unnecessary suffering and a bleak future.

Robert Kraig of Citizen Action at the podium in the Senate parlor in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, May 27 , surrounded by representatives of other grassroots groups | Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

More than 100 citizens from an array of grassroots groups packed the Wisconsin state Senate parlor and marched on Gov. Tony Evers’ office Tuesday, their chants bouncing off the marble walls inside the Capitol. They were there to deliver a letter — which they urged others to sign online — demanding that Evers veto the state budget if it doesn’t include key elements of the governor’s own budget proposal.

“The whole Democratic grassroots is now demanding that national leaders stand and fight,” said Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, who helped organize the effort, “and I think that spirit is now being translated down to the state level.” 

Public school advocates, child care providers, teachers’ unions and advocates for criminal justice reform and health care access came to demand that Evers take a stronger stand and threaten to use his significant veto power in negotiations with Republicans. 

“There has been a lot of talk over the last year about whether or not we can get this done as adults, or whether we have to be impolite,” Michael Jones, president of Madison Teachers, Inc., said of state budget negotiations. “Too much gets conceded about being polite,” he added. “Politeness without reciprocal respect is just being a sucker.”

In their letter, the advocates assured Evers that Wisconsinites were behind his original budget proposal — the one Republican legislative leaders threw in the trash. The advocates urged him to “hold the line” and reject any budget that doesn’t accept federal Medicaid expansion money, provide a 60% state reimbursement to schools for special education costs, close the Green Bay Correctional Institution, restore his proposed $480 million for child care and reject the snowballing growth of school vouchers.

Brooke Legler, a child care provider and co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (W.E.C.A.N.), has been leading a recent high-profile effort to sound the alarm about the loss of child care funds. “So many of us are going to be closing our doors because we cannot keep going and parents can’t afford to pay what they are paying,” she said during a press conference in the Senate parlor. Treating child care like any other business doesn’t work, she added. Instead, it needs to be seen as a public good. “Gov. Evers declared this the year of the kid,” Legler said, but “it’s not going to be” if Evers signs a budget that leaves out crucial funding for child care. 

Tanya Atkinson of Planned Parenthood Wisconsin spoke at the press conference about congressional Republicans’ effort to cancel Medicaid funding for patient care at Planned Parenthood.

In Wisconsin, 60% of Planned Parenthood’s patients have Medicaid as their form of insurance, she said. Most of them live in rural areas, are low-income, or are women of color who “continue to be further pushed out of our health care system,” Atkinson said. “And it doesn’t have to be that way. It is time for us to take the politics out of sexual reproductive health altogether.”

Atkinson and the other assembled advocates praised Evers’ budget proposal, including the part that would finally allow Wisconsin to join the 40 other states that have accepted the federal Medicaid expansion, making 90,000 more Wisconsinites eligible for Medicaid coverage and bringing about $1.5 billion into the state in the next budget cycle.

Shaniya Cooper, a college student from Milwaukee and a BadgerCare recipient who lives with lupus, talked about how scary it was to realize she could lose her Medicaid coverage under congressional Republicans’ budget plan. “To me, this is life or death,” she said. When she first learned about proposed Medicaid cuts, “I cried,” she said. “I felt fear and dread.”

She described having a flare-up of her lupus, with swelling and fluid around her heart, and then finding out she had to fill out paperwork to reapply for Medicaid, since it was unclear if her treatment would still be covered. 

“It isn’t just about the paperwork. It’s about waking up each day with the fear that the care I might need might be gone tomorrow,” she said, “It’s about knowing that people are quietly suffering mentally and emotionally from the stress and the anxiety that these policies are creating.” Her voice broke and people around her yelled encouragement. “You got this!” someone shouted. “What’s at stake here is humanity,” she continued, “and if we do nothing, we allow these cuts to happen, we are silently endorsing the neglect and slow death of those who cannot afford prime insurance. That is not a civil society. That is not justice.”

“We are here because we will not be pitted against each other to fight for crumbs in a time of plenty,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network. “We will not be divided on the issues that matter most where we live, because some people refuse to listen to us.”

DuBois Bourenane derided what she called a “cycle of disinvestment, first of all, but it’s also a cycle of disrespect,” by Republicans who dismissed Evers’ budget proposals despite  overwhelming public support. Increasing funding for schools, expanding Medicaid coverage and reforming the criminal justice system by closing prisons and reducing incarceration are popular measures. “Gov. Evers has the power, with his veto pen, to break [the cycle],” she said, “and we’re calling on him to use the full force, the full power of that pen, to say, enough is enough. It stops with me.”

“There’s a tremendous amount of Democratic leverage in this budget, if you consider both the number of Democratic members in the Senate and the veto,” Kraig said. 

“These are groups with large memberships calling on the governor to stand and fight,” he added.

Evers did not make an appearance or respond to the rowdy group at the Capitol. But it was clear they have no intention of going away quietly,