“It really blew up our world,” public schools advocate Heather DuBois Bourenane says of the failed school funding and tax-cut deal that Republican legislative leaders and Gov. Tony Evers trumpeted as a “blockbuster” before it fizzled in the state Senate, ending in finger-pointing and recriminations. 

“It was the first time the carrot had been dangled so close to public schools,” DuBois Bourenane says, describing the “moment of utter euphoria” when her group, the Wisconsin Public Education Network, made up of parents, teachers and school officials from every corner of Wisconsin, first heard about the deal. “It seemed like what we’d been fighting so hard for for so long was finally about to happen.”

But then DuBois Bourenane and the other members of her organization got the details.

The funding for special education was not locked in at 50% in the second year of the plan as they’d hoped. Instead of a “sum-sufficient” or guaranteed allocation to cover a set percentage of costs, the 50% was an estimate. If costs go up, that percentage would go down. As for the $300 million increase in general aid to schools, as a Legislative Fiscal Bureau analysis explains: “the additional aid would provide property tax relief but not additional resources for school districts.”

Tax cuts made up the lion’s share of the deal — about 80% of the total $1.8 billion. Those included property tax cuts, interest earnings reductions, no tax on tips and overtime and, biggest of all, an $870 million income tax rebate that would have put $300 checks in the mail to people who earned enough money to qualify. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected that the deal would leave the state with a nearly $3 billion deficit. 

Most of that deficit would be caused not by school spending, but by what Dubois Bourenane describes as a wasteful tax giveaway. “What the heck?” she says. “You’re wasting the surplus while pretending to fix the thing [school funding] you broke the worst!”

School funding in Wisconsin was broken by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s historic budget cuts. The damage has compounded each year for more than a decade and a half as school budgets haven’t kept pace with inflation. In such dire circumstances there were, DuBois Bourenane acknowledges, public school advocates who felt anything was better than nothing. But the two-year stopgap deal Evers and Republican leaders reached did not come close to fixing the long-term problem. 

On the bright side, says Dubois Bourenane, at least politicians in both parties have stopped pretending the last several budgets actually funded schools sufficiently. The need to address the funding crisis in Wisconsin public schools has become a bipartisan talking point. Even Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany (who, as a legislator, voted for former Walker’s massive cut to schools) lists it as a top priority.

A recent Marquette poll showed that 80% of Wisconsinites who were contacted about the rushed deal right after it failed, with little time for discussion or analysis, and asked if they would like to receive $300 in the mail from the state, said yes. But voters deserve a full, public discussion of their options, and whether tax rebates worth $278 to most individual Wisconsin tax filers and $574 to most married joint filers, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, are worth putting the state in a $3 billion hole with no long-term fix for the school funding crisis. 

DuBois-Bourenane wishes the Legislature would take up a bill introduced in March that would guarantee a 60% special ed reimbursement from the state, easing the burden on local property taxpayers, who have been filling the hole by passing local referendum requests at record rates, raising their own taxes as the state reneges on its obligation to fund schools. 

But couldn’t committing the state to once again cover the real costs of public education put us in a deficit? Maybe, says DuBois Bournenane. “We’d have to cut money in other ways. But we would stop balancing the budget on the backs of children” — instead of acting as though the state can always avoid paying its biggest bill.

“There’s not really a surplus here,” she adds. “There’s just a pool of money that used to be used to fund public schools that now is not used at all.”

That’s the pool of money Walker “saved” by cutting funding for schools, and Evers and Republican leaders wanted to dole out over the next two years — 80% of it in the form of tax cuts and 20% to schools. 

She finds Evers’ public expressions of frustration with Democrats for not supporting his deal mystifying. “It seems to me it’s a predictable problem he could have solved in advance by consulting with his colleagues on the deal before moving forward.”

But most of all, for public schools, kids and communities across Wisconsin, the whole thing was “incredibly cruel,” she says.

“If we were being led by adults they’d laugh it off and get back to the table and get a new deal,” she says. Instead, the long-term problems threatening public education in Wisconsin continue, with no real fix in sight. 

“I know it doesn’t look like it from a distance, but it’s not about the money,” DuBois Bourenane says. “It’s about are the kids OK? Can we meet their needs?”

The answer, coming from districts that are facing steep cuts, growing class sizes, fewer extra curricular activities and school consolidations and closures, is no. The kids are not OK.

Compounding the damage is a looming crisis that was not part of the budget deal discussion at all. In 2026 all caps come off Wisconsin’s school voucher program. An unlimited number of families will be able to send their kids to private schools at taxpayer expense, and the funding for that program, under a law signed by Walker and supported by Tiffany, comes off the top of state funds. As school voucher programs have steadily grown in Wisconsin, most new students enrolled come from families that already had their kids in private school. The potential explosion in new families joining that group will put the current school funding crisis in a long shadow.

Still, DuBois Bourenane is optimistic Wisconsin can fix the problem. Her group is part of a lawsuit charging the state with failing its obligation to provide a “free, adequate public education” to all Wisconsin children. 

She believes the problem could be solved right now, and that “it’s irresponsible to walk away from the table” after the budget deal disaster. And that the pride and anger of the politicians who don’t want to keep trying is hurting Wisconsin kids.

But she also sees a huge opportunity for voters to put pressure on the politicians running for office this fall to change the attitude in the statehouse and “elect people with more energy to do things for our communities.”

“I don’t think all is lost. We will fix it in the long run. But we could fix it now,” she says. “And we’re choosing not to.”

Republican lawmakers want a lawsuit challenging the state’s school funding formula as unconstitutional dismissed, according to court filings. 

The lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s current school funding system was filed in February by Law Forward, a public interest law firm, in Eau Claire Circuit Court. The progressive legal group filed it on behalf of a group of school districts, parents, teachers, students and two advocacy organizations, the Wisconsin PTA and the Wisconsin Public Education Network (WPEN). The suit argues that the state Legislature is not fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide a “sound basic education” under the current school funding formula.

GOP lawmakers, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and members of the Joint Finance Committee, called the lawsuit “meritless” in their filing and said that the majority of questions asked in the lawsuit have been previously answered in previous court cases, including in the state Supreme Court’s Vince v. Voight decision. That 2000 lawsuit found that the state’s school funding formula was constitutional. 

“For all of plaintiffs’ sky-is-falling assertions, the school finance system that plaintiffs challenge here is the same system that the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld against similar (indeed, mostly identical) constitutional claims in Vincent v. Voight,” the filing states. “That system, Vincent explained, complies with the Wisconsin Constitution because it affords every student the opportunity to obtain a constitutionally adequate education. The Supreme Court reached this conclusion notwithstanding various complaints relating to test scores, school facilities, teacher staffing, and the like — complaints that are materially indistinguishable from those that Plaintiffs raise here.”

The lawmakers said the plaintiffs in the suit are asking the judiciary to take over the Legislature’s constitutional role in determining funding for primary and secondary education, even as the Legislature has fulfilled its constitutional responsibilities by enacting a comprehensive school finance system for the state’s public schools. 

The new lawsuit argues that declines in student proficiency for Wisconsin’s reading and math test scores are the result of declining investments in schools. It also argues that the growth of the state’s school voucher programs, which use state money to cover the cost of private school tuition, have contributed to declining funding for Wisconsin public schools.

The lawsuit asks the court for a declaration that the Legislature hasn’t fulfilled and cannot “shirk” its constitutional obligation to fund schools at a sufficiently high level to “ensure that every Wisconsin student has an equal opportunity to obtain a sound basic education that equips them for their roles as citizens and enables them to succeed economically and personally in a tuition free public school where the character of instruction is as uniform as practicable.” It calls for the current funding system to be ruled invalid.

Jeff Mandell, co-founder of Law Forward, called the motion to dismiss a “predictable attempt to avoid accountability” in a statement.

“We filed this lawsuit because families, educators, and communities across Wisconsin are seeing firsthand that the current system is not meeting that promise — forcing schools to rely on referendums, widening inequities, and leaving too many students without the resources they need,” Mandell said. “We maintain that this case deserves to be heard and are confident that the court will agree.”

The lawmakers also argue in the filing that the five school districts named in the suit, including the Adams-Friendship Area School District, the School District of Beloit, the Eau Claire Area School District, the Green Bay Area Public School District and the Necedah Area School District, should be dismissed from the case, arguing that they lack standing to challenge the constitutionality of the school finance system as a political subdivision of the state.

The lawmakers argue that the issues the plaintiffs pointed to in the lawsuit are not sufficient evidence of the state not upholding its constitutional obligation.

The lawsuit specifically points to the increasing reliance of Wisconsin school districts on asking voters to help them keep up with operating costs by increasing local property taxes through ballot measures (with varying results) as well as the decline in the state’s special education reimbursement rate.

The state currently picks up a little more than one-third of special education costs, despite the state budget promising to cover 42% of costs this year. The Necedah Area School District, which recently failed to pass a  referendum in April, has diverted all of its revenue from its previous operational referendum requests, about $6.6 million, to its special education fund. Meanwhile, the special education reimbursement rate for private voucher schools is 90%. 

“The Wisconsin Constitution makes clear that localities are expected to cover a significant portion of the cost of funding public schools,” the Republicans’ filing states. “That some school districts have had to use some of their own general education funds to cover the costs of special education is not constitutionally significant in the absence of any plausible allegations that any student has been deprived of the opportunity to obtain a sound basic education. And as for districts’ need to use referenda to exceed the revenue limits here, this too is constitutionally irrelevant.” 

The Legislature appropriated more than $7 billion in school aid in the 2024–25 fiscal year, the Republican filing noted. 

Democratic lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee submitted their own filing, which was supportive of the lawsuit. 

“A constitutional promise is not optional,” the lawmakers wrote. “Wisconsin children cannot receive one level of educational opportunity in communities that can raise and pass local referenda and another in communities that cannot.”

The lawsuit also lays out how the state’s private-school choice system, which was launched in the 1990s and has grown exponentially over the years, has contributed to the erosion in  funding for public schools. There are four distinct school voucher programs in the state: the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the Racine Parental Choice Program and the Special Needs Scholarship Program. Wisconsin is paying about $700 million this year for more than 60,000 students to participate in the voucher programs.

Republican lawmakers rejected the assertion that the choice programs are related to the lawsuit’s claims.

“This is a baseless attempt to tar these longstanding, alternative educational offerings that are both highly effective and extremely popular across the State,” the lawmakers stated. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on behalf of parents and School Choice Wisconsin Action are also seeking to intervene in the case as are parents represented by EdChoice Legal Advocates, a school choice litigation firm.