It was a dreary, rainy Thursday morning when the state education department announced some depressing news: According to the final, official numbers, 62% of Wisconsin school districts will receive less money in state general aid this year than they did last year. 

Schools are struggling because, for the third year in a row, the state budget put no new money into general school aid, the Department of Public Instruction pointed out in an Oct. 15 press release. That’s after more than 15 years during which annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue in Wisconsin schools has failed to keep pace with inflation. The latest school funding data arrived from DPI under the header: “Nearly two-thirds of districts will receive less aid due to flat state funding, antiquated funding formula.” 

About an hour later, a press release from Gov. Tony Evers’ office cheerfully announced that Wisconsin has ended the fiscal year with a $3.3 billion budget balance and a record  $2.1 billion in the state’s “rainy day” fund. The top line from the governor’s office message was upbeat: “Despite continued national economic turbulence, Wisconsin maintains strong fiscal position, reaching seven consecutive years of record-high General Fund balances during Gov. Evers’ tenure.”

These two announcements, although dramatically different in mood, are directly connected. The reason Wisconsin has a big budget surplus is largely because the state has abandoned its commitment to fund its public schools. 

A slide presentation by Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, graphically illustrates the decline in annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue for Wisconsin public school districts since the 2008-2009 school year. Using Legislative Fiscal Bureau data, Chapman shows the steadily widening gap between the annual adjustment in general operating dollars schools would have had each year if revenue had kept pace with inflation and what they actually got. This year the shortfall reached $3,571 per kid. 

At the same time, schools have been carrying about $1.29 billion in special education costs that are not reimbursed by state or federal aid.

Schools have never bounced back from the drastic cuts to education spending during the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker. But the current budget situation is unprecedented 

“The 2025-27 state budget provided no increase to general school aids. This was an extremely unusual policy choice, especially in light of the fact that the state had a $4.3 billion surplus going into the budget process,” she says. “The last instance of flat or negative general aids across both years of a biennial budget was the 2009-11 budget, at which time the state was facing a deficit.”

In other words, in a historic act of stinginess, the Legislature, while staring at a sizeable budget surplus, chose not to add any money to general school aid, the largest form of state support for K-12 schools. That was a deliberate policy choice, not some sort of emergency measure taken under duress. 

Wisconsin’s school funding formula is complicated —  a mix of state and local funds divvied up based on school districts’ property wealth, enrollment numbers and spending patterns. Different districts get different amounts of funding from the state — and some get none at all. When funding is flat, statewide, some districts get more and some get less. This is the “antiquated” system DPI referred to in its press release. It uses outdated metrics, and doesn’t account for the effects of high poverty or large numbers of English language learners. 

State schools superintendent Jill Underly expanded on this in her State of Education speech in September: “The formula places value on the wrong things. It values enrollment, district spending, and property value, rather than student needs. It fails to ask the most essential question: how much does it actually cost to educate the students who live in a district so that they have an equal opportunity to succeed? A student’s opportunity for success should not depend on their zip code. If we are going to improve the academic outcomes for ALL students, then the funding formula must prioritize student need.”

Because of the complexity of school finance, and the patchwork of have and have-not districts, it’s hard to figure the exact amount Wisconsin has underfunded its schools since 2009, when overall per-pupil spending stopped keeping pace with inflation. But you can get a rough, back of the envelope estimate by taking the three-year rolling average for calculating revenue limit and per pupil categorical aid  from 2025-26  — 781,367 students — and multiplying it by a calculation derived from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s data on the cumulative shortfall in annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue, which was $3,468.60. The number you get is $2.7 billion in combined state aid and property tax levies. If the state returned to its much-discussed commitment to fund two-thirds of the cost of public schools, that would mean we’d have to allocate $1.8 billion of the current $3.3 billion surplus to make schools whole. Add to that the $1.29 billion in special ed costs the state has sloughed off on the schools, and it reaches $3 billion.

One of the main effects of the state deciding not to fund schools is that the burden has fallen instead on local property taxpayers, who are confronting another surge in referendum requests from their local school districts in the voting booth this fall.   

Gov. Evers has proposed, by his own estimate in an address to the Wisconsin Public Education Network, $7 billion in new funding for schools that was rejected by the state Legislature over his two terms. He was bitterly disappointed when the state Senate rejected a $1.8 billion deal he struck with Republican legislative leaders that included some money for increased special education funding and property tax relief along with income tax cuts. 

But in his latest message, the governor embraces the unspent money sitting in state coffers as “damn good news.” 

“We’ve ended every fiscal year I’ve been governor with a positive balance,” he says. “We’ve shown that state government can work, and work better for the people we serve, and I’m incredibly proud of our efforts.”

Along with the surplus, the governor’s office celebrates the “largest balance in the ‘rainy day’ fund in state history” — at $2.1 billion, it’s six times larger than when Evers took office.

Meanwhile, schools are in worse and worse shape, and all over the state, people are struggling to keep up with the cost of housing as property taxes rise. 

Whatever feeling of satisfaction there is in knowing the state has squirreled away a fat rainy day fund, when you look outside, it’s raining. 

Kate Murrain, a realtor and mother of two Middleton-Cross Plains School District students, said she has a couple of questions before she makes her mind up whether to vote for the district’s $118.5 million referendum request. 

Murrain told the Wisconsin Examiner that she wants to see a side-by-side comparison of budgets, one of if the referendum passes and one if it fails. Her questions reflect the competing concerns that surfaced in a recent public discussion of rising property taxes and the school district’s troubles meeting rising costs. 

“At this point, without any information and being as educated as I need to be I would vote no,” Murrain said, adding she noticed that the meeting was attended by a relatively small group of neighbors who appeared to be pro-referendum. “I was surprised. I expected to walk into 100 people having questions to get better educated. I’m just shocked that this is the turnout.”

Murrain was one of about 20 who gathered in the performing arts center of Middleton High School on Sept. 17 to listen to district leaders explain the request and take questions. The district is holding at least four of these sessions open to the public leading up to the Nov. 3 election.

Middleton’s request is part of a wave of more than 70 school district referendum requests this fall seeking $1.6 billion in support from property taxpayers. Under Wisconsin’s school funding system, there is a cap on how much school districts can bring in through a combination of state aid and property taxes. To exceed the caps, Wisconsin school districts have to go to voters for approval. 

Among the requests 17 are for one-time building costs, eight are recurring, to provide permanent support for operating costs, and the remaining are non-recurring, slated to help with operating costs but for a set number of years.

By the end of the year, the total number of referendum requests appearing on spring and fall ballots will total more than 150. Eight of the school districts asking voters for more money in November are trying for the second time this year after a spring request failed. 

In April, 75 referendum requests went before voters. According to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, 46 of those passed — a 61.3% approval rate. The Policy Forum found that a similar result in November would represent “a substantial decrease from the 70.1% approval rate in 2024” and the “lowest approval rate of any even-numbered year since 2010, when voters approved 52.7% of referenda.”

The Middleton-Cross Plains School District request is the second largest referendum ask  on ballots in November behind Green Bay Area School District, which is seeking $158 million over four years and is currently a party in a lawsuit suing the state over the school funding formula.

Middleton is considered “property rich,” meaning it gets less state aid than other school districts and relies more heavily on property taxes for its budget. According to school leaders, about 80% of the district budget comes from property taxes. The other 20% comes from state aid. 

The request would be split to provide $24.9 million in year one of the referendum. That amount would continue the funding the district is currently receiving through a 2022 nonrecurring referendum. The next three years the funding would rise by about 3% each year to account for inflation, so $27.9 million in year two, $31.1 million in year three and $34.6 million in year four.

Bob Hesselbein, the school board president, told the Examiner that the district considered about six different referendum scenarios.

“Like a lot of districts within Wisconsin since 2010, we have been forced to find operational funding with our own community because the state each year is giving us in real dollars less in buying power,” Hesselbein said. “We recognize with the economics going on now in the country, we didn’t want to ask for more because everyone’s hurting.”

The district conducted surveys while working to develop the question. In one survey of about 1,800 community members, 66% said that they would probably or definitely vote for a 2026 referendum. Those who opposed the referendum cited property-tax fatigue, spending reductions and a preference for state level solutions. 

Hesselbein said the district hasn’t had a “No Vote” committee form. In other districts, “No Vote” and “Yes Vote” committees will form and can come into contention with one another as residents concerned about rising property taxes are pitted against those who want their schools to be able to meet costs.

One attendee at the recent meeting in Middleton asked for clarification on the actual cost to individual taxpayers of the referendum and said he was worried about how the additional taxes would affect seniors on a fixed income.

An explanatory page provided by the district shows that property taxpayers could expect to pay no additional money in the first year, $21 in the second, $40 in the third and $59 in the fourth. However, the numbers are pegged to $100,000 of property. The district said it provided the information in the form it did so individuals could do the math easily depending on the cost of the house. 

“Who has a $100,000 house in Middleton?” the attendee said. “I’d rather see the average house in there, so people can get a feel as to what you’re looking at.” 

The average cost of a house is $500,000 in Middleton, meaning in the second year of the budget an average homeowner could expect to pay an additional $105 in property taxes in the second year of the referendum.

“You’re going to be squeezing me,” the attendee said. “You want to keep everything status quo. There’s room to cut.” 

If the referendum fails the district will have to cut its budget by about 20%. 

Whether the referendum passes or not, the district plans to cut $5 million from its budget, though conversations are just beginning on where those cuts will come from. 

“We’re going to probably find ourselves cutting some of the enhancements to education, not the meat of what we do here,” Hesselbein told the Examiner, adding that it likely wouldn’t mean layoffs, but retirements may mean conversations about dividing work among current employees instead of a new hire. 

The same retiree who spoke up about the cost of the referendum asked why the district wasn’t turning to state lawmakers. 

“I called Sen. [Dianne] Hesselbein’s office last year, and asked, what have you done to get more money?” he said. “I got the typical political run around.”

Gov. Tony Evers and Republican lawmakers tried to pass a deal earlier this year that would have tapped the state surplus to give schools some additional funding and send rebate checks to property taxpayers. The bill failed in the Senate, where most Democrats opposed it, saying it didn’t do enough to help schools or spend money responsibly, along with a couple of Republicans, who opposed the spending. 

Since then, progress on school funding changes have been stalled as most politicians have turned their attention to the upcoming elections. 

Bob Hesselbein, who is married to the Democratic leader of the Senate, said he had some inside information for the disgruntled taxpayer at the Middleton meeting.

“I happen to know Sen. Hesselbein pretty well,” he said, drawing a few chuckles in the room. 

“You can yell and swear all you want,” he added. “In Dane County, we have very pro-education representation in both our Assembly and our Senate. Unfortunately, they’re a minority within the state of Wisconsin, and until the rest of the cities, Wisconsin, come to that realization that their public schools are being damaged, we can’t expect anything different from our local politicians, because that’s the constitutional laws of our state.”

Sen. Hesselbein has said that Democrats will pass legislation to fund public schools in January. 

“We are going to be fully there for our public schools, especially when it comes to special education reimbursement,” Sen. Dianne Hesselbein said at a press conference last week. “One thing that school administrators are telling us all across the state — principals as well — that they want to see something they can count on and they want to rely on it.” 

Sen. Hesselbein said that her caucus has started having conversations over the summer about what needs to happen, including putting more money into special education and general aid. She said Democrats are also looking at other states to understand how the school funding formula could be changed.

“We’re also looking at a long-term goal of seeing what other states are doing and how they are funding their public schools, but that’s going to take probably a multi-year task to try to figure that all out and talking to our friends in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois,” Hesselbein said. 

Meanwhile, school districts continue to rely on taxpayers to help them meet costs. 

Jim Coursey, treasurer of the Middleton school board, explained the stakes to Murrain. 

“If we were to lose that 20% of the budget, there will be no question that classrooms will be impacted, that’s too much,” Coursey said. “That’s going to lead to larger class sizes because it’s going to lead to a reduction in the number of staff that we’re going to be able to have supporting. It’s going to lead to elimination of programs.” 

Murrain, who said she values the education her children are receiving, remained unconvinced.

“I don’t know, it’s tough… I would need to see exactly where those funds are being allocated,” she said.

Gov. Tony Evers is taking his final back-to-school tour of the state, visiting K-12 classrooms across Wisconsin to meet students, families and staff and tout his record as the “Education Governor.”

If you don’t happen to live in one of the 72 Wisconsin school districts that went to referendum last spring, begging local property taxpayers to cover basic costs the state is not meeting, you might get the impression from Evers’ valedictory tour that he is leaving office having solved the urgent problem of chronic underfunding of Wisconsin schools. 

“After a decade of disinvestment, Gov. Evers has spent the last almost eight years working to invest in public education at every level,” a statement released this week by the governor’s office declares. “During his time in office, Gov. Evers has enacted budgets to restore two-thirds funding for public schools for the first time in over two decades, provide the largest special education aid increase in state history, and bring per pupil aid to its highest level ever.”

Sounds like a strong record of accomplishment!

But wait, why does a lawsuit filed this year by the Wisconsin PTA, students, parents, teachers and communities across the state charge that Wisconsin “has seemingly abandoned its commitment to the education of Wisconsin’s public school children” and is violating its own constitution by failing to adequately fund public schools? 

The short answer is that Evers, along with the Republican legislative leaders who are the targets of the lawsuit, are using misleading language to pass off austerity for schools as generosity.

Take Evers’ claim about restoring the state’s long-abandoned commitment to two-thirds funding for schools. That two-thirds number is based on counting money in the state budget that schools are not allowed to spend. While the money is technically allocated for education, the state did not lift school revenue caps, so it can only be spent for property-tax relief. 

“Meeting the state’s two-thirds funding commitment doesn’t put a single new pencil in a classroom when you provide zero dollars in new spending,” explains Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, “and the current budget provided zero dollars in new spendable aid for both years of this biennium.”

Far from reaping a historic investment, students and teachers are starting the year in Wisconsin with no new money for schools. 

The state’s share of special education funding, which fell from a high of 70% in the 1970s to hover around 30% in recent years, did get a bump in the last budget, reversing a dire drop-off. But the “largest special education increase in state history” only amounted to a jump from 30 to 35% last year — considerably less than the 42% reimbursement rate state officials originally projected. 

Finally, in a sense, Evers did bring per-pupil aid to its highest level ever, but like his other claims, this is more a rhetorical victory than a concrete benefit to schools. Using his line-item veto, Evers extended school districts’ ability to raise $325 in revenue per pupil from local taxpayers for the next 400 years. This move infuriated Republicans, and they used it as a reason for not giving schools any new money in the current budget. But the $325 per pupil increase is not hard cash, it’s just revenue-raising authority granted to districts, which are allowed to raise property taxes by that amount if they choose to. Some, having exhausted the good will of local taxpayers with repeated referendum asks, have not done so. 

All in all, schools in Wisconsin are in bad financial shape, and property taxpayers are weary of filling the gap left by the state abandoning its obligation to kids. 

“The Legislature is selling kids short,” says Jeff Mandell of Law Forward, which is representing the plaintiffs in the school funding lawsuit. The Wisconsin Constitution guarantees every child an equal opportunity for a sound, basic education. But for years, the plaintiffs argue, the state has been breaking that promise.

Adams-Friendship school district, one of the parties in the lawsuit, used to have five elementary schools within its 500 square miles. Now, because of school closures due to low enrollment and shrinking budgets, it has only one K-12 school. Kids spend hours riding the bus to a single school building with aging infrastructure where many classrooms are unusable on hot days. 

Huge challenges are also facing urban districts. In Beloit last year one in eight students was homeless. 

“There is this fictitious idea that everyone has budgets, the schools just have to tighten their belts,” says Mandell. The reality is, even as the challenges schools face pile up, the state has steadily decreased funding, to the point where many now face an existential crisis.

The current lawsuit is not the first challenge to Wisconsin’s school funding formula based on the idea that the state is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide a basic, free education to all children. 

Back in 2000, a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a similar argument in the Vincent v. Voight case. 

In that case, “the Court said the system is not bad enough right now to violate the constitution,” Mandell says. But since then, two full generations of kids have completed kindergarten through 12th grade, and conditions have deteriorated dramatically.

When Vincent v. Voight was decided, school revenue limits were still automatically pegged to inflation. A state law, abolished in 2003, still held that two-thirds of school funding should come from the state.  A popular program, abolished in 2018, still kept class sizes small and offered extra supports to children living in poverty to help them succeed academically.  Overall, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, school funding has not kept pace with inflation in Wisconsin since 2009, a major reversal from the early 2000s, when Wisconsin schools were among the best funded in the nation. 

“The situation keeps getting worse and worse and worse, and we’re saying the court needs to give this another look,” says Mandell.

This is where the hopeful part comes in. Like the gerrymandering lawsuit that prompted the Legislature and the governor to pass fair voting maps in Wisconsin, Mandell believes the school funding lawsuit could trigger major legislative reform. As in the gerrymandering case, “the court’s job is to tell the Legislature, ‘What you have here is not good enough,’ and then give them a short window to fix it,” Mandell says.

It’s not the court’s job to come up with a new funding formula, but if the governor and the Legislature can’t agree, it could impose its own solution.

As the November elections approach, ushering in a new Legislature and a new governor, there’s a real opportunity for change. 

“There is growing momentum and understanding of what the problem is, and what the issue is, on both sides of the aisle,” says DuBois Bourenane. 

She and the other public school advocates in her organization are deeply disappointed that the governor and the Legislature failed to hammer out a deal to give more money to schools, after dangling the idea at the end of the last session. “It’s just criminal that they’re even willing to entertain the idea of sending these kids back to school with nothing again,” she says. “We’ve got 70-plus districts going to referendum again this fall … over a third of our districts went to referendum this calendar year.” 

DuBois Bourenane agrees with Mandell that the lawsuit could spur a breakthrough. 

“I’m just glad that everybody’s talking about it,” she says, “and I hope that they’re paying very close attention to what’s actually possible if we elect people who all agree that we have to fix this broken problem.” 

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When adjusting for inflation and total student population, state K-12 funding has fluctuated over the past eight budgets and is about where it was before major cuts in 2011.

Funding dropped after Republicans required public school employees to pay more toward pension and health insurance costs in 2011 under the law known as Act 10. Then from 2013 to 2020 inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending on K-12 education increased each year. In the two years after the COVID-19 pandemic, funding decreased but then increased over the next two years.

Inflation-adjusted, per-pupil state spending is now slightly above what it was before the 2011 cuts.

Here are the figures:

2010-2011: $9,469.08

2024-2025: $9,527.65

2023-2024: $9,386.15

2022-2023: $9,299.59

2021-2022: $9,700.89

2020-2021: $9,960.87

2019-2020: $9,380.61

2018-2019: $9,219.23

2017-2018: $9,167.82

2016-2017: $8,825.57

2015-2016: $8,576.74

2014-2015: $8,549.45

2013-2014: $8,426.60

2012-2013: $8,388.53

2011-2012: $8,408.17

2010-2011: $9,469.08

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Watch: School Funding w/ Sept. Count
• Legislative Fiscal Bureau: State Aid to School Districts
• Department of Public Instruction: September Count

Have eight consecutive Wisconsin state budgets given less money to public schools? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.