(The Center Square) – Wisconsin has 421 public school districts. It also has clearly documented dropping enrollment both now and into the future.
Those two factors have combined to create an untenable reality for public schools in the state.
“That number is going to have to drop,” Wisconsin state Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie said about the number of districts.
One problem is that not all of the smaller districts understand the scope of the coming public school enrollment and taxpayer funding issues coming their way.
“A lot of school districts don’t even really realize the position that our state is in when it comes to declining enrollment,” Nedweski aide Eric Brooks told The Center Square on Friday.
A group of bills proposed by Nedweski in the Wisconsin Assembly are aimed at fixing that.
School consolidation is a contentious issue as communities fight to retain sports teams and buildings and grapple with the difficulties in matching different teacher contracts and millage rates to make consolidation make sense. But the numbers don’t lie.
Wisconsin’s population is shrinking, it’s projected to continue to shrink. Student enrollment figures are some of the first places that decrease due to lower birth rates, and fewer students mean less teachers, schools and administrators will be needed to educate them.
Public school enrollment in Wisconsin is expected to decline by 10,000 students annually for the five-year period that began in 2023-24 and the trend is expected to continue beyond then.
Nedweski announced a month ago that she planned to introduce legislation to encourage school districts to consolidate.
In her district alone, she noted, there are nine single-school districts, some that only serve K-8 students.
Nedweski and her staff are meeting with educator, administration and school board groups before finalizing language on the set of bills, which they hope to bring forward before the end of the year.
One bill will involve the details on the process for districts to consolidate, including how school board positions would be distributed, what needs to happen to consolidate and what happens in three schools, for instance, look at consolidating and only two agree.
Another set of bills would help fund feasibility studies for schools to examine the impact of consolidation or shared services between districts. The scope is being determined for a few more bills set to be included, according to Brooks.
“We want school districts to be able to realize these efficiencies internally because then those efficiencies could get poured back into classroom resources,” Brooks said.
Details in the bills came from a 2023 study committee on shared services, Brooks added.
The lowering enrollments are impacting how much state funding districts receive, a number based partly on per-student funding, and districts are reaching their levy maximums, leading a record number of districts to go to referendum for more funding.
Consolidation would create larger districts and more overall funding with the goals of efficiency of scale and benefits of a larger range of course availability for students across the issue.
The statewide groups Nesweski and staff have met with understand the enrollment drop issues while not all individual districts understand the scope of the issue and how it will impact schools in coming years, Brooks said.
“We are seeing the enrollment decline pretty consistently,” he said. “It’s not just a regional issue.”
