By Ben Rodgers
Editor

SUAMICO – Instead of the standard motion and roll call vote for the 2019-20 district budget, the Howard-Suamico school board looked ahead Monday, Oct. 21, to the next possible referendum question in April 2021.

“What we’d like to do, once we get approval for the budget and tax levy, is bridge and pivot to the larger Strategy 2035 discussion,” said Superintendent Damian LaCroix.

Strategy 2035 was formally introduced earlier this month and is the district’s vision for what education will look like in 2035.

A major part of Strategy 2035 is the district’s Graduate Profile, which is seven characteristics and traits it wants students to have when they graduate to be ready for a changing world.

“How do we crosswalk all subject areas, all skill competencies our students need with that measure?” said Matt Spets, assistant superintendent of operations. “That profile, that’s audacious, that’s a big goal.”

Spets presented the board with three key numbers: 427, $2 million and 14,000.

The first is the number of teachers the district has today.

“We’ve invested over $4 million into teachers (with the last referendum),” Spets said. “We have 427 teachers today. We hired 30 to help with that work we heard about. We also maintained our best-in-class sustainable benefits.”

The cost to hire those teachers and level-set or raise employee salaries is $2 million, he said.

To simply maintain those positions and avoid teacher layoffs and larger class sizes, the levy override will need to continue with a new referendum question in April 2021, Spets said.

Finally, 14,000 is the number of students expected to move through the district by 2035.

“It’s the 6,000 (students) we have today, but every year the next class ends up being 400 to 500,” Spets said. “If you do the math it’s 14,000. That’s why this is important, 14,000 kids.”

Due to the state budget, this year’s district budget also has an increase of roughly $2 million in the district’s revenue limit, the largest jump in the past decade, he said.

That increase will allow more flexibility for the district to pay down its existing debt ahead of schedule, which opens more funding up down the road for potential projects.

“We are going to be able to over deliver on our debt prepayment this year,” Spets said. “It’s projected around $600,000. It’s going to be over $1 million (in the future). That allows us some substantial debt flexibility down the road.”

Three different scenarios out of dozens were presented to the board about what different referendum questions would mean for district finances in the future.

The first of the scenarios is a $5.4 million levy override coupled with a 30-cent tax rate increase. This would allow the district to take on $123 million in facilities debt.

The second is a $5.4 million recurring levy override with no tax rate increase. This would allow the district to take on $99 million in facilities debt.

The final scenario is a $4.9 million recurring levy override with a 30-cent tax rate increase. This would allow the district to take on $123 million in facilities debt.

Spets said the facilities debt and $1 million of the override in the scenarios will be used for an unknown future project.

Some examples Spets mentioned are a district 4k program, a potential partnership with Bellin Health and a possible innovation center to better prepare students for jobs in the workforce.

The board also heard from Michele Wiberg, director of Wisconsin Public Finance, on different scenarios around the state.

The one that stuck out to the board was Stevens Point, which at one point failed to pass a second $11 million operational override referendum and was forced to cut jobs.

“That was a huge change in the district and a lot of years of healing had to ensue,” Wiberg said. “They had to shrink and they had to make a lot of difficult choices, and when they came back to the community, they were successful, but it took a few years to get there.”

Board member Vanessa Moran said she is fearful a similar thing may happen in Howard-Suamico.

“Things change, so I like the idea of going for something that is a recurring referendum,” she said. “The only problem with that is last time that opposition was so loud and clear. However, if we can communicate that you could still have that without any change in your tax rates and we can continue to operate, I think that might make that more sell-able. But the thing is, is $99 million for facilities, is that enough for us to do what we want to do?”

Board member Jason Potts said recurring would be the best option, but there wasn’t enough community education when the effort failed in April 2017.

“Being part of the community task force for the last referendum that was asked, I felt that it seemed most of the community members of the task force, after we had several sessions explaining how school finance works, most of us were in agreement that ‘Wow, that recurring thing would have been a better option.’”

Spets said it’s early in the 18-month planning phase and more details about the extra facilities project and specific finance options for the referendum will come before the board as Strategy 2035 continues to move along.

After viewing the scenarios, the board approved a tax levy of $28.24 million – an increase from the 2018-19 tax levy of $26.57 million – which supports a district budget of $87.4 million for the 2019-20 school year, a decrease from last year’s budget of $89.35 million. The tax rate of $9.19 per $1,000 of home value will remain the same for the fifth straight year.