Frederica Freyberg:
The big state budget gap means cuts to school funding are in the works. More than a $300 million reduction over two years. It's true the sting is eased by the hundreds of millions of dollars headed toward education in federal stimulus funding, but school leaders say day-to-day operations and students will feel the cuts. I sat down with the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, Miles Turner, for his reaction to the state budget action. 

Miles Turner:
These cuts couldn't come at a worse time. I think the people of Wisconsin have to understand if they don't know already that Wisconsin schools, public education and public schools, have been under revenue caps for the last 16 years. So for 16 years essentially the state has said we're going to cap you at 2 percent revenue. You can't get revenue from any source above 2 percent. And yet there are fixed mandated costs that are about 4.5 percent. Anyone can understand if that was your home budget, you could only get a raise of 2 percent but your costs were going up 4.5 percent, you'd be bankrupt. So for years we've been cutting and cleaning up. Now this budget comes in, as you've asked. Now the budget comes in that further cuts public education funding and lowers the revenue cap even more tightly on school districts. So it's pretty much disastrous for some school districts.

Frederica Freyberg:
How so?

Miles Turner:
Because they're going to be laying off teachers, cutting off programs. Just under the revenue caps that we’ve had the last 16 years, 80 percent of the school districts have delayed purchasing curriculum materials. Seventy percent have laid off teachers. Seventy-five percent have delayed maintenance. There have been cuts pretty much across the board in all areas of education, and now these — it's like a man who's starving or a person is starving in the desert and wanders out of the desert and comes into a village that's in famine. These are tough times.

Frederica Freyberg:
Yet this is the biggest chunk of the state budget pie, and we all talk about shared sacrifice. What about that and at what cost?

Miles Turner:
I think schools have to do their share to sacrifice in these times. The unique element is we've already been under revenue caps for 16 years, unlike any other element of government, we are under revenue caps. And so we would be willing to do our share, but that share is going to cut more deeply because of the kind of cuts we've already made.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, to specify, there was a 3.1 percent cut to general school aid, a 2.5 percent cut to categorical aids and reduced per pupil spending. What do those reductions mean at the local level?

Miles Turner:
Hundreds of thousands of dollars for local school districts. If you were to ask local administrators, they're looking at budgets they had already prepared and that they thought they had are now going to be reduced by several hundred thousand dollars and more teacher cuts. So the layoffs are going to be significant throughout the state.        

Frederica Freyberg:
Many school districts I understand were already contracted with their teachers for next year and so they can't turn there. Where do they turn?        

Miles Turner:
The perfect storm as we put it in education is, if you already had a settlement with your teachers, your layoff dates have been passed, so you did all this assuming where your budget was going to go and now these hits occur and you don't have a fund balance to tap into, there's no place to go. They may have to close their doors.

Frederica Freyberg:
Do you anticipate that there will be over the next couple of years school districts closing up shop?

Miles Turner:
I have virtually no doubt. I mean, I've been in this job for 20 years. I have virtually no doubt that if the financial conditions exist in the next year or two and continue to exist, that there will be schools closing throughout the state of Wisconsin.    

Frederica Freyberg:
Another item that was in the budget and gets a lot of discussion is the Qualified Economic Offer that guarantees at least 3.8 percent in salary and benefits for teachers, and in the Joint Finance work they maintained the QEO for the first year and then removed it in the second. But at least one superintendent I talked to said, ‘well, I can't pay 3.8 percent anyway, so maybe it would have been better just to remove the QEO.’ What are you hearing?

Miles Turner:
Well, the sad thing is the teachers have been under the QEO for 16 years, and their salaries have sunk to 24th in the nation. We are below average. We're at the mid point. So teachers taking further hits isn't a good thing and teachers being laid off because of all of the cuts, it's very problematic. The QEO, ironically, if they take it and teachers don't get 3.8 percent, they'll sink even further in their pay regarding their colleagues throughout the United States. 

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, I know that many people, myself included, believe and I think it's true that the federal stimulus money has backed up education spending in Wisconsin for at least the next couple of years, but you suggested that this may be a double-edged sword.        

Miles Turner:
Well, we were very excited when the federal government said they were going to put a lot of stimulus money in education and thought this would be excellent. This is great for public education. And they are sending millions of dollars to Wisconsin. When we found out it was coming through two federal programs, one being Title One, which is essentially reading programs, and the other being IDEA, which is special ed programs, and that the money can only be spent in those areas and it cannot supplement current programs, it has to be new programs, when you put that together, that federal stimulus money cannot avert the layoffs and the budget cuts and the classroom size increases that are going to happen in Wisconsin. So people look at their districts and say, ‘you're getting all this stimulus money, why don't you backload the budget with it?’ You can't because the federal government does not allow that.

Frederica Freyberg:
You can't deny that money will do some good.

Miles Turner:
Totally. Special education has been underfunded for years. The government said they'd fund it at 60 percent. It's always been at 20 percent. So funding special ed where it should be is a major initiative.

Frederica Freyberg:
What about that funding cliff when this funding goes away?

Miles Turner:
That's really scary. If you put in the context of revenue caps, cuts, now you get a little bit of federal money and then it goes away in two years, there's going to be a cliff that many districts will fall off because they're going to have to do mass layoffs even more.

Frederica Freyberg:
What do you see in the future under the current financing structure?

Miles Turner:
If it hadn't been for the revenue caps being imposed for all of these years, public education could weather this financial storm a lot better than any other institutions. I mean, Wisconsin's been a proud state of its schools and has funded them well. But under the current economic environment, I see it as pretty much disastrous. The citizens of Wisconsin should know we could head to being a Mississippi, where public education is very substandard. And we've always been proud of our public schools. We've always been number one in acts. We've slipped three points in our ACTs. We are now second to Minnesota and to Iowa or third to those, whereas for 12 years we were number one in the nation. We're beginning to slip, and I'm not sure the citizens of Wisconsin understand that.        

Frederica Freyberg:
Miles Turner, thanks a lot.

Miles Turner:
Thank you very much. This is a very important topic.