A half-dozen citizens braved subzero temps to air their concerns with Boscobel’s state senator, Howard Marklein, on January 15.
The event was billed as a listening session, designed to give members of the public a chance to raise issues important to them, but with the light turnout, the session turned into a free-flowing conversation among participants, including Senator Marklein.
School funding
The group included three representatives of Boscobel’s school district—Administrator Lisa Wallin-Kapinus, Director of Business Services Jarrett Roethke, and Jimmie Kaska, a parent and assistant football coach who sits on the district school board.
All three addressed the financial problems faced by rural districts like Boscobel. The last legislative session boosted state aid to schools—which comes through a variety of targeted funds, including perpupil operating funds, monies to reimburse special education costs, and special funding for districts that serve a broad geographic area. In spite of these state-level increases, many schools, including Boscobel, lost funding under the new model, according to attendees, because the student population is declining—a phenomenon that hits especially hard in rural, low-income regions like southwestern Wisconsin.
“I don’t know how we’re going to meet the Consumer Price Index cost of things,” Wallin-Kapinus told Marklein. “We can’t cut our way out of this. I can’t just keep cutting things out of the school.”
Faced with these fiscal realities, Kaska said, a growing number of districts in Boscobel’s position are relying on local property taxes. In the last election, Boscobel voters narrowly passed a referendum to update and expand the district’s high/middle school facility and close the old Rock Building.
Other districts, including a number in the southwest region, are asking taxpayers for “operational referendums” that simply help pay the bills, according to Kaska.
“I don’t know that it’s sustainable to increase property taxes,” Kaska said. “At some point, with the rising cost of everything, people are going to probably say ‘no.’ I don’t see that as a sustainable way of funding schools.”
Enrollment woes
Marklein responded that the problem was not so much the level of funding from the state, as the way that aid is apportioned. The primary source of state funding is a “per-pupil” allotment of about $12,000 per student.
“What’s the one variable that affects the size of your budget? Enrollment. So it ain’t state funding. It’s enrollment,” the senator said. Of the 34 districts in Marklein’s senate district, he added, most are facing similar declines as Boscobel.
“The problem we have, pick any rural school district, is the decline in the enrollment is more precipitous than the increase in any funding we can do,” he said. “The size of the pie is based on enrollment.”
Yet many costs remain roughly the same from one district to the next. A dozen students less might not impact the basic operations of a school—but when those dozen take $150,000 from the budget, it has an impact on non-fixed costs.
Another attendee, Joe Mc-Daniel, wondered if school closures weren’t the answer, pointing out that districts like Kickapoo and Seneca have even smaller student populations than Boscobel’s.
“I’m not going to go there,” Marklein answered. “That’s a local decision. But we can do more collaborative work between districts. I don’t see how some of the smaller districts are going to survive on their own.”
Mental health needs
Another primary issue that participants brought to the session was the need for better mental health resources in rural areas like Boscobel.
It’s an issue that hits close to home for Jimmie Kaska. When one of his children was struggling in school, his family had a hard time finding services to help.
“The health system we have here in town didn’t have anybody,” Kaska told the Senator. “We couldn’t take him to La-Crosse because they’re booked out over a year. The hospital we did find that had something within 8 to 12 months, we were told we’d have to change our primary care to this hospital system and bring our son to Minnesota. So mental health services in our area are severely lacking. And this wasn’t for a serious behavioral issue. It’s just, we wanted to make sure our son is okay.”
Marklein shared the concerns of his constituents, and wondered if the pandemic and lockdown was a contributing factor.
“We are social people,” he said. “I’m not a doctor, but I believe COVID accelerated the symptoms for a bunch of mental health issues.”
Wallin-Kapinus said she sees the effects of this isolation firsthand in younger kids entering school for the first time.
“We’re seeing it in 4K classrooms,” she said. “It’s crazy what they don’t know. They were born during COVID, and were at home, and not doing social things, learning social cues.”
Worker shortages
While Marklein pointed to the legislature’s increased funding for mental health services through Wisconsin’s Department of Public Health, he cautioned that paying for healthcare was only one aspect of the problem.
“Who’s the provider? Who are the specialists that are going to provide the mental health care?” Marklein asked. “We could put more money into it, but are we going to get providers here in southwest Wisconsin?”
The shortage of workers, generally, was another common refrain of the listening session, with school officials pointing out the difficulty of attracting and retaining talent as yet another financial pressure on school budgets.
In the realm of mental health services, Marklein pointed to experiments in telehealth, including one pilot program, borrowed from South Dakota, that connects first responders to mental health professionals in real time.
Katy Prange, Marklein’s Chief of Staff, explained that it’s a tool for law enforcement—who are often the first ones to help in a mental health crisis.
“If they go to a call, and they know it is more a mental health issue than anything else, they actually can hand the iPad to the person and a live person will be talking to them face to face. They can deescalate, or figure out what’s going on, or help the police know what to do next,” she said.
Climate change
While schools and mental health dominated the conversation, McDaniel raised the issue of climate change as another concern and encouraged the development of electric vehicles in the public sector.
Wallin-Kapinus reported that the school had applied for a grant to purchase an electric bus, but had not received it.
Other sessions
Other listening sessions with Senator Marklein are available for those who missed this one and want their voices heard. The following sessions are upcoming:
• Monday, January 29, 2024, 1-2 p.m., Blanchardville Village Hall
• Friday, February 2, 2024, 10-11 a.m., New Lisbon Library Community Room
• Monday, February 12, 2024, 1:30-2:30 p.m., Platteville Public Library
