No more annual meetings
It is time to sunset the Wisconsin school district annual meeting. The meeting no longer serves a vital purpose and is largely ignored by the public.
The pointlessness of the meeting was in full evidence last week in Marathon City.
There, the school board members showed up in the school auditorium ready to read budget documents, review last year’s spending, set school lunch prices and review school improvement progress at Marathon High School and Marathon Area Elementary School. But there was a problem. Nobody from the general public showed up.
The meeting was conducted with the school principals, who are both district residents, making and seconding each other’s motions, including a motion to set the district’s proposed $4.7 million tax levy.
The dilemma with the school district annual meeting is that it is advertised as an exercise in grassroots democracy, but isn’t.
True enough, school boards and administration present a budget for the coming school year, but any vote of the people at the meeting on the budget is merely advisory.
The budget presentation, too, is always premature. The state Department of Public Instruction doesn’t confirm what general aid to districts will be until October. Most annual meetings, then, take place without knowing what budgets will really be. The annual meeting information is guesswork.
The public is pretty much done with the annual meeting. Somehow, however, the state can’t move on and change the law.
In calling for the end of the school district annual meeting, we are not saying that school boards should not get input from the public. Quite the opposite. With most school districts asking citizens to approve operating referendums, there is a greater need than ever to cultivate a positive dialogue between voters and their elected school board members.
Many school districts, including those facing budget shortfalls, hire public relations firms to survey the local electorate in order to hedge their bets on the next referendum vote. The school district annual meeting should be replaced with a system of boardto- public communication that would render these kind of surveys unnecessary.
The state needs to help, too, in making school-to-citizen dialogue easier. It has created an overly complicated, Byzantine system of school finance that only a handful of people in any school district understand. That needs to end. The state should vastly simplify how schools are funded.
Our proposal is straightforward. Make school finance understandable. Schedule public hearings on school district budgets when last year’s spending is audited and next year’s proposed expenditures are finalized. Listen to what the public says and, where prudent, school boards should change their budgets. Serve cookies and milk. Give out door prizes.
One way or the other, the public needs to tell school boards what they want. The school boards need to hear that from the public. The school district annual meeting has proven a poor vehicle for that conversation.
It’s time to kill a dinosaur.
Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
