School Closing Eyed to Help Ease RUSD's Fiscal Woes

Racine Unified School District officials are looking at possibly closing at least one elementrary schools to avert an impending long-term structural deficit in the 2013-14 school year.

Administrators and several Board members discussed the impact of vouchers on their budget 2012-13 budget and future budgets, the possibility of school closures, and the need for a marketing strategy at their Audit Committee meeting held Monday.

, a school that earlier this year but was spared, may be on that list next year because of anticipated budget shortfall. Goodland Elementary was also on that closure list, but it wasn't specifically mentioned at the meeting.

David Hazen, chief financial officer for the district, said part of the reason the district's property tax is increasing in 2012-13 is because of what he calls a “voucher tax,” which will continue to take its toll on future budgets.

Last month, the school district approved the 2012-13 budget, which raised the estimated property tax rate by $.57 per $1,000 equalized value of their property, or 6.42 percent, to $9.51 per $1,000 equalized value. The rate includes "the voucher tax," Hazen said.

On Monday, Hazen explained to the committee that the district would lose $1.2 million in state aid in the 2012-13 budget because students are leaving the district to go to private schools. In addition, because the district can’t count the voucher students in their enrollment numbers, the district appears like a richer school district. This means it will receive less in equalized state aid and in order to maintain the funding for the existing student population at the same level, the cost is shifted onto the property taxpayers.

“That’s an additional few million dollars, and that’s another 20 to 30 cents added onto the tax levy,” Hazen said. “It’s a tax, and we might as well admit it and fix it.”

Open enrollment students, those who transfer out of the school district and into another public school, are handled differently. The district still receives money from the state to pay to the out-of-district school, but the district still gets to count them in their enrollment numbers and it doesn’t skew the formula.

In the 2012-13 school year, up to 500 students can leave the district through the voucher program and in the 2013-14 school year, an unlimited number of students can leave.

“It doesn’t help us with the long-term structural deficit,” Hazen said. “We still have to work through this with the board and make adjustments.

Don Nielsen, board member and chairman of the Audit Committee, said the district would ultimately need to re-evaluate its total elementary school capacity and their total enrollment.

“People have talked about us kicking the can down the road,” Nielsen said. “In a way, yes, we kicked it down the road, but we did so knowing that if we told people we were going to close the school without enough time to prepare, there are consequences there also.”

But Nielsen anticipates the need to close at least one, if not two schools next year and maybe more in upcoming years because of the reduction in enrollment.

“Wind Point is our smallest school and needs a lot of repairs,” he said. “It is a likely candidate to be closed, but there is also a great possibility in my mind that there may need to be another closure that same year. I would like the public to be prepared because it’s going to happen. To me it’s not a question of if (it’s going to happen), it’s a question of when.”

Superintendent Ann Laing told the committee the district also has to market itself better.

“What a lot of people in the general public don’t understand is that we have a lot to offer,” she said. “We have a lot of programs that private schools don’t have…In fact, we have private school students coming to take advantage of our high school programs such as technical education, foreign language and higher-level math. We need to make sure the general public understands that.”

Hazen told the committee that a study session would be held in July and a public hearing would be held in August, but the final budget wouldn’t be approved until October.