A little-told story from the recent election is the change happening across Wisconsin as citizens voted to increase their property taxes to pay for local schools.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2018 was another record year for school districts to pass referenda. State law imposes caps on school spending, so voters must approve referenda to exceed their spending limits to fund property tax increases for their local schools.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, citizens approved at least $1.3 billion more for schools across Wisconsin in last Tuesday’s election. These decisions by local voters will result in higher property taxes in the coming years.

Why did so many citizens vote to increase their taxes to pay for schools? Programs cut, new fees, fewer opportunities for students and delayed maintenance are all examples of why voters chose to increase property taxes.

Recent numbers from Kids Forward, a nonprofit children’s advocacy organization, explained in stark detail why voters across the state chose to help schools by paying more in the least-favorite type of tax: property tax.

Kids Forward reported between 2012 and 2019, Wisconsin will spend a cumulative $3.5 billion less in state aid to schools than if the state had stayed at the 2011 funding level.

This decline in state spending is the result of a series of decisions over the past eight years, including a dramatic increase in taxpayer subsidies to private schools.

While many schools face less state aid, local costs are going up. Teachers are leaving. Schools have new expenses, like improving student safety and replacing outdated technology. This means budgets today are very different than ten years ago.

Further, changes in student needs are occurring at a rapid pace in our state. Communities have more students in poverty, students with special needs, English-language learners, and students experiencing trauma and suffering from mental illness.

State spending for schools has failed to keep up with increased needs for students facing special challenges. For example, the state funds only 26 cents on the dollar for special education needs. But federal law requires all special education needs be met. As a result, general education money is used for students with special needs. This forces schools to divert money from all students to pay for the increased special education needs.

We're working on a new collaborative social media curation tool and will be collecting election news here. If you'd like to help out, use the contact form on the site and let us know.  

Now that you have voted - you have voted, right? you are probably wondering how you find out who won. State-wide, the AP collects data from various counties and reports results. Many news organizations in the state are AP members, and so will have access to the returns. If you are interested in local results, it's usually fastest to look at the elections on your own county website. We've listed some of our favorite links below. More will be coming throughout the day. Note that Wisconsin does not collect unofficial election night results and post them on any of the state-run sites.

OR - watch the live streaming on our front page from WQOW Television.

As we head into the election tomorrow, let's review the increasingly obnoxious campaign trends of the last few weeks. We all get trained to not call campaign statements lies. Let's face it, candidates of all parties are prone to stretch a point while campaigning, and to cast themselves in the best light possible, and their opponents in the worst.

This year, though, something is different. Though I always dread the onslaught of campaign commercials in the weeks before the election, I'm now torn between hitting the mute button on the remote and listening in rapt attention to forthcoming calumnies. True desperation has set in on the campaign trail, resulting in fanciful spin, interesting interpretations, and flat-out lies. Candidates are acting like standup comics suffering from flop sweat. They're saying anything they can think of that might stick to voters. There are not enough fact-checkers in the world to keep up with this.

Of course, many of the biggest whoppers are coming from someone who is not even a candidate, but is acting like one. The president has cast this election as a popular vote on his performance, and many now see it as that. He has gone across the country holding campaign rallies and throwing red meat to his base, particularly employing racist dog whistles and fear tactics to drum up support. No exaggeration is too big. He claims his "wall" is being built and is funded. Other times he has threatened to shut down the government if he doesn't get the funding. He has sent soldiers to the border to stop the "invasion" of asylum seekers and now wants to throw away long-standing laws and policies on handling applicants for asylum. Of course, lies and exaggerations are no stranger to the Trump presidency, but his rate of untruth has increased markedly in recent weeks, setting a "personal best" a few days ago. He continues to call the press the "enemy of the people" whenever these prevarications are pointed out. In the last 24 hours the major TV networks have stopped running his most recent ad spreading fear from the border due to the dog-whistle racism of the ad. When Fox won't run a Republican ad, you know the party has gone too far. 

This all of course spreads down-ballot. In our governor race Scott Walker continues to fly around the state to campaign....

Last night's Nightline program featured the dairy crisis in Wisconsin. Watch local farmers, including Farmer's Union officer Sarah Lloyd as they discuss the dairy crisis, the current administration, and the upcoming election. 

“Hard to wrap my head around,” the woman shared as she considered Foxconn. Just what do big budget decisions mean to us?

Work has begun on crafting the next state budget. Over the next few months, this work will continue in earnest. One hefty unbudgeted expense added to upcoming budget math is a large taxpayer funded payment to a foreign corporation.

Foxconn is the Taiwanese company building a manufacturing plant in southeast Wisconsin. To lure the company to our state, majority lawmakers and the governor created the largest state corporate give-away in American history.

The first big Foxconn payment, nearly $470 million, will come out of our next two-year budget. There is no pot of money set aside for this payment. Budget writers are faced with three choices: increase borrowing, increase taxes, or take money from other parts of state government.

When you consider the trade-offs lawmakers must make in the next budget, it is helpful to think of our tax dollars (mostly income and sales tax) like a checking account that pays for five big items. About eighty-five percent of our general fund money goes to pay for health care, K-12 education, colleges and universities, corrections and local government. Money for roads and bridges are in a separate fund.

All five areas of these areas are challenged; by chronic underfunding, growing caseloads, rising social problems (like drug addiction) and shifting demographics (for example, an aging population).

What kind of budget trade-offs must be made by budget writers to absorb the new money commitments made to Foxconn? Let’s start with the largest part of the general fund: K-12 education.

Our children’s education makes up about a third of the general fund spending. This includes the private subsidies known as vouchers. While public spending for private schools has grown dramatically, overall education revenue as a percent of our budget has steadily dropped. Over the past 15 years or so, Wisconsin moved from spending a little more than forty percent to spending less than a third of our general fund on schools.

Reviewing work by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB), one can easily see that money to public schools has still not been fully restored from the deep cuts in state aid made in the governor’s first budgets.

Looking forward to the next eight years, Wisconsin is committed to sending over two billion dollars to Foxconn. To give some context to these payments, consider this – the estimated payments to Foxconn for five of the next eight...