Education Week - December 11, 2019 - 17

Last-Ditch Efforts
An active group of parents and
teachers in Palmyra are making
several last-ditch efforts to spare the
district, including selling off one of its
elementary school buildings, providing more services, and doing more
outreach in Eagle in order to retain
more students and asking the county
government to levy a new tax.
"I'm forever seeing unicorns and
rainbows," said Tara LeRoy, a Palmyra mother who has rallied parents to the district's cause. "As long
as people are willing to fight, there's
always hope."
The road to dissolution in PalmyraEagle started a little over a decade
ago when parents started complaining on social media about the influx
of Latino migrant workers, bullying in
the school's hallways, administrative
turnover, and a disjointed curriculum.
There's historically been discord
between the residents in Palmyra, a
rural farming community, and Eagle,
an outer-ring Milwaukee suburb. The
school district, established in 1976,
encompasses both.
"Palmyra and Eagle are eight miles
apart, but worlds away from each

Lauren Justice for Education Week

ticipated in the program in 2010 and
up from just over 2,400 students when
the program first started in 1998.
Funding experts here said that after
K-12 cuts in state and local aid during
the Great Recession, some districts in
this mostly rural state started accepting more open enrollment applications to shore up their budgets with
money from the sending districts.
The loss of students and revenue
has especially hurt rural districts that
are near the high-performing and
wealthy suburban districts surrounding Milwaukee, Green Bay, Racine,
and Madison.
In districts already suffering from
pressure on the farm industry, losing just a dozen students can cause a
$100,000 gap in a strained budget.
More than two-thirds of districts in
Wisconsin have declining enrollment.
"Taxpayers are saying, 'We're done
raising taxes on ourselves to pay for
this, and the districts can't cut anymore, and the costs keep going up, and
there's zero new state aid. The situation here is catastrophic," said Heather
DuBois Bourenane, who leads the
Wisconsin Public Education Network,
a school funding lobbying group.
In Palmyra-Eagle, the logistical,
legal, and fiscal questions around district dissolution are fraught: Where
should the state send the shuttered
district's students? Where should the
57-member teaching staff go? What
should happen to the three buildings?
Which districts should take on the dissolved district's $11 million in debt?
Only two of the surrounding eight
districts, both wealthy suburban districts, want any of Palmyra-Eagle's
students.
The rest of the districts, all mostly
rural, say taking on hundreds of students at once would cause dramatic
budget cuts since the transportation
and special education costs would far
outstrip any of the state or local aid
districts will receive to service the incoming students.

Tara LeRoy, left, and her daughter Bailey, 10, tend their pony at their home in
Palmyra, Wis. LeRoy has joined with other parents in seeking ways the
Palmyra-Eagle district could stave off dissolving because of financial pressures.

other," said Bloom, the district superintendent.
Shortly after the internet rumors
about the school's diminishing quality began, a group of Eagle residents
tried to get a neighboring district to
annex the town's students, but the attempt failed in court.
That's when the district transfers
started, residents say.
Under the state's open enrollment
law, parents who apply can transfer
their child into another school district
if that district approves, as long as the
parents can provide transportation.
School board members and administrators in Palmyra-Eagle scrambled
to change the narrative about the district, replacing the superintendent,
overhauling its curriculum, and hiring a public relations official who
crafted a slick YouTube video touting
the district's offerings.
But they were too late.
"Once the story developed about
our district, we couldn't change it
back," said middle and high school
Principal Kari Timm.
Raising revenue in Palmyra-Eagle
has always been challenging.
A 22,000-acre state forest splits the
district in half, limiting the district's
tax base. And several farms, including the ones that employed migrant
workers, have closed in recent years
leading to an aging and declining
demographic hostile toward any new
taxes. Since 1991, the district has
gone to taxpayers more than 17 times
asking for more revenue. Of all those
requests, voters only approved three.
When students transfer districts,
the state allows the losing districts to
retain some of the per-pupil amount
of state funding for a handful of years
to allow administrators to reduce
costs. But Palmyra was losing so
many students at once that administrators and board members couldn't
keep pace.

Between 2010 and 2018, the district
lost more than $3 million in revenue
when it went from 1,300 students to
a little over 600 students. Another
300 students' families moved out of
the district.
Administrators laid off staff, increased to $3,000 teachers' annual
health-care deductibles, shut down
the district's summer school program, and got rid of their public relations person. Many residents, especially those living in Eagle, feel their
taxes already were too high and that
there was more fat administrators
could cut.
"There's been a lot of financial
mismanagement in this district,"
said Cheri Geraci, a mother from
Eagle who every morning drives
her children just a few miles east to
neighboring Mukwonago, a leafy
suburban school district with some
of the highest test scores in the
state. "The people can't afford to
pay for their medication. They can't
keep taking on more tax increases
like that."
Administrators in Palmyra-Eagle
argue moves like consolidating the
district's two elementary schools or
scrapping its expansive after-school
and sports programs would only result in the loss of more students.
The State District Boundary Appeal
Board made up of school board members from across the state will have to
decide by the end of January whether
to dissolve the district, and-if so-
where to send its students and what to
do with the district's assets and debt.
During one seven-hour meeting in
the middle school's gymnasium last
month, the tension between Eagle
and Palmyra residents was palpable.
Eagle residents sat in folding chairs
on the gym f loor while Palmyra
residents, dressed in Palmyra-Eagle
purple panther gear, filled the gym's
bleachers.

Open Enrollment:
Wisconsin Impact
Participation in Wisconsin's open enrollment program has
ballooned since 1998 when the state began letting parents
send their children-and the per-pupil funding
that goes with them-to districts they don't
live in. This graph shows the student
participation rate and the amount
60,820
of money transferred between
$419
districts in millions of dollars.

37,332
$196

2,464
students
$10 million

1998-99

21,028
$104

2005-06

2011-12

2017-18

SOURCE: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

Palmyra residents accused Eagle
speakers of spreading lies while Eagle
residents accused audience members
of being rude and nasty in front of
their children.
Surrounding districts also were
frank about their reality. They complained about the provision in the
state's funding formula that says
that when a district dissolves, the
school systems that get its students
don't get the full per-pupil costs
until three years after the dissolution. They say that would make it
almost impossible to afford hiring
new teachers, or the $50,000 bus
routes they'd need to add.
"I feel like I'm airing our dirty
laundry, but our story is not that different than Palmyra-Eagle's," said
Patricia Deklotz, the superintendent of neighboring Kettle Moraine

school district, which has 4,000
students. After lopping off a third
of its budget over the last decade
in response to the loss of students,
the district increased its staff 's
single-payer health-care deductible
amount to $5,000.
"District dissolution will soon be a
statewide trend," she said. "Sending
Palmyra-Eagle kids to us will only
hasten the timetable for our district's
insolvency. And then an only larger
student body will be displaced."
Coverage of how parents work with
educators, community leaders, and
policymakers to make informed
decisions about their children's
education is supported by a grant
from the Walton Family Foundation.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

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Education Week - December 11, 2019

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