He wasn’t indoctrinated into the old ways.

I have a link to an awesome article found on the Wisconsin Conservative Digest by Weyauwega-Fremont School Board president Steve Loehrke. This is the type of School Board President that Hudson needs. His emphaisis, “How do we maintain or improve the quality of education in Wisconsin while controlling the current and future costs to taxpayers?”

He did just that. Here are a few snippets of the article.

Before I got on the Board, our school district tried three times until they finally received voter approval for a referendum. When I got on the Board, I was told that our district would have to plan for another referendum when the existing one ran out in order to keep our district afloat. Demographics showed that our school district would be switching from an increasing enrollment to a declining enrollment. I have observed that an increasing enrollment hides many financial problems while a declining enrollment emphasizes the problems. Our school district had been running deficits budgets and was depleting its fund balance to pay regular expanses. Our mill rate was one of the highest in the area. Our administrative overhead was one of the highest in the county. Our employees’ health insurance costs were one of the highest in our neighborhood. Our post retirement costs were the highest in our conference. Yet, everyone said they expected another referendum to sustain the bloat. No one wanted to tighten the belt.

Sounds gloomy and familiar, right? Well Mr. Loehrke has had phenominal results.

With proper management, our school district has now had a balanced budget for four years. Four years ago our mill rate of $12.02 per thousand was 43 percent higher than the current rate of $8.38. In the same time frame, the equalized valuation of the taxable properties in our school district has gone up 31 percent while the actual amount of local property taxes collected for our school district has gone down 9 percent. Our mill rate decreased from the highest of all contiguous school districts to the lowest. We now have more money in our reserve fund than the balance of our only remaining loan. Therefore, we are effectively a debt free school district.

So do we need a 17 Million Dollar reserve? Give back 75% of that back to the taxpayers. Why not adopt some of the measures Mr. Loehrke acted upon?

I have a whole list of things we did to balance our budget. For a few examples, first we reduced administrative overhead. Then we combined non-union jobs. I assigned myself to be head negotiator for the district in its union negotiations. We did not implement the QEO. We actually raised the wages of our teachers to one of the highest of our comparable school districts. We kept all class offerings except Driver’s Ed which was available privately. We kept all extracurricular athletic and academic activities. None of our schools closed. When I researched comparable school district’s budgets, schedules, and union contracts, I found out that many other districts could do the same things we have done. The details of all the things we did to move our school district from a financially troubled district to a debt free district would take hours of discussion. My point is that we have proven that schools can operate effectively on less tax money.

Less money! Lets here more.

Pouring more money into education doesn’t automatically help the education of our children. For example, doubling the wages and benefits of our existing teachers doesn’t help the education of our children. They still have the same teachers teaching the same curriculum. In order to make strides in education, we have to make changes in the philosophy of our school. Just this last month our Board approved a new policy which contains an element of accountability for teachers in certain advanced courses. Under the No Child Left Behind act, school districts will have to be accountable to students and their parents. When we passed our new policy with teacher accountability, I soon found out that teacher unions do not like their members to be even partially evaluated based on the results of their teaching ability. Incorporating accountability into teaching is as big a change today as the revenue cap was in 1993. In my opinion, the main reason why teacher unions do not want standardized testing at every grade level is because it makes it easier to implement teacher accountability criteria.

My favorite quote from the article was: “This prevented me from being indoctrinated into the old ways of school districts.” I think that we have been being conditioned for years and years. Start questioning the views and facts coming from Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction (DPI), and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB), Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), and their supporters including our wholly owned subsidiary of WEAC, Governor Jim Doyle in addition to their motives. Let everyone you know the true facts. Vote for some reform in your schoolm don't take "no" for answers when asking questions. Think of the underlying reasons Educrats say what they do. Check out Steve Loehrk's suggestions for improving school's and ACT on them.

You have to read it here.