Planning surrounding a potential Appleton Area School District referendum has been discussed at both the November 22, 2021 Board of Education meeting as well as the most recent meeting on December 13, 2021.
On November 22, AASD Chief Financial Officer Greg Hartjes reviewed the draft of a potential referendum timeline.
September 30 and October 11, 2021: During the Board of Education work sessions on those days, they discussed the possibility of holding a referendum in either November or April of the 2022-23 school year. With the approval of the Board, a Core Planning Team drafted a timeline specifically for a November referendum.
November 18, 2021: They reached out to the school principals and asked them to reevaluate and update the information that had been prepared by a planning group several years ago when the district first started exploring the possibility of a referendum. The principals sent back any changes they wanted to make regarding the needs at their buildings.
Per Greg: “And what we got back is that they don’t have any changes. They recognize that we still have elementary capacity challenges on the north-east side of our district. We continue to see increased needs from our students. We have more students with special education needs. We have more students with English learning needs, and those needs are getting more significant. So, we need spaces to go along with those needs and to support those students. In addition, obviously nothing has changed with our outdated classrooms and our outdated spaces, especially at some of our schools like Wilson and Kaleidoscope which are over 90 years old. So, they reaffirmed what we already thought we knew, but it’s important for us to have that information as we go forward.”
November 22, 2021: As the timeline called for, they were at that very meeting presenting the timeline to the Board of Education.
November 2021: Over the next several weeks, the core team was going to refine some project strategies, define needs and challenges, and gather some community input. They were going to bring together the Future Needs Advisory Committee from two years ago, bring them up to date on where they were at today, and ask for their input.
December 13, 2021: They planned to come back to the Board of Education and give them more specific details around STEM, 6th grade moving to the middle school level, the possibility of staffing increases to decrease class sizes at the kindergarten through 2nd grade level, and have some discussions around right-sizing in the district. He said that they needed to look at how enrollments have changed across the district over the last two year, at general needs of schools, and at some of the charter schools that are currently in rented space.
January 3 & 4, 2022: They would hold their first focus groups. Each school would provide one representative staff member and one representative parent, and they were also going to get some community members at large. They anticipated 60-70 members total across both of those days.
January 10, 2022: They had a STEM workgroup currently working to define the district’s vision for STEM. They have been talking about staffing, reconstructing existing STEM spaces, and constructing new Stem spaces. That work would be completed by January 10.
January 10, 2022: They would share with the Board of Education all the feedback they got from the first focus group sessions.
January 17 & 18, 2022: They planned to hold a 2nd set of focus group sessions. [Note: it turned out that January 17th was MLK day, so they ended up deciding to only hold one large focus group session on the 18th.]
January 24, 2022: They would provide an update to the Board of Education on the January focus group session.
January, 2022: The core team was going to take the feedback from the focus groups to use it to draft a community survey. Greg noted that this would be the first opportunity they would have to pause the referendum process if they felt that was necessary. Otherwise, they would move forward in crafting the survey. They actually had one ready to go a year and a half ago, but they paused at that time.
February 14, 2022: They’ll bring the survey to the Board of Education to review.
March 7, 2022: The Board of Education will approve the survey.
April 2022: The survey will be emailed to AASD staff and parents and mailed out to the approximately 44,000 households in the community. He said they were using a company called School Perceptions which has a lot of experience with these types of community surveys. [He didn’t mention if they were taking any steps to make sure that emails were not sent to AASD staff who live outside the district or to the parents of students who have open enrolled from outside the district since neither of those groups would be eligible to actually vote in a referendum regarding AASD.]
April/Early May 2022: The survey deadline will end and School Perceptions will create reports.
May/Early June 2022: Survey results presented to Board of Education.
June/July 2022: If they decide they are ready to move forward, a core team will work on finalizing the referendum questions. He noted this was the second point at which they could pause the process depending on the feedback they receive from the community.
August 8, 2022: If they decide to move forward with a resolution, the Board of Education would approve the language.
September/October 2022: The core team, administrators, and staff members would try to communicate as best they could with the community about the referendum questions.
November 8, 2022: The referendum would be held.
He reiterated that if at any point they felt that needed to pause the process, they could do that and that there was a referendum possibility in April of 2023 which would give them 5 more months to do whatever planning they needed to do.
Board member Deb Truyman asked if the focus group meetings would be open to the public. Her recollection was that they were but that the public would be limited to observing and not participating.
Greg answered that she was correct. They would be open to members of the public who wanted to sit in and listen.
During the December 13 Board of Education meeting Greg provided an update on the Future Needs Advisory Committee.
He explained to the Board that that committee, which had last met in December of 2019, was brought back together on 1207/2021 to provide feedback on a potential referendum. Their work had been used to give direction to the Board and the leadership team two years ago on a potential referendum.
During that 12/07 meeting, Superintendent Judy Baseman and Greg had reviewed the committee’s work from 2019 and asked them if anything had changed about how they viewed the potential referendum projects now vs when they had last met. The response was that nothing had changed other than perhaps the urgency of needing these projects. They felt that two years ago the district needed to modernize its schools to better meet the needs of its students and certainly now two years later they still had those needs.
Per Greg, “They also felt that with the minimal tax impact that a potential referendum would have, our student needs may warrant us asking our community for more than originally discussed.” [He did not give any details onto how much more they wanted to ask or how an increase in the amount asked for would influence what currently was deemed to be a “minimal tax impact”.]
He said they asked the committee to consider the possibility of adding recurring funds to reduce class sizes in grades kindergarten through 2nd grade as well as to add STEM staffing at the elementary and middle school levels. The committee was very supportive of both those concepts, especially the reduction in class sizes. They did ask, “Why stop at 2nd grade? We know we have needs in grades 3-12. Why don’t we look at reducing class sizes all the way through grades 12?”
The committee also reiterated the need for AASD to keep “equity” in mind. And Greg stated they certainly would do that.
The committee preferred a November referendum due to their perception of urgency, because a successful November referendum would allow the district to potentially have new spaces available in the fall of 2024 whereas if they waited until April of 2023, they wouldn’t be into new spaces until the fall of 2025. He reiterated that there was a sense of urgency.
He finished up his report by stating that they didn’t intend to bring the Future Needs Advisory Committee together again, but they did plan to gather more input from community members, staff members, and parents during the focus groups that are scheduled for early January.
He then opened things up for questions.
Deb Truyman asked what was meant when the committee said they wanted to “keep equity in mind”.
Greg answered that they wanted to make sure that they didn’t just build a new elementary school in the newest part of town while not looking at all the other spaces in the district. They wanted every student to be impacted by the referendum. That’s what they meant by equity.
Board member Jim Bowman was pleased the committee endorsed smaller class sizes. He understood that doing it from kindergarten through 12th grade would be hugely expensive. He was interested in finding out what the community’s support for that was.
Greg noted that it cost approximately $800,000-$900,000 per year to reduce class sizes in an additional grade. They had originally looked at including 3rd grade in the class reduction plan, but due to the cost decided not to. In addition to the cost, they would also need additional classrooms, and they’re already strapped for classroom availability. That was one of the reasons why they were just looking at kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade.
Board member Ed Ruffolo pointed out that earlier this year when they had been talking about how to spend ESSER funds they had a discussion about using that toe perhaps permanently reduce class sizes, but, at the time, the response had been that the academic studies seem to indicate that it was more effective and resulted in better outcomes to have additional supports in the classroom than it was to reduce classroom size. Now they were talking about using referendum money to reduce classroom sizes. Those two positions didn’t seem to reconcile with each other and he asked for clarification.
Greg answered that the desire for smaller classes came out of discussion that were held more recently with principals regarding the successes they “felt” they had last year when class sizes were smaller. The desire for smaller classes sprang from their own experience and looking at what they could do to meet the needs of students when they have 20 students in the classroom. He specifically mentioned literacy interventions and the ability to have 4-5 students with an interventionist while the classroom teacher handled the other 15 students.
[His answer didn’t seem very convincing to me. They had all of these ESSER funds which would not have added to the burden on taxpayers and they opted to not use them to reduce class sizes, while pointing to studies backing up that decision. Now, based on successes they “felt” they had, they want to saddle taxpayers with debt so they can reduce class sizes, an action they declined to do earlier this year. It would be more persuasive if they had actual student scores to point to as proof that these smaller class sizes improved student scores.]
Ed asked if they felt that it was most effective and would result in the greatest return on investment to target the early learnings with the classroom sizes.
Greg answered that they did.
Elementary level Assistant Superintendent Nan Bunnow jumped in and said that research related to lower-class sizes shows that it does make a difference if they change how they’re teaching. If they continue to teach to the whole group then they will get the same result. At their Achievement Gap Reduction schools they’re having staff working with a work group on how to change instruction and how to differentiate and work in smaller groups, particularly with guided reading groups, working one on one with students, and looking at math workshops. She said that was the key. Smaller class sizes did make a difference, but they had to change how they were teaching, which she said they were doing. She said that research had shown that getting those foundational skills at the lower level did provide the biggest bang for your buck.
[Again, none of that seemed persuasive. She very plainly stated that reduced class sizes in and of themselves would do nothing unless the teachers changed the way they were teaching and yet, for some reason, AASD is still wanting the taxpayers to fund smaller class sizes even though it has not yet demonstrated returns from a change in teaching styles. AASD has had declining student scores for a number of years, even predating the pandemic. It seems to me that, before asking the taxpayers to throw money at an intervention that Assistant Superintendent Bunnow fully admitted does not do anything in and of itself, the district should demonstrate several years of improvement as a result of the new teaching techniques. Then, only after that improvement has been demonstrated, would it make sense to ask the taxpayers for money to reduce classroom sizes as a way of potentially adding to the benefit of the altered teaching styles. If the district can’t demonstrate any improvements due to changing the way they’re teaching, then based on what Nan Bunnow said, spending money to reduce class sizes would be a waste of taxpayer resources.]
There was a brief discussion about the January focus group sessions and then the Board moved on to other business.
View the 11/22/2021 Board of Education meeting here: https://youtu.be/eE0AOK3OE8E
View the 12/13/2021 Board of Education meeting here: https://youtu.be/OVghHVLCOjM
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