The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 06/06/2022. The purpose of the meeting was the review the complete community survey results regarding the proposed referendum in the fall. Chief Finance Officer and soon-to-be Superintendent Greg Hartjes, had reviewed the preliminary results during the 05/23/2022 Board of Education meeting. Those results showed strong support for a referendum. Bill Foster from School Perceptions was now presenting the complete results. Those results also showed strong support for a referendum.
School Perceptions was founded in 2022 and across all 50 states had conducted over 850 surveys like the one they conducted for AASD to help districts with strategic planning or referendum preparations.
Mr. Foster briefly reviewed the background information on the survey. It had been mailed out to every community household and the residents could respond either online or by completing the paper application.
They received 5,588 responses which was a response rate of about 12 percent. That worked out to a margin of error of +/- 1.3% which meant the data was statistically sound and would not change if a lot more people responded to the survey.
He said it was important to make sure that seniors were well-represented in the data, which they were for this survey. The 2020 census had them making up 19-20% of the area population, so they were actually a bit overrepresented in the survey. However, he noted that seniors tend to turn out to vote, unlike the 18–24-year-olds, so while the survey was a bit biased it was exactly what they were searching for in terms of representing the seniors well.
89% of the respondents lived within the Appleton Area School District boundaries. The remaining 11% consisted of staff and parents who had open enrolled their children from other school districts. He said the answers from both of those groups were removed from the survey results regarding the funding support questions, but they had been asked to participate so that they could be involved and aware of what was being proposed. An additional 0.3% of respondents were not sure whether they lived inside or outside the AASD boundary, and the answers from those people also were removed from the results of the funding questions.
Mr. Foster broke out the respondents by the municipalities they resided in and stated that he thought they had a good representation from all the municipalities.
Of the respondents, 20% were employees and 40% were parents which was an overrepresentation. In order to remove bias, they separated responses out by groups: staff, parents, and non-staff/non-parent community members.
- Staff represented less than 1% of the community and therefore did not get a lot of votes, but they were communicators and would be talking to friends, neighbors, and parents every day. If staff wasn’t supportive a referendum would be dead in the water. In this case, staff was very supportive.
- Parents represented roughly 25% of the community
- Non-staff/non-parent community members represented about 75% of the community and were the most important group given that they were the majority of voters. Mr. Foster noted that the Board would want to give more weight to the response from this group than the parents and staff given that they made up the majority of voters.
Mr. Foster reviewed the background information that was provided to the survey takers. That included showing an estimate of the impact on property taxes, overviews of the various projects that the district would be pursuing, and an explanation of both the operating referendum and the capital referendum.
He then reviewed the description provided to survey takers for the specific building/capital projects and the survey responses received.
Those capital projects included:
- Building a new elementary school ($36 million)
2. Updating elementary level learning spaces ($13 million)
3. Adding capacity and updating STEM areas at the middle school level ($47 million)
4. Updating the three high schools and building or expanding their fitness centers ($33.8 million)
He then moved on to the background and questions related to annual operating expenses.
Those funds would go toward:
1. Increasing STEM teaching staff ($1.2 million per year)
2. Decreasing class sizes in kindergarten through 2nd grade ($2.2 million per year)
3. Operating newly constructed spaces ($1.6 million)
Altogether, the costs added up to a one-time capital expense of $129.8 million and an ongoing annual operating expense of $5 million.
In the survey, they tried to show both in text and through graphics that those costs would represent an increase in tax of $0.27 per $1,000. A property valued at $100,000 would pay $27 per year. A property worth $200,000 would pay $54 per year. That was the estimated combined tax impact on properties were both referendum questions approved.
After trying to make that clear to survey respondents, they then asked if the respondents would support what was proposed.
- 80% of staff was supportive
- 73% of parents were supportive
- 58 percent of non-staff/non-parent residents were supportive
Using the assumption that non-staff/non-parents made up approximately 75% of voters, parents were approximately 25%, and staff were less than 1%, their combined responses added up to 61.75% support for the referendums.
That did not even take into account those who indicated they were undecided. Mr. Foster explained that their experience had been that more of those people would break “no” than “yes”, but they would pick up some undecided support as well.
Boiled down, a majority of all subgroups supported pursuing a capital referendum, a majority supported pursuing an operational referendum, and, if held today, both proposed referendum questions would likely pass.
He then opened things up for questions.
Board member Jim Bowman asked how the voting here compared with the other referendums that School Perceptions had assisted with.
Mr. Foster responded that the surveys were typically quite predictive. Over the last 12 years in Wisconsin, their surveys had been 95% predictive in terms of how the actual votes went. “The one footnote I would say right now is I’m a little more nervous ’cause when you go to the gas pump and you see a five dollar per gallon, I think that’s a concern. That is a financial headwind that everybody is experiencing so I’m still—we haven’t seen any reason over the last two years where our data has not been predictive, but the economy is changing. There is inflation. There is—I think people are a little more nervous.”
Jim asked if he had any experience regarding how attitudes might change between now and November.
Mr. Foster responded that they typically don’t change much but noted a scandal at a school could affect things. He thought the risk was more regarding things the District couldn’t control such as if the stock market plummeted.
Board member Ed Ruffolo said that Grand Chute, one of the major towns within the school district, was considering its own $135 million referendum for the November ballot, and interest in that was very high. He asked what kind of impact having a $130 million town referendum and a $130 million school referendum on the same ballot might be.
Mr. Foster questioned if, over the last 6 months, people had been aware that Grand Chute referendum was being proposed and did they factor it into their answers on AASD’s survey? If they didn’t, the fact that there were two referendums probably wouldn’t help AASD. At some point people would say they couldn’t afford both so would vote against one or the other, and some people might decide that because they can’t afford both that they were going to vote against each.
Ed also noted the state of the economy and the high level of inflation which was something that had not been experienced for 40 years. He asked if there was a way for them to get a better handle on “it” [I took that to mean “community sentiment”] as they got closer to the referendum.
Mr. Foster thought the answer was probably “no”. If the board decided to move forward with a referendum, then they would have to get it approved in August at the latest. He didn’t think things would change so much during that time, and that if something happened that it would be in September, October, or even November. By that point, the Board would have already set their course.
Jim Bowman asked what percentage of the voting population lived in Grand Chute versus Appleton. Mr. Foster didn’t know, but he did point out that 17% of the survey responses came from Grand Chute, so if response percentages lined up with community size Grand Chute would be a little less than 1/5th of the voting block while Appleton would be around 2/3rds.
Board member Pheng Thao asked if there was any idea why people responded “undecided”.
Mr. Foster answered that there were two reasons. (1) Some people can never make up their minds regardless of what data they might receive. (2) Some people, particularly in Wisconsin, are just nice, and they don’t want to say “no”, so they say they’re undecided instead. He noted that they hardly ever do a survey with less than 10% being “undecided”, and ultimately. more undecides would break “no” than “yes”.
Board President Kay Eggert mentioned that there was an option on the survey for people to leave comments. She asked if Mr. Foster could share anything about the themes of those comments and if they indicated why people were supporting or not supporting the referendums.
He responded that they had not finished their comment theme analysis yet. He typically advises school boards to not try to use comments to set strategy. They are helpful to read and understand, but boards would drive themselves crazy if they looked at comments and tried to take specific action based on them.
Kay asked if the comments would be useful in helping the District communicate about the referendum.
Mr. Foster said they were. The comments might highlight misinformation that the public was worked up about. He had seen districts be able to clarify that something was a myth or was untrue. The comments helped with communicating with the public and understanding if there was potentially a frustration going on.
Board member Deb Truyman pointed out that the referendum was for a set amount but costs weren’t staying the same. She asked what would happen if the costs to do the things laid out in the referendum exceeded the referendum money.
Chief Financial Officer Greg Hartjes answered that the District had been working with Hoffman Planning and Design to prepare estimates. Hoffman put a lot of time into the estimates they made and built in a 15% contingency for inflation. The numbers in the survey were very generous in terms of the dealing with the possibility of inflation.
Mr. Foster added that, if the referendums were approved, the District would not get any more money so they needed to be sure that they could do the projects with the money that was approved.
Board member Kris Sauter returned to Kay’s questions about the open comments and asked if some survey respondents had offered other suggestions for items they hoped might be included in a referendum.
Mr. Foster was not the person who did the comment analysis and so could not answer the question, but he would ask them to look for that specifically.
View meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CEQKEX50AA78
View meeting video here: https://youtu.be/SQhJDp6PQss
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