The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 05/12/2025. One of the items they discussed was strategies for how to deal with the District’s increasing deficit. During the 2023-2024 school year AASD had a deficit of over $12 million. For the 2024-2025 school year they approved a budget with a built in $11 million deficit. They did this knowing they had a fund balance that could cover the deficit, but that is only a short-term solution, and they need to come up with new strategies.
This discussion was the first of several such discussions. No action was taken, but both board members Oliver Zornow and Nick Ross expressed a desire to hold a referendum and ask for increased funding from taxpayers before taking steps such as cutting staff.
It was also noted during the meeting that if the District was reimbursed by the state for 60% of its costs for providing special education it would largely take care of the deficit. Per AASD Executive Director of Finance Holly Burr, “If we were able to get close to that, it wouldn’t solve 100% of our issue, but it would solve a whole bunch. We would be we would be looking at about 10% of our adjustment that we’re looking at right now.”
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
The agenda packet for the meeting included a list of questions and points to guide the discussion on how to reduce the deficit. Those included:
- Increasing revenue through things such as state aid, state and federal grants, and local taxes
- Cutting programs and services
- Decreasing non-instructional educators and support staff
- Decreasing operational resources
- Consolidating schools, sharing services, and increasing digital learning models
The plan was for the Board to talk about those various areas over the course of several meetings.
Regarding cutting positions or services, if the District were to achieve $11 million in savings through cuts to staff, they would need to cut between 110 and 150 positions out of the 1,922 staff members employed by AASD. That would be a cut of between 5.7% and 7.8% of total employees.
AASD Superintendent Hartjes told the Board, “We run so lean, and because we’re constantly looking to better support students, it will be very challenging for us to think about, okay, where are we not—what positions in the district are not contributing to the success of students? It’s virtually impossible for us to look at—right?—because we know every one of our positions contributes to the success of students. So, we’re going to have to figure out a way. We’ll certainly look at what other districts are doing.” He noted that 15 years ago when they had to make cuts, they tried to cut positions that were furthest from students. “And so, we didn’t raise class sizes. We didn’t cut teachers. We cut administrators and school counselors and social workers and LMC specialists and interventionists, and we worked our way towards coming up with something that we thought was reasonable.”
[The dynamics of what is happening around this issue at AASD reminded me very much of what Scott Adams described just a couple months ago about what happens when companies need to make cuts. To quote Mr. Adams:
So Dilbert’s company, the CEO’s gonna ask the Pointy Haired Boss to make some deep cuts, but with a scalpel not an axe. How do you think that’s gonna go? Well, let me give you an idea.
CEO to Pointy Haired Boss: “I need to make some deep cuts, gotta cut 20%, and since you’re the manager who knows what everybody’s doing, you can do it with a scalpel, otherwise I’d have to do it with an axe because I don’t know what anybody does.”
So the pointy haired manger goes away and says, “All right. Give me a month to study it, and I’ll come back with some recommendations.” A month later the Pointy Haired Boss comes back and says, “I studied everything, talked to every person who works for me, and we decided that we need more money not less.”
“Okay. The job was to cut 20%.”
“Yeah, I know, but it turns out that when I took the scalpel as opposed to the axe, everything looked like it was necessary. So nothing to cut, and we really need to expand a few things. So I’ll need about 20% more.”]
How changes being made at the federal level would impact local schools was a big unknown at this point. Board member Ed Ruffolo expressed concern about how the proposal to eliminated the Department of education and revert to block grant funding might impact things. He was worried the federal government might direct funds toward vouchers and AASD could lose $6 to $8 million in federal funding.
Superintendent Hartjes indicated AASD was already seeing some grants going away for next year and had to eliminate the positions that were funded by those grants. He indicated some of those grant-funded positions were in areas of mental health support and other services.
It was noted that if AASD was reimbursed by the state for 60% of the cost of special education, it would remove a large part of the deficit. Per Ms. Burr, state statute allowed for reimbursement up to 2/3rds of the cost, but AASD was only advocating for 60%. “That’s what we need. That is not a want; that is a need. If we were able to get close to that, it wouldn’t solve 100% of our issue, but it would solve a whole bunch. We would be we would be looking at about 10% of our adjustment that we’re looking at right now.”
There was some discussion about refinancing the District’s existing debt and whether that might decrease the impact of a referendum on taxpayers.
Both Board members Zornow and Ross expressed a desire to go to a referendum first and only making cuts should the referendum fail. Board member Ruffolo seemed to somewhat agree with that, but he felt that the District should have a backup plan available to provide to the community so they can understand what they would be facing if they voted down a referendum.
Board member Jason Kolpack thought it would be worthwhile to look for efficiencies regardless of a referendum.
View full meeting video here: https://aasd.granicus.com/player/clip/70
View meeting details here: https://d3n9y02raazwpg.cloudfront.net/aasd/9fce25e2-243a-11f0-9f54-005056a89546-2171d860-3ac4-49db-84a5-200d91432c4c-1747160705.pdf
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