The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 05/23/2022. During the meeting they received a brief overview of the preliminary results of the community survey that was sent out regarding the potential school referendum.
Chief Financial Officer (and soon to be Superintendent) Greg Hartjes explained that they had emailed the survey to AASD staff and families and then mailed paper copies to the 44,000 households within the boundaries of the Appleton Area School District. They received approximately 5,300 online responses and those were the results that were presented at the meeting. There were roughly 400 more paper survey results that were returned which were not included in the preliminary results.
Bill Foster from School Perceptions was scheduled to provide a full and more detailed report on all of the results during the 06/06/2022 Board of Education meeting.
The survey consisted of 8 questions. The first 4 questions pertained to the capital referendum which would include the construction of a new building and the remodeling of multiple existing buildings.
Question 1: Would you support a capital referendum to build a new elementary school?
- Yes: 64.8%
- No: 21.1%
- Undecided 14.1%
Question 2: Would you support a capital referendum to update the elementary schools?
- Yes: 72.1%
- No: 17.9%
- Undecided: 10%
Question 3: Would you support a capital referendum to update the middle schools?
- Yes: 69%
- No: 19.7%
- Undecided: 11.3%
Question 4: Would you support a capital referendum to update the high schools?
- Yes: 62.9%
- No: 23.6%
- Undecided: 13.5%
The next 3 questions pertained to the operation referendum which would provide ongoing, yearly funding to pay for expanded staff and building expenses.
Question 5: Would you support an operational referendum to expand STEM instruction?
- Yes: 72.4%
- No: 16.1%
- Undecided 11.5%
Question 6: Would you support an operational referendum to provide smaller class sizes at the kindergarten through the 2nd grade level?
- Yes: 73%
- No: 18.6%
- Undecided: 8.4%
Question 7: Would you support an operational referendum to operate new spaces and/or buildings?
- Yes: 69.9%
- No: 18.6%
- Undecided: 11.5%
The final question was an all-encompassing question that asked respondents how likely they would be to approve both the proposed operational and capital referendums. The question also explicitly noted the amount of annual tax increase property owners would experience because the District wanted to make sure that voters understood what the cost would be.
Question 8: Would you support both proposed operational and capital referendums to fund the recommended plan? As a result of the District paying off past debt obligations, approval would represent an estimated annual tax increase of $39 for each $100,000 of a home’s value over the current level.
- Definitely yes: 41.6%
- Probably yes: 26.4%
- Undecided: 11.3%
- Probably no: 7.9%
- Definitely no: 12.8%
Mr. Hartjes noted that, when talking with School Perceptions, he had been told that in general, approximately 1/3 of undecided respondents go on to vote “yes” and 2/3 turn into “no” votes.
The next step in the process was to have Bill Foster from School Perceptions come present the results to the Board of Education on 06/06/2022. He would break the data down further than what was preliminarily presented, separating out responses by staff, families, and non-family/non-staff community members.
The Board would also need to make a decision on whether to move forward or not. The deadline for that decision was the end of August, but they intended to put it on the agenda for the meeting at the end of July so that they could make sure there was plenty of time to answer questions and address concerns.
Board of Education President Kay Eggert asked if the survey results would be posted publicly to BoardDocs. Mr. Hartjes responded that they were going to wait until after 06/06/2022 when the full results that included paper responses were presented.
Board member Ed Ruffolo asked if they were satisfied with the number of responses they had received.
Mr. Hartjes said they absolutely were. They would have needed just under 1,000 responses in order to be statistically relevant, but were going to end up having around 5,700 which was a very strong number. He went on to say that Bill Foster felt that the survey was 99% accurate and felt it was best to consider a fall vote while this information was fresh in everybody’s mind because the thing that sometimes causes people to change their vote is that they forget about the issues surrounding the vote.
Mr. Hartjes said everything was very positive in terms of the response that they wanted. “And I don’t think it should surprise us. We know our community supports education, and so we’re excited to see these numbers certainly.”
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CE5LLZ562059
View full meeting video here: https://youtu.be/eLRIBgk5UDQ
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