Wisconsin After Recall
The Wisconsin recall battle is not just a political story. It’s a story about painful change coming to a troubled state.
In March of this year I visited my hometown, Spooner, Wisconsin -- population 2, 700. Spooner’s school system has about 1,300 students (which may seem high for a city that small, but Spooner’s school district is 550 square miles – which gives you a sense of just how rural the area is). The district is low income, with a per capita income of $22,700 a year.
The collapse in state revenues after 2008 up-ended the local school system. The state law was written expecting a three percent increase in the 2011-2012 budget, but that was changed to an estimated five percent decrease in January, when the new budget was passed in Madison. The district had prepared for the possibility of no increase, but hadn’t foreseen such a precipitous drop.
Budget cuts in Spooner would have had to follow, no matter what was done in Madison. But without Gov. Walker’s new law, the district could not have reduced teacher salaries. It would have had to find its savings by cutting programs or removing teacher positions.
However, the jarring adjustment in teachers’ salaries and benefits did not come without an equally jarring shakeup in Spooner’s school. When I interviewed local school superintendent Dr. Donald Hack, he pushed a list across his desk toward me:
“These are the names of teachers that have declared their retirement.”
Not knowing what the future would bring, 16 teachers had decided to quit under their current contract. With such a significant drop in the number of teachers, the district is expecting to hire as many as eight or nine new ones to fill the void.
“Is that weird? We’ve got to cut almost a million dollars from the budget, but I’m gonna hire people back.” said Dr. Hack.
Gov. Walker’s bill shook up Spooner’s teaching corps, but also enabled the school to partially close a budget gap and control long-term growth in payroll costs. It also sent unintended shock waves through the local economy of the town.
“It did address a real problem” said one small business owner, who preferred not to be named, “annual raises after annual raises, and increased benefits… coupled with decreased funding from the state and federal level, and then failed referendums at the local level just made this unsustainable. He allowed us to go in and make some cuts that the unions were just not allowing us to do. [Gov. Walker] allowed us to look at the school district in the same way that a business owner would look at a business.”
Even so, this business owner worried that the erosion of union power could leave a gap in the ability of teachers to be represented fairly. “You look at a small district the size of Spooner. Can one principle viably evaluate that many teachers?” Although he does not care for public unions in their current form, he did suggest that teachers may eventually need to organize at a local level in order to represent themselves before the administration.
Each year class sizes shrink in the school district. The total number of children enrolled in the district has declined 20 percent over the past ten years. Unable to find higher paying jobs, young people are migrating to more metropolitan areas, while retirees replace them, attracted by the lower cost of living and the picturesque countryside.
This dual trend means that rural areas are increasingly graying areas, with a labor force that won’t attract high paying industries. It also means that any appetite for raising new revenue to maintain or expand services locally is likely to be sparse - and that upheavals like the fight in Wisconsin will soon spread through Middle America.
