Spring referendum student benefits and cost opportunities
How more transparent, thorough planning, avoiding subsidies, and paying market rates can cut down the $13,500 average household cost of an important investment in Sheboygan Falls students
The upcoming Sheboygan Falls School District April 1 referendum includes important upgrades and maintenance in infrastructure, science, tech, athletics, culinary, special ed, and more. By thoroughly modernizing our 56-year-old high school, it better provides an environment for students to feel proud and engaged to learn in. Even at $70 million, it’s an important investment, although its cost could be reduced with more thorough planning and by avoiding subsidies.
As it stands, the cost of referendum averages about $13,000 per household, sourced from higher home property taxes or rent plus the passed-through price, wage, and value impacts of higher business property taxes.1 The additional taxes would span several years, depending on factors like tax rates, operational costs, and how long until the next referendum.
The school district’s tax impact calculator shows $58.75 per year. See this explainer for how that relates to the average cost per household.
Since 2017, the year following the last referendum, annual per-student spending by the school district has outpaced inflation by about $1,400.2 Passing the referendum would raise taxes still further.
Career & Technical Education
The largest referendum project is expanding and updating space for Career & Technical Education. The trades offer a rewarding career path for many students. For example, the median 40-year career income of welders, machinists, and electricians exceeds the high school diploma baseline by 6%, 10%, and 33%, respectively, which translates to an extra $100,000 to $600,000 in career earnings.3 The CTE upgrade would foster these types of careers by enhancing class offerings and eliminating waiting lists.
At $24 million, however, the plan is very expensive – 57% of the cost of the entire middle school after adjusting for inflation ($30.9M in 2016, equivalent to $42.8M in 2026).4 Still, the value to students is even greater. The question is whether a similar result can be achieved at a dramatically lower cost.
Renovating would reuse the existing space, which could provide considerable savings, but would still incur its own unique costs, including site prep for the adjacent hill and ravine and creating openings in load-bearing walls to expand classroom sizes. It would also require partnering with a business or another school for a semester to provide an alternate learning space while construction is underway. The temporary costs would also have to cover transportation.
By using new construction, the referendum provides optimal room layout and corridor sizing and positions the CTE area in the front of the building, providing visibility to draw more students into technical fields.
The district’s planning should address the tradeoffs. It should report the feasibility and cost of renovation versus replacement and justify the selected approach, since either option leaves students well prepared for a career in the trades.
Athletics
A project where the choice for replacement is straightforward is the fitness center. Students and the community will enjoy natural lighting and an openness not possible in its current interior location. The students it attracts to athletics will benefit from the social skills, self-esteem, personal growth, and skill development that extracurricular activities provide.
More nuanced is the case of high school locker rooms. There are three locker rooms: a boys PE room and boys team room, which are adjacent, and a girls PE room. Since adding additional space isn’t practical, to provide a team room for girls would require reconfiguring the space, and since the locker rooms are in need of maintenance anyway, now is a good time to make the investment.
The challenge is to ensure no locker room becomes so small that students no longer have time to shower and change after their activity. Even if the current fad is for some students to not shower, part of the high standards of our district is that every student fully participates in athletics. A locker room design that dissuades students from a full workout due to insufficient facilities would be a step backward. The district’s referendum plan should propose a clear solution.
Childcare
The district currently subsidizes public childcare through buildings that taxpayers built, maintain, and operate. The referendum’s $6 million addition to the elementary school would expand the subsidy by providing more space for 4-year-old childcare.
While childcare subsidies benefit some parents, they discriminate against parents who raise their children at home. By contrast, equitable alternatives like child tax credits support all parents. Subsidies also tend to interfere with efficient allocation of resources, leading to decisions made only because other people are paying.
Although both subsidies and tax credits are outside the mission of the public schools, there is a logistical advantage to co-locating childcare with 4K to avoid mid-day transportation. Is that advantage worth $6 million? Let the free market decide. Offer a long-term, transferable lease agreement that would collect $6 million in rent. If an investor estimates that there’s sufficient value to our community and takes the deal, build the addition, which would have no net cost to taxpayers.
If the answer is “not worth it”, no construction is required so long as the school prioritizes space for K-12 education. The district’s 2023 facilities study concluded, “the overall size of the building and its support spaces is adequate, but the amount of space dedicated to support spaces and outside groups creates pressure on available learning space.” The study calculated a functional capacity of 533 students if outside groups are prioritized or 754 students if not,5 which covers the projected increase from 587 to 731 students.6
A side argument made for an addition is that providing childcare will attract more 4-year-old students, who will then be more likely to stay in the district throughout their K-12 education, which increases the school district’s taxing authority. That extra funding, however, is offset by the additional costs of educating those same students, and that’s before considering that attracting them would cost $6 million.
Safety
Safety is fundamental to our students, teachers, staff, and community. The referendum allocates $7 million towards safety, security, and accessibility. Nowhere is data-driven decision-making more important than planning for safe schools and ensuring that the largest safety impacts get the most attention. Government agencies commonly perform cost-benefit analyses before requiring the public to pay for safety features, for example with seat belts, airbags, car seats, anti-lock brakes, smoke detectors, machine guards, fall protection, and PPE. Our district should do likewise.
Even with the advantage of coordinating the referendum’s fire sprinklers and after-hour access control projects alongside its other projects, the cost and benefit should still be weighed. A helpful indicator is insurance rates. Does the district’s insurance company quote a rate improvement that over the long term pays back the investment?
Schools have a strong track record of personal safety in these areas. For over 75 years, there has never been a fatality from any US high school fire, whether sprinklers were present or not.7 The same goes for access control between a community space like a pool or fitness center and the rest of the school.8 That upgrade is also partially redundant with the district’s brand-new $250,000 security camera system.
A cost-benefit approach helps ensure funds aren’t overtapped to the point that more beneficial safety projects become impractical. For example, due to the era of the high school’s design, it provides little natural light, a key environmental factor for improving not only academic performance, but also safety through better mental health.9 The district should be transparent in weighing its options and assessing the greater good.
Maintenance
Maintaining our schools is important, and in some cases long overdue, with the science labs serving as just one example. Given the ages of the high and elementary schools, the work required is generally not surprising. What may not be expected, however, is its absence from the ordinary maintenance budget. Shifting maintenance to the referendum causes it to be paid for by a separate, additional tax, which effectively lets the district tax more for non-maintenance before reaching the state-imposed revenue limit.
With school spending outpacing inflation by $1,400 per student over the last 7 years, it’s hard to argue that the district is underfunded. We need to ask ourselves if we’re spending correctly. For example, our teacher compensation is 7.2% above state average,10 which totals an extra $1 million per year.11 Does that mean some teachers are being paid above market rate? Would merit pay better follow the market rate while retaining effective teachers? Statewide research in Wisconsin indicates it would.
Important investment
Had the district been paying teachers at the state average and putting the difference into maintenance, there would be much less to do today. However, that doesn’t change the present-day needs of our schools. Although the district can reduce some of the cost with more thorough planning and by avoiding subsidies, most of the work is unavoidable. If the district ends up having to make another referendum attempt, it should select projects in which it can present the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs to provide a clear and thorough case to the community that they are easily worthy of the investment.
Related posts
This article incorporates feedback provided by the school district based on a draft of the article.
Sheboygan Falls School Board meeting minutes, January 16, 2025. Census Reporter district households, February 2025, which used U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2023). Calculation: $70,000,000 ÷ 5,196 = $13,472.
Compares actual spending for 2017-18 and 2022-23 (the latest year DPI data is available for) with 2017-18 adjusted for inflation using CPI-U into 2022-23. These are the data sources for the calculation and for the The Sheboygan Falls School District spending graph:
Years 2008 and later: Wisconsin DPI Comparative Cost Per Member Multi-Year Comparative Cost Summary Data File.
Earlier years: Wisconsin DPI Comparative Cost Per Member, Sheboygan Falls (5278) Profile, Data For Comparative Cost Per Member.
Inflation: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). Each year on the graph shows the indexed value of the 2004 cost per member.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Second Quarter 2023, Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release: full-time workers age 25, high school graduates (no college), median weekly earnings: $889 × 52 = $46,228.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023: 47-2111 Electricians, 51-4041 Machinists, and 51-4121 Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers, median annual wage.
For each trade, the baseline high school graduate median annual income times 40 is subtracted from the trade’s median annual income times 40. The results are:
Welders: +$108,480 (+6%)
Machinists: +$184,480 (+10%)
Electricians: +$614,480 (+33%)
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator calculates the middle school cost of $30.9M in November 2016 to have the same buying power as $40.4M in November 2024. Extending the inflation rate linearly to the planned construction time of November 2026 brings it to $42.8M, of which the $24.2M CTE cost is 57%.
MDRoffers Consulting, Sheboygan Falls School District Community Change & Projections Report, April 2023, p. 36. The enrollment count students in 4K the same as students in K through 4th grade, even though the 4K school day is a half day.
Grok DeepSearch on fatalities attributed to fire.
Grok DeepSearch on fatalities attributed to lack of access control.
Heschong, Wright, and Okura (2002) (PDF) found that over 21,000 students in classrooms with more natural light excelled in math and reading, linking it to improved cognitive and mental well-being, aligning with studies showing improved mood, stress, and cognitive function in the workplace. Lamoreaux and Sulkowski (2019) discuss the impact of environmental design, including how “the absence of natural light can have adverse effects on students, as research indicates that individuals with consistent and minimal exposure to daylight experience more sadness, fatigue, and dysregulated circadian rhythms, all of which are related to well being and psychosocial outcomes”.
Sheboygan Falls School District Retention Report, July 15, 2024, Salary/Benefits Comparison (p. 9). Summing the salary and benefit and dividing local by state calculates to 7.2%.
The sum of total salary plus fringe listed on the Wisconsin DPI Public All Staff Report for Sheboygan Falls School District is $14,267,485, of which 7.2% is about $1 million.