Shawano School District $54.5 referendum fails. April 3, 2024. PC: Fox 11 Online
(WTAQ-WLUK) — The Shawano School District is looking at what’s next after its $54.5M referendum failed Tuesday night at the polls.
Shawano School District’s Superintendent, Kurt Kirzan, says the process of getting the referendum on the April ballot started more than a year ago.
In a perfect world, a $107M referendum would have updated classrooms and labs, athletic facilities, added a daycare, and replaced the 70-year-old middle school building, among other things. But, after months of meeting with community members, it became clear that the community was more likely to pass a referendum with a smaller number attached to it.
“When we looked at the $54.5M referendum, about 40% of that was for critical maintenance needs, looking at infrastructure pieces so HVAC, water heaters and things along those lines, just day-to-day pieces to keep our building operating,” Kirzan says.
Kirzan says the smaller referendum still fit well because it would’ve allowed for those most critical needs to be fixed, but also meant the school district portion of the mill rate would not have increased.
The referendum, he says, is all about planning for the future.
“Shawano, like most districts in the state of Wisconsin, are in declining enrollment, but Shawano as a community is growing. There’s new housing development and a lot of industry coming to Shawano so we wanted to make sure that we were positioning the district for an increase or once that decline levels off and starts coming up so that as our purpose we wanted to make sure we maintained our buildings but better utilized the space within them.”
However, when Tuesday’s election results came in, the referendum failed by just a few votes.
“I was disappointed, I saw the numbers come out and did the math quick ad saw 75 votes was the difference so, yeah, there was a lot of work done by the school board and our and our administrative team so just thinking about all the people and the amount of hours we put in to share the information, I was disappointed by the results.”
Despite the failure, the district is looking forward and not giving up.
“Because a lot of the needs of the $54.5M were maintenance, those haven’t gone away, so, were looking at a plan to address those needs and hear from the community what some of the other needs to move forward with,” he adds.
“So, we’ve scheduled three sessions already where we’re asking community members to come in and provide us input and feedback, what parts of the plan we should keep and how we can put a plan together where we can be successful in November.”
Throughout the process of creating the referendum, the district created a 10-year facility plan to identify the most critical needs that need to be addressed sooner compared to items that can be handled further down the road. Right now, Kirzan says there are a few big ticket items that need to be handled between now and three years down the road.
“There are some boilers and chillers that are limping along right now, and don’t have parts to repair some of them, we also have a crack in our pool – it isn’t leaking yet, but that would be something were going to have to look at how we would address.”
Upcoming meetings for community input will be held at the Shawano Community high School library on Monday April 15, Wednesday April 17, and Tuesday April 23 from 5:00pm to 6:30p.m.
Kirzan says he’s going to be listening for what pats of the project people were in favor of, and for the parts of the plan that people may need more information on.
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