A referendum on the invaluable gift of education

The Appleton Area School District needs money and I can give you 33 years worth of reasons I think we taxpayers should give it to them.

That’s how long I’ve been sending students to Appleton Public schools — including hundreds of parent teacher conferences, book reports, math assignments, science projects, concerts and athletic events.

In those years, I have met so many teachers who have gone out of their way to meet the needs of their students I could not possibly name them all. There’s the special ed teacher who connected to a traumatized young boy through his love of potatoes; and the grade school music teacher who, with her friend the art teacher, taught little kids to share their gifts with such confidence and joy you just know they could summon either in times of stress in the days and even years ahead; the middle school teacher who regularly ate lunch with a struggling student just to give him time to decompress.

In a world that changes faster than we can even type the letters AI, education remains increasingly essential. Strong schools don’t just benefit students, they also lead to healthier communities. We all know this.

Appleton currently has the sixth largest student population in the state, but ranks near the bottom in per-student funding. According to information in the district’s most recent survey, the amount of state funds public schools receive from the state used to be adjusted for inflation. That stopped in 2009. Had the inflation adjustment continued, Appleton would have an additional $53.5 million this year.

Despite the cuts they made to budgets, staffing and employee benefits, the Appleton Area School District is facing a $13 million shortfall this year.

The survey asks participants to mark any reductions they believe the district should make, but the list is alarming.

Close/consolidate elementary schools? Delay updates to classroom materials and tech? Increase class size? Reduce middle/high school course offerings? Reduce mental health services like counseling, social work and nursing? Reduce elementary music and all fine arts at the middle and high school levels? Reduce athletics and extracurricular activities?

I don’t want our district to have to consider any of those options.

The referendum surveys are due today, but the school board won’t decide on the referendum until January. If you, like me, lost the survey they sent to your house and you still want to participate you can do what I did. Contact the school board and ask them to send you a unique link via email. You still have time to do this today.

Alternately, you could just contact the board directly and let them know you would support a referendum and would like to see one on the April ballot.

We’re lucky to have such an excellent school system here in Appleton and I hope we can all lean in a little to sustain it.