Education
La Crosse Schools superintendent Engel on playing for private schools bussing, $53 million referendum
School District of La Crosse superintendent, Dr. Aaron Engel, joins to discuss the $53.5 million referendum that’s on the fall ballot, plus changing the school start date to help alleviate added private school costs with bussing.
La Crosse Talk airs weekdays at 6-9 a.m. Listen on the WIZM app, online here, or on 92.3 FM / 1410 AM / 106.7 FM (north of Onalaska). Find all the podcasts here or subscribe to La Crosse Talk PM wherever you get your podcasts.
The state requires public schools to start on or after Sept. 1. But what we discussed was how the school district is required to bus private school students, and the added burden to do that. Private schools don’t have to adhere to the state’s Sept. 1 rule, and that adds to the burden to add bus routes when La Crosse public schools aren’t going.
We also reviewed a bit, the elementary school referendum, and how the public meeting have been attended. The plan is to tear down the Hogan Administration building, built a new elementary school there, upgrade State Road Elementary with eight new classrooms and a new gym, while closing Hintgen, Emerson and Spence.
walden
October 22, 2024 at 4:27 pm
The taxpayers agreed to provide an additional $60 million to the District in a referendum just last fall.
That, after the State agreed to provide record increased funding to public schools with further increases this year.
Now, the District puts price tag of $52 million on a plan to close neighborhood schools in the name of cost reduction. It’s lunacy. The administration has not been honest and both the administration and the school board are too politicized and unskilled to run our schools effectively. Results matter and the District’s results are abysmal.
Vote NO on the referendum.
Yvonne
October 23, 2024 at 6:06 pm
Agree 💯. The administration lies to the taxpayers and the La Crosse school district should bus kids to private schools. Those parents are still paying TAXES for the public schools and tuition.
Libertarian Guy
October 22, 2024 at 7:59 pm
Walden, I agree with you 100%. I hope the community is wise enough to vote NO to this latest boondoggle. You cannot save money by spending money. A brand new shiny building is not necessary when the district already has too many buildings that they have to close some. Most unfortunately, they can do the following: Use taxpayer money to publish flyers and mail these to the entire community twice. They can threaten teachers with layoffs. They can hold as many information sessions as deemed necessary to get a yes vote. WIZM’s Rick Solem has been giving the superintendent a platform every Monday to promote the referendum. They can commit district residents to 20 years of debt in order to make a $54 million referendum sound cheap. And they can do all of this without any organized opposition from taxpayers. I watched the school board meeting last night. The entire board is clearly aligned with the board president and superintendent to spend other peoples money.
I also watch them vote unanimously to change the school calendar to fit their needs. They did this without knowing the percentage of respondents to the survey sent to parents. That is, the superintendent acknowledged they do not know if the response rate was sufficient to be representative of parent views. They did not yet know the views of the teachers in regard to the school calendar. They also did not determine whether the calendar should include a long break during October, a longer break in the spring, or to keep the same breaks the same length so that the school year will end earlier. Despite the unknowns, every single person on the school board voted yes to change the school calendar. There was no mention made of the actual results from the survey and no mention of any comments submitted by parents on the survey. They simply agreed to do the superintendent’s bidding. They said at the board meeting that the school district has to pay the cost of busing students to private schools, and that it will save money if they can match the public school calendar to the private school calendar. However, I have been told that any parent who wants their student to ride the bus to private school, said parent must pay the cost of writing the bus. am sorely disappointed with the current slate of members on the school board.
walden
October 22, 2024 at 10:55 pm
Libertarian Guy, you are correct.
The school board members are willfully ignorant of both District finances and why academic results are so poor. The Administration and school board wants to keep dumping more and more taxpayer cash on the fire in hope results somehow improve. The collective incompetence is astounding.
The prospect of a new school is a “shiny object” to distract the public as they have no plan to right-size the District nor have they made an effort to determine what the right size should be. Student headcount has declined over 20% and the District has done nothing but move chairs around, which saves nothing. The District’s budget gets larger every year even with large student declines.
Yvonne
October 23, 2024 at 6:13 pm
Why should parents who send their children to private school pay extra to have their kids bussed to those schools? Those parents are paying the same taxes as public school parents. That is very unfair and wrong. I don’t have kids in school anymore but the busses can pick up private school kids because they pay taxes for that service.
Sam
October 30, 2024 at 11:38 am
Whatever happened to Save Our Neighborhood Schools? This was a group organized by a couple of Western TC teachers a couple decades ago. Media actually gave them a voice. Signs were everywhere. At that time Emerson was on the chopping block, along with a few other elementary schools in favor of a mega school at Hogan. Engel seems to have found Superintendent Jerry Kemper’s playbook from the early 2000s. Voters did not want it then, nor to we want it now.
We need to look at other cities our size. Oshkosh has about a dozen schools, including 2 high schools. Wausau School District has 2 high schools, 2 middle schools, 13 or more elementary schools. Grant Elementary was built in 1910 and still is in use. Grant is a national historic landmark and looks a lot like Hogan, actually. An older school does not make a school less effective at giving a good education. Many universities, UW-L included, have some buildings that were build around the turn of the 20th Century. My junior high was located inside a Victorian mansion. It was the best school I ever attended.