GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Green Bay’s school board will vote on a plan on Monday that recommends closing 12 buildings, including 11 schools, but some residents are questioning whether the district has done enough to avoid shuttering schools, including looking into cutting staff.
Leah Weakley moved to the area a year ago so her kids could attend Wequiock Elementary, which specializes in environmental science.
“You just don’t find this type of school anywhere else,” said Weakley.
Wequiock is on the list of buildings that would close under a plan recommended by a task force of 26 community members. The group looked at the issue over four months, and the recommendation would cut operational costs by 15% over 10 years.
Click here to see the full recommendation for the Green Bay Area Public School District’s facilities.
The district is facing a $20 million budget deficit after next school year and one in four classroom seats currently sit empty. That figure is projected to be one in three seats in 10 years if nothing is done. The recommended plan would move it to one in five seats, according to the taskforce.
“I guess I’m just frustrated with the transparency during the taskforce and all the plannings with the district,” said Weakley.
Weakley recently sent the school district a public records request for job titles, duties and reason for retention during downsizing for all district positions.
The district responded, stating there are 310 unique positions within the district — 114 of them have digital job descriptions, and the descriptions for the other 196 positions need to be located and digitally converted. The district told Weakley compiling all the information she requested would take 196 hours and cost her $4,894.
Weakley was surprised the information wasn’t more readily available.
“They wanted to charge me over $5,000 for records that should be readily available if all the positions had been looked at, if all the options had been exhausted before trying to shut down these schools.”
In two weeks, it will be one year since the district told the school board about a $36 million projected budget deficit for the 2024-25 school year. At that meeting, a graph showed enrollment has declined since 2016-17, while the number of total full-time equivalent employees has been increasing.
At the time, Green Bay Area Public School District Chief Financial Officer Angela Roble said the graph shows the district is heading in the wrong direction.
“That is a major source of why we’re facing a fiscal cliff and facing a structural deficit in the next couple of years,” said Roble during the June 15 meeting last year.
FOX 11 wanted to ask district officials what has been done in the past year to address staffing and to close the gap between employees and enrollment.
The district declined our interview request, saying “a budget update will be presented to the Board at the June 12th Work Session, and with the understanding that the Board will be voting on the Task Force Recommendations on June 5th.”
However, the district’s communications director, Lori Blakeslee, also sent us a power point presented to residents at a table top discussion on May 10. One of the slides lists 17 ways, since last fall, the district has reduced the projected $36 million budget deficit to $20 million. The ways include eliminating or downgrading administrator positions and reviewing all vacancies.
When asked for more specific information, the district sent us a memo sent to the school board in September that states 104.99 full-time equivalent employee jobs were reduced, which included 42 open positions not yet filled. It is unclear if those positions were eventually filled.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data shows three of the district’s 105 administrator positions were eliminated this school year. It is unclear which buildings those positions were taken from, but they were not any of the 26 district-wide administrator jobs.
Overall salaries and benefits took up about 65% of Green Bay’s budget for this school year, which is in line with similar-sized districts. Kenosha, Racine and Appleton all spent between 61% and 66% of their annual budgets on salaries and benefits this school year.
“I agree that changes do need to be made, but I think we need to look at budget first,” said Weakley. “We need to look at all the district positions. I think the facilities is the very last resort.”
District officials have said if nothing is done with facilities, it will lead to forced consolidation, an operational referendum, larger class sizes, reduced programming and class offerings, and staffing reductions beyond attrition.
Any facility changes the school board makes on Monday wouldn’t take effect until after next school year.
