School Finance & Budget Crisis Resources

We are projecting deficits upwards of $6 million beginning in the 2024-2025 school year. This budget crisis is the result of decades of inadequate funding from the state of Wisconsin, the lingering effects of historic inflation and rising costs of goods and services, implementation of unfunded mandates, and a low percentage of reimbursements on costs associated with providing required special education services to students who qualify.

Wisconsin’s public schools are funded using a combination of state aid and revenue from the local tax base. MTSD receives approximately 2.6% of revenue limit authority from state aid, and 97.4% from local taxes. This is because MTSD is considered “property-rich,” which means that the state sees our school district as having a greater-than-average ability to access funding from the local tax base.

No. Financial challenges are increasingly common among Wisconsin’s public school districts. Since revenue limits were established by the state of Wisconsin in 1994, public school districts have been funded primarily with a combination of state aid and local property taxes. Unfortunately, revenue limits have not kept pace with inflation and since then, 80% of public school districts across the state of Wisconsin have approved operating referenda to maintain adequate programming. 

If the MTSD Board of Education and administration fail to secure an adequate and sustainable source of funding to meet our budgetary needs going forward, the District will be forced to make extremely challenging decisions regarding ways to cut operating expenses. Some of those options include cutting co-curriculars or programming, increasing class sizes, reducing or eliminating administrative/other staff positions, and more.