Many questions, few answers
Gov. Scott Walker wants to end the Chapter 220 integration program. School officials are worried about a cultural and financial impact.
Destiny Huven, an eighth-grader at Bayside Middle School, thought long and hard about where she wants to go to high school next year.
She made a pros and cons list, assigning point values to features she prioritized at several schools. A track program, lots of electives and Advanced Placement classes warranted high points. So did a respectable selection of cute boys.
Ultimately Huven, a Milwaukee resident who has attended suburban schools on the North Shore since kindergarten through a special racial integration program, settled on Nicolet High School — a choice made easier by the fact that Bayside is part of a K-8 district that feeds into the high school.
But Gov. Scott Walker’s 2015-’17 budget could upend Huven’s plans to attend Nicolet through the Chapter 220 program.
The governor has proposed eliminating the long-standing racial integration program, a move that could redirect $60 million in school funding and have a cultural and financial impact on Milwaukee, nearby suburban school systems and districts like Racine, Madison and Wausau.
The proposal has districts analyzing the complicated structure of school funding to try to get their arms around the potential impact of ending Chapter 220.
“Children that have attended school in these districts since 4K will now not have the ability to attend high school with their current classmates.”
Max Dickman, Fox Point-Bayside School Board member
“It’s hard to speculate,” said Bob Lang, director of the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau, which has yet to complete its own analysis of the legislation.
The governor’s proposal calls for phasing out the Chapter 220 program to reflect declining participation by school districts and pupils, according to Walker spokeswoman Laurel Patrick.
Students currently in the Chapter 220 program could participate through graduation, but districts would not be able to accept new students through the program — including Nicolet, which is its own district despite its network of feeder programs like Fox Point-Bayside.
The Chapter 220 program, named after the 1975 law that created it, is called “integration aid” in state budget parlance. Its signature feature is a voluntary school integration transfer program that provides busing for children of color living in the city to attend suburban schools and for white suburban children to attend Milwaukee Public Schools. The goal is to improve racial balance between schools and districts.
Student participation peaked about two decades ago, with close to 6,000 Milwaukee students transferring to suburban schools, and about 1,000 suburban children transferring to city schools. This school year, the program is used by just 1,456 city children transferring to suburban schools and 215 suburban children transferring to MPS.
Another component of Chapter 220 receives less attention, but ties up more money. Millions of dollars of integration aid flow to MPS, Racine, Madison and Wausau to bus district students within the districts. The goal is to achieve better racial balance within district schools.
For this school year, the state estimates total integration aid payments at $60 million. For transfers between districts, about $2 million goes to MPS and $18 million to 22 suburban districts for cross-district transfers. For transfers within districts, the state estimates $30 million to MPS, $9 million to Racine and about $700,000 split between Madison and Wausau.
Where would money go?
Tracing the financial implications for ending the program isn’t easy.
Under the governor’s plan, integration aid would be phased out with each graduating class of 220 students and be shifted into a main pot of money for state school funding. That money gets distributed through a complicated equalization aid formula that funnels less aid to property rich districts and more to poor districts.
Because of other complicated factors, nobody knows yet how districts that receive integration aid would fare under the new distribution.
A big question for Milwaukee: Would the millions it would lose through integration aid be replaced, increased or decreased once redistributed through the equalization aid formula?
“The district is continuing to work to determine the final fiscal consequences of the elimination of the program,” MPS spokesman Tony Tagliavia said.
It isn’t just MPS crunching the numbers. Wealthy suburban districts like Whitefish Bay, Fox Point and Elmbrook say that if integration aid is eliminated, they would likely see little to no boost once the money is redistributed through the equalization aid formula, likely leading to higher property taxes.
Participation down
One reason for the decline in the cross-district transfer program is that suburban districts have preferred to accept nonresident students through the state’s open enrollment program, which usually offers them a better financial deal.
But for parents of minority children, a key difference is that Chapter 220 provides free transportation. There’s no busing with open enrollment.
That distinction was not lost on Karl Hertz, an Ozaukee County Board member and the former longtime superintendent of the Mequon-Thiensville School District.
In a recent letter to the Journal Sentinel, he wrote that at a time when state leadership is welcoming the idea of school choice, “it seems strange to eliminate the 220 program, which allows children a choice and provides transportation, which is very important for disadvantaged families.”
Hertz added that it’s hard to imagine political leaders in Madison “wishing to act in a manner that raises taxes in suburban communities that have exhibited a degree of social justice through the 220 initiative.”
Social, financial impacts
Tagliavia, the MPS spokesman, said the district is concerned about the governor’s proposal because Chapter 220 is one of the oldest voluntary public school choice programs in the country, and it has provided academic and cultural benefits to students and districts.
Vance Dalzin, superintendent of the Fox-Point Bayside School District, where 10% of students attend through Chapter 220, was more blunt.
Eliminating the program “would be a horrible thing,” he said.
Dalzin said Chapter 220 has helped his district become more racially diverse and given participating city students an academically rigorous education.
Not accepting new Chapter 220 students, who bring the district about $10,000 per pupil, would amount to a $125,000 hole in the district’s budget, Dalzin said.
North Shore superintendents are also discussing the problem of K-8 Chapter 220 students not being able to continue with their peers into Nicolet High School.
“Children that have attended school in these districts since 4K will now not have the ability to attend high school with their current classmates,” said Max Dickman, a School Board member for Fox Point-Bayside. “Without a change, it will happen in these schools for the next 10 classes of students currently enrolled in 4K through eighth grade.”
Angela McCarty, the mother of eighth-grader Destiny Huven, who is biracial, said she carefully chose the Fox Point-Bayside district for her daughter, but wanted to give her the right to choose a different high school if she wanted.
McCarty said that if the governor’s proposal to end Chapter 220 passes, they would probably try to use the state’s open enrollment program to attend Nicolet.
“Now that she’s older, transportation isn’t as big of an issue,” she said, adding that she and Huven’s father would figure out how to get her to school every day.
Bridget Robinson may be in a similar predicament with her daughter, Taylor, who is 13 and in seventhgrade at Bayside. Robinson, a single mother, was motivated to get into the Chapter 220 program at least a decade ago after she went to her daughter’s preschool graduation in Milwaukee and saw no other parents show up.
“I remember thinking: ‘Is this what it’s going to be like? Is this a snapshot of what’s to come?’ ”
Then again, Walker’s proposal may not affect them at all.
Robinson, who works in customer service at a large Milwaukee employer, is searching for a house to buy near Nicolet.
As district residents, they would be guaranteed a seat at the high school.