“If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?”

Waiting an additional two years for a referendum has caused proposed construction costs for the Waunakee Community School District to spike dramatically.

TL;DR – Dave Boetcher was right in 2020. WCSD should’ve had a referendum in 2020. It could have saved the district around $40,000,000. No one is explaining the numbers (probably on purpose).

If you’re told something unbelievable, you should consider not trusting it.

In February 2020, the WCSD school board heard from representatives at Vogel Brothers and EUA on referendum planning, projections and costs. At the time, the Board had decided on effectively two choices:

• Building a new Middle School (MS)
• Building a renovated or completely re-built Heritage Elementary (HE).

District administrators nor Vogel/EUA made any reference to any need to purchase additional land.

In short, the BOE learned that it would cost roughly $43 to $48 million to rebuild Heritage Elementary and that a new Middle School would cost $65 to $68 million.

For those with short memories or new to the district, the voters passed a building referendum in November 2014 to build a new Intermediate School on purchased land on the western end of Woodland Drive, in the southwest corner of Waunakee. The district also owns at 24 acre parcel on the south-east section of Woodland Drive near Carriage Ridge.

Presumably, voters also approved this because the district directly advised that the land on Woodland west would be the site of a future Middle School. That’s what the district has been saying for almost a decade.

The western Woodland site was divided into two sections, with the eastern portion reserved for a future Middle School project. The plans for this construction have circulated through the community for 8+ years at this point, and can be seen in the image below.

However, everyone knows what happened next. March 2020 saw a nationwide shuttering of public schools. Lockdowns went into effect and the district expressly put its referendum planning on hold.

In mid 2020, the BOE held a vote to indefinitely delay referendum planning and to suspend plans to ask the community what it wanted through a survey. Two Board members voted against this decision. Myself and David Boetcher.

We both expressly said at the time that “The district will continue to need these projects, and the cost is only going to go up.” For all the fire and brimstone directed at myself and Dave for political leanings (he’s a Democrat, I am to his political “left”), if the Board had listened to us and pushed the community toward referendum in November 2020, the district could have saved upwards of $30,000,000 to $40,000,000.

Predictably, prices skyrocketed, and the cost to build has increased dramatically. These figures were approved in March 2022 for promulgation within the district prior to an expected vote in November 2022:

The district appears to have completely abandoned the perspective that building a new Middle School at the location near the Intermediate School (that it had planned for such a project for almost eight years) is even possible.

In short, in barely two years, the district has changed from suggesting that it needs $67 Million for a site it already owns, to needing nearly $100 million to build a new Middle School (anywhere but on the current Heritage Elementary site). The cost for a new Elementary school jumped over $10 million alone.

There are problematic issues in the district’s current approach. The language “a new middle school will be needed in the future” is a lie.

A new middle school was needed years ago.

It is needed now.

The district has known it has needed a new middle school since before I joined the Board in 2018. The district now has 4 classrooms in adjacent trailers hidden behind the current middle school. Special Ed teachers in the middle school have high-need children hidden away in converted closets and break rooms being used as make-shift classrooms. Teachers have smuggled coffee pots and microwaves into 2 foot-wide hallways. I saw these issues with my own two eyes: three years ago. It certainly hasn’t gotten any better.

There is no requirement that a middle school be within walking distance of the high school or athletic fields. Many urban and suburban school districts have middle schools without fields. The district also appears to be proceeding under the logic that any middle school needs to placed on a lot that is significantly larger than the 24 vacant acres it already owns.

Kromrey Middle School in Middleton is located on a 13.1 acre parcel that includes a full turf field, a forest, ample parking, and currently enrolls about 1200. The MS in Waunakee is proposed to serve around 900. Kromrey also cost only $44 million (2015).

[EDIT – An email from the District informed me that any planned MS in Waunakee would serve an increase to 900 students. The paragraph has been updated to reflect this change from 800]

In short, by waiting until 2022, the Waunakee school board is going to propose to spend literally twice as much (at a minimum, a new MS would cost $88M) to educate 300 fewer students compared to Middleton-Cross Plains.

There has yet to be any explanation from the district for why it pushed a referendum in 2014 to build an eventual Middle School next to the Intermediate School, only to abandon the idea 7-8 years later. I have yet to hear anyone in the district take any amount of responsibility for the decision to claim (without evidence) that the district needs to purchase new land to build a new Middle School. I don’t assume that the district is stupid. However, I suspect they want the community to support moving Heritage away from the downtown area, and are suggesting that it would cost an additional $10 million to keep it there and move the Middle School somewhere else is the rhetorical gambit they’ve chosen.

I have my theories for why the district appears to now be pushing for a new Elementary school be built on village boundaries. The most likely speculative-explanation is private lobbying by developers to relocate Heritage to a new site to encourage new home buyers. After all, Savannah Village was filled out by those seeking to place their children in the district’s brand new building (Arboretum).

I trust the motivations of capital, and in short – there’s no money to be made in putting a state-of-the-art elementary school in downtown Waunakee. No developer can capitalize on new home sales there. After all, the new building would likely not move houses for anyone other than existing home sellers or the developments of Bishops Bay/Terrance Wall (which currently sends students to the current Heritage).

If the school district wants voters to support an expensive new referendum, it will need to explain why it chose to wait so long for costs to spike dramatically, why it appears to be pushing for new land purchases without sufficient explanation on the need, and why huge parcels of land need to be developed to focus on the main aspect of K-8 education: which is apparently sports.

“With poetic justice, If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?”