I mean, I don't care.

All right, it is 5 30, and I will call the committee whole to order.

Uh roll call.

It looks like everybody is present, and it's all the reckless cases.

See?

I forgot my rule for you.

We don't need it yet.

I'm sorry.

I'm confused.

We'll move on to public comment.

Is there anybody from the public that wishes to address the committee of the whole this evening?

If you do, please come forward to the podium, state your name and address for the record.

Second call for public comment.

Third and final call for public comment.

I thought maybe with this large group we'd have some public comment, but we will close public comment and we'll move on to our presentations.

We have a presentation 26-0819, Wisconsin Public Mantaw Public School District discussion on school voucher program.

I believe Lee Tennis.

Good evening, everyone.

Oh, great.

Okay, green is good.

Thank you very much.

First of all, uh I'd like to thank the council for allowing us to come and do a presentation here this evening.

Um this is an issue uh that has been talked about at greater length in our state in our community over the last um several years.

Um earlier in the spring, uh we did a public presentation in April at the public library where we had goodness, probably between 30 and 40, I would say, folks out, maybe even more.

Um and what we just are basically finding is that um the general public doesn't really understand this.

Um we um after that uh I joined Two Rivers and we went to the Two Rivers uh City Council um in July of the summer, uh shared the presentation with them in a joint effort.

Um and um I had some conversations, I believe it was late July or August with uh President Sitkowitz, and uh asked him if he would be so kind to allow us to come and have uh short presentation for you here this evening.

So again, thank you very much.

Um my name is Lee Tennis, and I am proud to serve as the superintendent of the Manitowac Public School District, and I'll allow my friends to introduce themselves.

Hi, I'm Diane Johnson, the superintendent in Two Rivers and I'm Mary Case Slattery, I'm the finance director for Two Rivers Schools.

Uh so we have a short presentation for you this evening.

Um please if you have questions even during the presentation, feel free to raise your hand, otherwise we'll take them at the end too.

Um so uh we'll go ahead and get started.

Again, thank you.

Uh so we have some learning targets for tonight.

Um, hopefully, our goal is uh just to provide some education to you and to the people in the audience.

We'd like to share with you a history of vouchers, how vouchers work, and who qualifies for those vouchers, voucher costs versus open enrollment costs versus per pupil.

Those things uh we found in our own community get mixed up.

A history of voucher tax impact on schools, transparency on the tax bill, and then next steps.

Vouchers have been around for a very long time.

So they started in 1989 in Milwaukee, and the purpose of that was uh for people in Milwaukee to be able to send their children to private schools um using uh public school funds, and then in 95 it expanded, um, and that included religious schools, and from there in 2011, uh Racine kind of jumped on the wagon.

So they had a Milwaukee in 1989, Racine in 2011.

Two years later, it was a state uh parental choice program for anybody in any of our districts.

So there's 421 districts in our state, and anyone could be part of the voucher program beginning in 2013, and then um in addition to that in 2015, we're special needs scholarship program, and you're gonna see a little bit later that in two rivers, we don't um currently have that as part of our program, but manitows and Lee will be sharing that information with you.

So, how vouchers work is that they're part of the state's parental choice program, and what they do is they allow families to use uh public funding as a mechanism to attend private schools.

So the state sets the dollar amount that is assigned on a per pupil basis, similar to what they do for open enrollment.

Um what happens then now in it will be happening in October is we are assigned a dollar amount or we are told a dollar amount that will be part of our vouchers for this school year, and our board of education has the ability to levy for those dollars because what happens then at the end of the year in June when we get our final state aid payment, the Department of Public Instruction takes that dollar amount for the vouchers and deducts it from our final aid payment, so they net it against them.

We have to pay that cost of the vouchers to the state.

The state owes us state aid, so they just net those two together.

But that's where the property tax levy comes in because we need to levy those funds in order to make the district whole.

Otherwise, we would end up having to pay the cost of the vouchers out of our budget, and we don't have the ability to do that.

At the bottom of that screen under number five, where it says the districts do not know which students participate, right there.

You see that is an example of what we see through the open enrollment program, where this is a student, obviously whose name was um redacted, but uh this is a student in high school who um has lives in Arrowhead and attends two rivers schools through our um online program or online lighthouse learning academies uh school.

The difference with vouchers is that we don't know who the students are that are living in our district that are going to other private schools, so our taxpayers and us in the district, we don't know whose students we are paying for.

In terms of qualifying for vouchers, um in general it's 220 percent uh of the federal poverty level.

So if you look at this chart behind me, you'll see how uh where things were uh from year to year in 2627 at 70,730 dollars is what the annual household income level would be.

So if you're under that at that level or under, you qualify for a voucher in the state of Wisconsin.

There has been over time, there's been some changes policy-wise at the state level that have been incremental, and by that I mean there has been up to this point caps on the number of vouchers that would be given out in a particular district.

Um this school year, those caps um are no longer in place.

So there were three districts in the state of Wisconsin last year that met the CAP.