The drop is steep. In April, 61% of referendum requests passed. According to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the approval rate was 70% in 2024, 80% in 2022 and 85% in 2020.

School districts have increasingly relied on ballot measures asking local property taxpayers to cover costs including electric bills, building maintenance, program offerings, and teacher and staff pay and benefits. The decline in passage comes as state support for public schools has fallen dramatically over the last 15 years. Ahead of the election, 62% of Wisconsin public schools received notice from the state Department of Public Instruction that they would receive less aid for the 2026-27 school year than in the prior year. The current state budget provided no increase in funding for 2026 or 2027.

Heather DuBois Bourenane, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, called the results a “mixed bag.”

“Green Bay desperately needed that referendum. Dodgeville, you know, had to go to referenda four times in order to pass one, and I mean the referendum they passed still leaves them in a pretty precarious fiscal situation, but at least they aren’t facing the same kind of cuts and shortfalls that they would have otherwise,” DuBois Bourenane said. “Most of them did pass, but the ones that didn’t are just gutting.”

In districts where requests failed, she said, officials will be weighing cuts to services and staff, consolidating schools, or even dissolving their districts.

That last option became reality for one Wisconsin district right after the election. The State Board approved a dissolution request for the Hustisford School District in Dodge County. The tiny district had struggled financially in part due to a lack of state funding and repeated failed referendum requests. After its fifth failed referendum in April, it began the dissolution process.

State Superintendent Jill Underly said in a statement that dissolution “is a casualty of decades of an antiquated, broken school funding formula that has failed to keep pace with the costs of educating our children.”

Underly said that following Tuesday’s elections she is hopeful the state is positioned to make “meaningful change” to how Wisconsin funds its schools.

“While I am optimistic about what the outcomes of yesterday’s election mean for the future of public education in Wisconsin, that optimism does not undermine the reality that too many communities are forced to make an unfair decision,” Underly said. “The school funding formula is broken, and it has failed our children, our schools, and entire communities for decades. Wisconsin’s public schools cannot continue to rely on referenda to provide the educational opportunities all students deserve.”

Underly said she looks forward to working with Democratic Gov.-elect David Crowley and members of a Democratic-controlled state Assembly and Senate as they prepare to take office.

“There’s just like a lot of energy right now about the possibility of a more democratic co-governance that could be possible,” DuBois Bourenane said. The Democrats who will lead state government “seem truly committed to listening to people and to delivering a budget that reflects their needs,” she said. “That’s something we haven’t seen in this state in a really long time. We can fix school funding for real. We can actually get to the root of the problem and set this course straight and undo the damage that’s been done in previous administrations.”

Among the actions DuBois Bourenane hopes to see from the new administration and Legislature are repeal of Wisconsin’s union-busting law, Act 10, and making the cost of the state’s school voucher program visible on property taxpayers’ bills. She said Crowley and lawmakers could also act on funding before the next state budget, suggesting a bill to provide 60% funding for special education could be among the first Crowley signs.

“The fact that about half of the referenda didn’t pass means we’re going to see a ton of referenda in the spring again, and we shouldn’t have to wait for another budget to go into action to help the schools that are struggling now,” she said.

It is unclear how fast Democrats plan to move on education funding. Crowley campaigned on increasing funding to public schools, including moving the state toward reimbursing districts for 90% of the cost of special education, but he has said he wants to convene a blue ribbon commission to examine Wisconsin’s tax system, including the role of property taxes in school funding.

Crowley is not the only Democratic leader suggesting additional study. Senate Democratic Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), who will likely become the next Senate majority leader, said in late September that Democrats will increase school funding in the next state budget, but added that changing the state’s school funding formula could be a “multi-year” process.

“We’re also looking at a long-term goal of seeing what other states are doing and how they are funding their public schools,” she said. “But that’s going to take probably a multi-year task to try to figure that all out and talking to our friends in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois.”

Crowley has also said he supports repealing Act 10, but wants his administration to examine the impact on taxes.

“We’re going to couple all of this with a blue ribbon commission bringing Democrats, Republicans, tax experts, local units of government, business leaders, as well as labor unions to the table to focus on that long-term fix,” Crowley recently told WISN-12. “We know that there are going to be a lot of people who continue to attack our workers across the state of Wisconsin, but our job is to make sure that this is a place they can see a future that they can afford.”

DuBois Bourenane was not enthusiastic about another blue ribbon commission on school funding, saying it is the “last thing” Wisconsin needs.

“We know exactly what the problem is. There is no mystery here. There is no need for additional research. There is no need to study this problem further, we have been studying and documenting what the problem is for decades,” she said, noting that Crowley was in the Legislature during the last blue ribbon commission.

The last bipartisan blue ribbon commission on school funding was conducted nearly 10 years ago and took two years to complete its work. It provided a slate of recommendations to address the issues in the school funding system, including indexing per-pupil funding to inflation. Many of the recommendations went unaddressed by the Republican-led state Legislature.

“Those recommendations sit unfulfilled on a dusty shelf, and he could just blow the dust off of that and put those into action if he wants. Those are still good recommendations,” DuBois Bourenane said. “We need to do a lot more than piecemeal solutions. We need to really overhaul the school funding formula, and we know how to do that.”