Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a bill into law Wednesday overhauling the way reading is taught in the state.

The Republican-authored bill is meant to improve sagging reading scores and emphasizes phonics, the relationship between sounds and letters, over memorization. It also requires more frequent reading tests and employs reading coaches to help struggling students.

“We have to ensure our kids have the reading and literacy tools and skills to be successful both in and out of the classroom,” Evers said in a statement. “This bill, modeled after initiatives that have been successful in other states and fine-tuned with significant changes throughout the legislative process, is a step in the right direction.”

Evers, a Democrat, and the state Department of Public Instruction initially opposed the bill over a requirement that low-scoring third-graders repeat reading classes. That measure was changed to put low-scoring students in a remedial program with mandatory summer reading courses.

The department worked with Republican lawmakers for months to create the plan, which passed both chambers of the GOP-controlled Legislature last month with some bipartisan support.

Evers, who was state superintendent before he became governor, called Wednesday for the Legislature to also pass other investments in public education.

Only about a third of Wisconsin fourth graders scored high enough to be considered proficient readers in 2022, marking a 20-year low, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The bill Evers signed into law requires students in kindergarten through third grade to complete three reading tests a year, up from just one currently. Those tests will be used to more quickly identify struggling students and get them extra help.

The plan applies to public schools and private schools that receive funding through Wisconsin’s school choice voucher programs. Republicans already set aside $50 million in the state budget for new curriculum materials, teacher training and hiring reading coaches.

Evers vetoed a similar bill last year because it did not include enough funding.

A nationwide push to embrace similar teaching methods has gained ground as lawmakers look to address learning losses attributed to the coronavirus pandemic. Wisconsin’s bill is modeled after literacy laws in Mississippi, sometimes referred to as the “Mississippi miracle,” because the changes led to dramatic improvements in the state’s reading scores over the past decade.

Wisconsin governor signs bill overhauling elementary reading education is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

After a long and frustrating search, Beth Wisniewski felt like she found a haven for her son in Penfield Montessori Academy — a Near West Side Milwaukee charter school that serves children with and without disabilities.

Wisniewski’s son, Henry, was born with Down syndrome. As he approached school age, Wisniewski and her husband toured private schools, traditional public schools and charter schools — those that are publicly funded but independently operated. But no matter the school model, the Milwaukee couple walked away with the same message: Henry was not wanted. 

“Every place we went we had to explain that our son was worthy, as if we had to sell the school on our son,” Wisniewski said. “You feel less than, like there was no place that welcomed him the way he is.” 

The family finally found Penfield, which centered its vision for the school on students with disabilities. Penfield Children’s Center — a taxpayer-funded nonprofit that serves young children and infants with developmental delays and other disabilities — opened the school in 2016 for children who aged out of the center. 

“(At Penfield) we’ve never had to apologize for where my child is at, developmentally. He’s truly welcomed by everyone,” Wisniewski said, pointing to the school’s teachers, therapists and specialists to support students with special needs.

But that support may vanish. Penfield’s board in April abruptly announced the school would shutter at the end of the year, citing long-term financial pressures and surprise building repair bills. 

Absent a long-shot plan to save Penfield, the closure means families must find a new school next year — whether returning to their home district public school or trying to navigate a state school choice system that offers few options for students with disabilities. 

Public schools must serve all students living within their boundaries, including those needing special accommodations. But not all neighborhood schools are equally staffed or resourced to meet the needs of students with disabilities.   

In theory, Wisconsin families have a variety of options. But those options often exclude students with disabilities. 

Student art hangs on the wall of Penfield Montessori Academy, a Milwaukee-based charter school that serves children with and without disabilities. School officials announced plans to close at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, but parents are hoping to save the school. Photo taken on April 19, 2023. (Jonmaesha Beltran/ Wisconsin Watch)

Such students could apply to attend a private school with the help of a taxpayer-subsidized voucher, a program that enrolls 52,000 students across Wisconsin. But such private schools also are allowed to expel a student with disabilities if officials determine they cannot meet that child’s needs.

Charter schools elsewhere have been accused of denying entrance to students with disabilities — either because they cost too much to accommodate or because their test scores could lower the school’s average. The practice is commonly known as “cherry picking” students. 

Less talked about, however, is how the state’s biggest choice program, open enrollment, excludes students with disabilities. Roughly 70,000 Wisconsin students attend public schools outside their home districts through the 25-year-old open enrollment program. It allows students to apply to better-resourced public schools outside of district boundaries. But those schools can limit or deny slots for out-of-district students with disabilities.

Wisconsin districts in 2021-22 received 41,554 open enrollment applications, about 14% of which represented students with disabilities, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data show. Schools rejected about 40% of applications in that category, with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14% of applications from students without disabilities. 

Last year, for example, one suburban Madison district announced 115 slots for incoming open enrollment students — but none for children with disabilities.

The denials tie students to their home district school, underscoring how a child’s ZIP code shapes opportunities. The effect is compounded for students with disabilities.

Problem’s root: Special education funding gap

Joanne Juhnke, an advocacy specialist for Disability Rights Wisconsin, said the fundamental problem is the gap between the cost of special education services and how much the state reimburses school districts. Despite years of lobbying from disability rights advocates, Wisconsin reimburses school districts only 30% of special education costs — one of the lowest rates in the nation. 

The New Jersey-based Educational Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice, produced this map to accompany its October 2022 report titled: “Wisconsin’s special education funding crunch: How state underfunding disproportionately harms students in high-poverty districts.” 

Over the past five decades, state funding support for special education has declined precipitously. That forces districts — which must abide by revenue caps set by the state — to take money from the regular education budget to pay for services for students with disabilities.

“Wisconsin is currently at something of a crisis point,” Juhnke said. “The funding problem is something we have not managed to move the needle on very far.”

Abigail Swetz, communications director for the state’s Department of Public Instruction, said Wisconsin’s “abysmal” funding for special education could indeed impact open enrollment decisions. 

“It is my fervent hope that open enrollment decisions would not hinge on the status of a student’s (plan for additional accommodations), and yet I would be shocked if budgetary concerns did not impact open enrollment decisions. Districts need to pay their bills,” said Swetz. 

Some experts say the state could make the system more inclusive by following Minnesota, which prohibits school districts from rejecting students with disabilities due to resource constraints. 

“This policy in Wisconsin may not be illegal, but it’s absolutely inequitable,” said Jennifer Coco, senior director of strategy and impact at the Center for Learner Equity, a national nonprofit headquartered in New York.. 

“If we pride ourselves on advancing equity for kids in the state of Wisconsin, this isn’t it — for a multitude of reasons. It’s discrimination with a lowercase d.”

Schools limit admissions for students with disabilities

Milwaukee Public Schools saw about 3,400 more students transfer out than in last year, more than any other district, as many families headed to nearby suburban schools. The movement flows in both directions, and open enrollment helps some districts make up for shrinking in-district enrollment by attracting outside students and their attendance dollars.

The open enrollment process begins each January, when school boards determine how many outside students they’ll accommodate the following year. Seats are specifically reserved for students who have disabilities and those who don’t. 

Families can apply to attend out-of-district schools between early February and April. Parents learn of the decision by early June.  

While the process allows districts to avoid overcrowding classrooms by capping the number of incoming students, it can also shut doors to students who have disabilities, with districts citing a lack of space to serve them.

Verona schools made no space for students with disabilities

In 2022, Verona Area School District, southwest of Madison, announced it would welcome 115 open enrollment students, the most in a decade. But the district reserved zero spots for students with disabilities, citing a gap between the cost of special education services and state reimbursements. 

“This is nothing but discrimination against students with special needs and students with disabilities,” longtime disability rights attorney Jeff Spitzer-Resnick told Isthmus at the time. 

Spitzer-Resnick’s chief concern, he later told Wisconsin Watch: that the district claimed to lack space for students with disabilities before analyzing applicants’ individual learning needs.

While some children have medically-sensitive disabilities that are expensive or complicated to accommodate, most students with disabilities are taught in regular classrooms alongside their peers, said Spitzer-Resnick. And many of their needed accommodations cost little to implement. 

“If a student needs extra time on a test because they have ADHD, that’s literally a zero cost item,” he said. 

School districts aren’t required to offer evidence of a lack of space for students with disabilities unless a parent appeals a denial. In most cases, parents never see the analysis behind a school district’s decision. 

State data do not capture the untold number of parents who abandon the application process, assuming their child will be rejected due to a disability. 

“We saw they weren’t offering seats for students with disabilities, so we didn’t even bother submitting an application,” Wisniewski said of one school district the family considered before finding Penfield. 

Habitually truant, disciplined students face rejection

Disabilities aren’t the only reason students are rejected from open enrollment. A smaller number of students were rejected because they were considered habitually truant or faced previous expulsions — categories that can disproportionately exclude students from low-income families, who are more likely to struggle with transportation; or students of color who are overrepresented in discipline data. 

Black students with disabilities in Wisconsin, for instance, are roughly 6.7 times more likely than white students to be removed from the classroom for disciplinary reasons, according to a state analysis.

Author Tim DeRoche details in his book A Fine Line how school attendance boundaries often correlate to families’ income and race, a pattern he calls educational redlining. He says Wisconsin’s open enrollment law has a “loophole” that allows a public school to categorically deny open enrollment to a child who has a disability, no matter how minimal the services that child requires.

“This means that kids with disabilities are really at the mercy of one district, and that district may or may not have the ability — or desire— to meet the child’s needs,” DeRoche said. 

“It’s not right for a child to be denied enrollment at a public school because of where his or her family lives,” he added. “Our system of district boundaries and attendance zones means that the best or most coveted public schools are often only available to families that can afford a home in the most expensive part of town.”  

Courts uphold open enrollment rejections 

Wisconsin’s open enrollment system has already survived scrutiny in federal courts. 

The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty (WILL), a conservative law group, in 2014 launched a lawsuit against the state and five southeast Wisconsin school districts on behalf of several students with disabilities who faced open enrollment rejections, citing lack of space. One Racine family was rejected by school districts 12 times over five years based on their child’s disability, according to court documents. 

WILL took the case after hearing from numerous families that the state’s open enrollment system left children stranded in schools that didn’t work for them, Libby Sobic, an attorney for the families, told Wisconsin Watch.  

The state, WILL argued, essentially created a two-tiered system allowing school districts to reject students based on their disabilities. 

But siding with the state, U.S. District Judge William Conley ruled the system did not illegally discriminate, because districts may allocate space based on a “nuanced analysis” of available resources. While school districts must serve all students living within their boundaries, federal law does not require districts to expand or “fundamentally alter” its program to accommodate students who live outside their boundaries, Conley ruled in 2017.

Sobic rejects the judge’s rationale, pointing out that school boards allocate space before knowing how many students are applying or their particular needs. 

“How can you do a nuanced analysis after you’ve already determined in January that you have no seats when students have disabilities?” Sobic said. “I don’t think in practice that ‘nuanced determination’ happens. I’ve sat through school board meetings where they’ve set these numbers, and it’s very rarely a discussion.”

But the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed Conley’s ruling in 2019, writing that “differential treatment of special-needs students doesn’t make the program unlawful.” 

Minnesota transfer system seen as more inclusive

Still, the Legislature could change the open enrollment process, Sobic said, pointing to Minnesota as a model for a more inclusive open enrollment system. Unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota prohibits school districts from considering a student’s disability when weighing a transfer.

A 2021 WILL report calls for a year-round open enrollment application window and increased transparency in decision making. While it’s difficult to measure the specific impact on Wisconsin school districts due to data limitations, research shows that open enrollment tends to increase racial and economic integration, the report said. 

Juhnke, the disability rights advocate, said Wisconsin must revamp the way it funds special education more broadly. Gov. Tony Evers wants to increase state special education reimbursement from about 30% to 60% of a district’s costs. But Republican leaders in the Legislature have questioned the size of that increase and called to expand the state’s private school voucher program.

Voucher-subsidized private schools that accept students with disabilities can currently receive up to 90% of special education costs through a special reimbursement program. 

“Any solution or improvement to the open enrollment program has to reckon with the overall state funding challenges for education for students with disabilities,” Juhnke said. “For real equity, we ought to be reimbursing school districts statewide up to 90%.”

Swetz, the DPI spokesperson, said the agency hopes the proposed funding increase will land in the final budget, considering the proposal’s historic bipartisan support. In 2019, the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding established under then-Gov. Scott Walker recommended increasing special education reimbursement to 60%. 

“This is an incredible opportunity for our Legislature to make a huge difference in the lives of every kid in Wisconsin,” said Swetz. 

Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, co-chair of the Republican-led budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, declined to comment. 

Penfield Montessori Academy parents fight for their school  

Back at Penfield, parent Amy Scales said news of the school’s closing  unleashed chaos at her home, where her overwhelmed children cried and threw toys. Penfield students volunteered to sell prized possessions to keep the school afloat, Scales said. 

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Amy’s husband, Martice. “As a parent it makes you feel like you’ve failed them,” he said. 

Losing the school would drastically alter the daily routine of Nicole Kirk, whose daughter attends Penfield and lives close enough to walk. Penfield was also a sanctuary for Kirk’s niece, who 10 years ago suffered burns to 75% of her body in a house fire. 

“She had to relearn everything after the fire, but she’s doing fantastic now,” Kirk said, crediting the speech, occupational and physical therapists who worked with her at Penfield. 

Parents are still fighting to save their school.

As the April meeting unfolded at the school, leaders from Adeline Montessori, a similar charter school in Oconomowoc, announced they were exploring a plan to fold Penfield into their school, operating it as a satellite campus. 

Parents have since launched a plan to raise money for the effort. They hope to quickly gather $1 million to move forward this summer, Scales said. But the outcome is far from certain. They also need to find a building and retain enough students and staff for the plan to be viable. Penfield principal Michelle Ravin declined to comment on the progress.

Meantime, parents know they must confront the possibility of losing Penfield.

Milwaukee Public Schools officials are offering to help families search for a new school within the district. But some families don’t see that as a viable option. 

“My experience with neighborhood schools is that if you’re struggling, too bad, it’s your fault,” said Penfield parent Cassie Johnson. “Penfield is amazing, it’s a collaborative environment, instead of shaming kids.” 

Johnson, like her children, is autistic and has attention deficit disorder. A traditional “public school is not an option for us,” she said.

“If the new school doesn’t happen for us, we’ll likely homeschool, at least for the next year,” Johnson said. She worries less for her own family, and more for the students who need  higher levels of support, many of them Black and brown, who would have to find new schools. 

“People should be able to make choices that are best for their kids — not made to leave schools or to homeschool instead or be forced into situations that don’t work,” she said.“That only traumatizes kids.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school choices is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Nat Werth surveyed the “gender identity and theory” section of the handbook for his alma mater, Sheboygan Lutheran High School, with shock and sadness. 

“This was not in the school’s handbook when I attended,” the 2019 graduate and valedictorian said. “Wow, this is gonna make me cry. I cannot believe that this happened.” 

The school’s current handbook dedicates over 1,000 words to a policy that uses Biblical teachings as the basis for its anti-transgender policies. 

Werth recalled that the handbook from his time as a student had, at most, a line about gender identity. But parts of the new anti-LGBTQ+ policies felt familiar. 

As Werth was preparing to graduate, he drafted a valedictory speech in which he planned to come out as gay and critique homophobic Biblical interpretations as archaic, mistranslated or misconstrued. Administrators canceled his remarks.

Sheboygan Lutheran is a private school that receives public funding through tuition vouchers, which currently subsidize nearly 40% of its students. Administrators ignored repeated requests by phone and email for an interview. When a reporter recently again asked Executive Director Paul Gnan for a comment in person, Gnan smiled and said: “Absolutely not.” 

Across Wisconsin, four voucher programs serve about 52,000 voucher students, which comprises 6% of students at public schools; 95% of the participating schools are religious. 

Diploma in hand, Werth began researching Wisconsin’s voucher programs. He learned that private schools receiving public funds can legally discriminate against LGBTQ+ students, and that the state Department of Public Instruction is largely powerless to stop it. And he went to the press. 

“I didn’t want stuff like that to happen again,” he said. “For people to feel backed into a corner and powerless in a situation, where, like, that just shouldn’t be the case.” 

Werth’s story went viral. He got to meet Jennifer Lopez and speak with Sen. Tammy Baldwin. And when he spoke about his experience, Werth urged Wisconsinites to demand their representatives change the law. 

“It’s not that I’m against school choice,” Werth said. “It’s that everybody has human rights and that they should all be protected no matter what, especially the rights of kids who go to private and parochial (voucher) schools in Wisconsin.” 

Discrimination justified through Christianity

There is no state law protecting LGBTQ+ students from discrimination once enrolled in a voucher school. And the federal Title IX law exempts religious institutions from complying with the anti-discrimination law if it runs counter to their religious beliefs. 

This leaves religious voucher schools like Sheboygan Lutheran free to discipline or even expel gay or transgender students for expressing their gender identity or their sexual orientation. A Wisconsin Watch investigation has found that many have policies that allow such treatment. 

Wisconsin Watch reviewed public materials for about one-third of the state’s 373 voucher schools and found that four out of 10 had policies or statements that appeared to target LGBTQ+ students for disparate treatment. Some had explicitly discriminatory policies, such as expelling students for being gay or transgender. 

All 50 of the voucher schools with anti-LGBTQ+ stances identified by the news organization are Christian, with denominations including Lutherans and Catholics, among others. Almost every school cites religious principles as a basis for their positions.

Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at University of Madison-Wisconsin, argued that language casting gay or transgender identities or behavior as sinful, even without policies codifying the perspective, “has a discriminatory intent behind it.”

She also pointed out how some policies, although not explicit, could result in LGBTQ+ students being treated inconsistently from others. For example, some schools specifically ban all sexual contact outside of a straight, cisgender marriage.

Green Bay Adventist Junior Academy, which has nearly 68% of students on vouchers, says that it “does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation (in admissions), but does discriminate on the basis of sexual misconduct,” which includes “homosexual conduct.” Reached by phone, a representative of the school said: “We have no comment.”

Werth, now approaching graduation from college, said his experience, although difficult, was not as hostile as the policies now in place at his alma mater and elsewhere.

“There are plenty of kids in much worse situations, experiencing much worse acts of discrimination, and who aren’t able to speak up for themselves,” he said. “My story’s not even that bad, compared to, like, the trans kids who get expelled for just existing. Or for the gay kids who get beat up all the time and aren’t defended by their school’s administration.” 

Sheboygan Lutheran’s current handbook said it would “take the necessary precautions, in accord with the policies of this document, to avoid bullying and to protect the integrity of those who may express tension or concerns about their biological sex.” 

Research shows that LGBTQ+ youth experience “significantly greater rates” of bullying and suicide attempts than their straight and cisgender peers, according to The Trevor Project. Affirming LGBTQ+ students’ identities can reduce those rates, the advocacy group says.

Transgender students special target of policies

Sheboygan Lutheran’s anti-trans policy credits its approach to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. 

These policies call for the school to refrain from using the chosen pronouns of any transgender student, employee, personnel, volunteer or contracted vendor. It prohibits puberty blockers on school property if taken for transition-related care. And it requires students to use the facility, athletic team or dress code that “matches their biological sex,” although it does have “individual-use bathrooms which are available for all members of the respective community.”

“Why are they going out of their way to make people feel overtly excluded when they also have individual bathrooms? Why can’t you just say that?” Werth said as he read the policy.

At least 17 other schools reviewed by Wisconsin Watch have anti-transgender policies similar to Sheboygan Lutheran’s. Three carve out exemptions for intersex students with a required note from their doctors. 

The principal for one of those schools, Green Bay Trinity Lutheran, declined an interview twice by email, saying: “We are very busy filling the gap left by the teacher and substitute shortage and have no time for these inquiries.” He said the school operates its voucher programs “fully in accordance with the law” and the beliefs of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

In recent years, anti-trans laws, such as those banning best-practice medical care or restricting athletic participation, have proliferated, thanks to a highly funded and coordinated far-right campaign. Policies regarding students’ gender identity in public schools have also attracted attention, with transgender youth and allies protesting efforts to deny a person’s chosen name or pronouns, or require parental consent to do so. 

Reviewing his alma mater’s anti-transgender policy, Werth reflected: “If I was a kid with gender dysphoria, or even, like, questioning how people refer to me using my pronouns or if I wanted to use a different name and I read this, if this was what the school provided to me, that would have been extremely traumatic.”

An anti-trans evening

Sheboygan Lutheran has hosted at least one anti-trans event for the public. In April, the school welcomed Christian clinical psychologist Beverly Yahnke, who gave a talk titled “Transgenderism and Sexualization in Our Schools.” 

Promotional materials contained false information, claiming that “Most of our public schools are allowing students to join Gender and Sexualization Alliances without parental or guardian knowledge or permission.” The extracurricular clubs, which bring together LGBTQ+ youth and their student allies, are called Gender and Sexuality or Sexualities Alliances. 

Yahnke cited the American College of Pediatricians, a fringe group of anti-LGBTQ+ physicians that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a hate group.

And the falsehoods were exhaustive. Yahnke called being transgender a “delusion.” She described the rise in the number of transgender children — who comprise a tiny fraction of the nation’s population — as an “epidemic” like ebola or COVID-19 that “appears to be contagious” with “consequences that can cause illness, self-harm and even death.” 

She described transition-related health care as “primitive” as a lobotomy, which she graphically described, and characterized people who have received desired transition-related care as “irreversibly damaged” and “left … in a wasteland.” 

In a striking moment, she also argued that children should go through natural puberty, without blockers, “to discover what it feels like to be a man, to feel their shoulders broaden to take out their little sister and smack her against the wall.” When an audience member reacted in shock, Yahnke added: “In playful jest, of course.”

Addressing the private school auditorium, Yahnke added to applause: “If your first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade child is learning things, saying things, reading things that flies in the face of the faith they’ve been given by our most Holy God, it’s time to move them from the public school.”

‘Unwanted and unwelcome at school’ 

Ali Muldrow, co-executive director of the LGBTQ+ youth advocacy organization GSAFE, argues the anti-LGBTQ+ policies identified by Wisconsin Watch harm all students — whether cis, trans, straight or gay.

Muldrow and Werth both oppose supporting discriminatory institutions through publicly funded vouchers. 

“I just want to do everything within my power to change this system that facilitates oppression with taxpayer dollars,” Werth said. “And I guess until that day happens, I won’t stop telling my story, just because it’s not right. It’s unjust.” 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

‘Unwanted and unwelcome’: Anti-LGBTQ+ policies common at Wisconsin voucher schools  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Listen to reporter Phoebe Petrovic discuss this story on WUWM’s show Lake Effect and on WPR.

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school. 

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that. 

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can. 

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

Students vulnerable to expulsion, lack of accommodation

Private schools participating in any of the four state voucher programs — the Milwaukee, Racine and Wisconsin Parental Choice Programs and the Special Needs Scholarship Program — may legally expel students with disabilities if staff determines they cannot accommodate their needs with minor adjustments or deem their behavior too disruptive. 

And as upsetting as this may feel to parents, Juhnke said it’s even worse for the students themselves.

“It’s very disruptive,” she said, adding that “stability for a student with disabilities is often even more important” than for those without disabilities.  

And expelled students’ funding may take time to follow them back to public schools, as voucher payments correspond to pupil counts made early in each semester.

Reviewing public materials for about one-third of the state’s 373 voucher schools, Wisconsin Watch found that about 15% had policies or statements appearing to discriminate against students with disabilities, often citing limited capacity to meet their needs. This figure omits schools that make no mention of disability accommodation. 

“We know not all schools in these programs employ such practices, but the fact that the law allows it is unacceptable,” said DPI communications director Abigail Swetz. “We owe it to our learners and their families to make the necessary changes to ensure these schools provide access to all children, regardless of their ability.”

Between 2013 and 2020, DPI received several complaints alleging disability discrimination at voucher schools — but it determined it had jurisdiction to act in just one of them. Wisconsin Watch has learned the agency quietly suspended its complaint process in 2020 when it comes to students with disabilities attending voucher schools. 

Nicholas Kelly, the president of the state’s leading education privatization advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin, did not answer specific questions but disagreed that private schools discriminate. He shared a statement that read, in part: “Fundamentally, parental choice and educational freedom provide accountability. If parents or students are not satisfied with the education they receive they can choose another school.”

Juhnke and her organization argue that legal discrimination is a “fundamental issue” of the voucher program: “Discrimination is, on some level, baked into the cake.” 

“The requirements on choice schools have been different for students with disabilities from the very inception of the voucher program,” she said. “We have two parallel school systems: one of which is oriented toward serving students with disabilities and the other which never has been.” 

Enrolled one minute, expelled the next?

State law does not prohibit discrimination against students with disabilities at voucher schools. Federal law only requires minimal accommodations, far less than what it requires of public schools, and only applies to recipients of federal funds, such as subsidies to run a lunch program.

When a private school exercises its legal right to expel a student with disabilities, Juhnke’s clients have little recourse. 

The fact that students with disabilities waive legal protections when taking a voucher is one reason Disability Rights Wisconsin is “deeply concerned” about the state’s voucher programs, even the Special Needs Scholarship Program. 

Drafted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, the scholarship program specifically serves students with disabilities. 

Wisconsin’s program requires families receive a document detailing the rights their child will lose, Juhnke said “that doesn’t sink in” until it’s too late. And overall, while the program facilitates private schools in serving more students with disabilities, and expands access to schools dedicated to educating them, she said “it also means that more public funding is going to schools that don’t have to follow the same rules.”

As with LGBTQ+ discrimination, state law requires private schools to restrict admissions considerations of voucher students to statutorily described characteristics, such as residence and income. The statewide program always includes a random lottery, and the Milwaukee and Racine programs include that if the number of applicants exceeds the seats available. 

Yet in practice, the line appears blurred. Said DPI’s Swetz: “The scenario of a student enrolling as a (voucher) student in a private school one minute and being expelled the next is, in fact, possible.”

‘We will not be moving forward with enrollment’

The handbook for Milwaukee’s St. Joan Antida High School, an all girls school with nearly 99% of students on vouchers, states: “Students may be admitted under the Parental Choice Program, but may not be suitable for enrollment if the school cannot meet the needs of the student with minor adjustment to the curriculum.” 

In 2019, a parent complained to DPI of disability discrimination at the school, although it’s unclear from the record if the student was enrolled.

That same year, DPI heard from parents about St. Leonard School in Muskego, which has just under 18% of its students on vouchers. They alleged they were blocked from enrolling their children — it’s unclear whether they were seeking vouchers — solely on the basis of sensory issues. 

Following a school tour, they received an email from the principal, which reportedly stated: “After much prayer and consideration, we will not be moving forward with enrollment for your children at this time. This was not an easy decision. We wish you all the best in your search for a better fit.” 

The parents claimed the school declined to give an explanation. Neither the school nor the Archdiocese of Milwaukee responded to requests for comment.

Exclusion described as a matter of practicality

Although 17 of the 19 voucher schools with policies discriminating against students with disabilities are Christian, none appeared to root their exclusion in theology. (The two secular schools identified are both Waldorf schools, a nondenominational private school prioritizing arts and nature curricula.) Instead, disability discrimination is often phrased in practical, if regretful, terms. 

Fond du Lac Christian School, for example, which has about 63% of its students on vouchers, stated in its 2017-18 handbook that it “desires to serve the needs of students who would be considered at a level of need for which we are equipped to accommodate.” It also stated it “reserves the right to expel any student diagnosed with behavioral disorders … or significant learning disabilities” whom the school cannot “adequately facilitate,” calling it a matter of “recognizing (their) limitations.” 

Fond du Lac Christian blocked a reporter from contacting the school via email and hung up on the phone, so Wisconsin Watch has been unable to obtain a current handbook.

Some schools claimed they did not discriminate on the basis of disability, only to detail policies that exclude students on that basis.

Milwaukee’s Tamarack Waldorf School, with 85% of its students on vouchers, considers working to “increase the diversity of our school community and promote equity and inclusion for all community members regardless of… disability status” one of its guiding principles, according to the current handbook. But the document also acknowledges the school may expel students whose “special needs are greater than the school’s ability to meet them.” 

DPI received two complaints alleging disability-based discrimination at the school in 2018 and 2019. 

Tamarack staff did not respond to emails and a phone message. The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, which accredits the school, declined to comment on specifics but said it is committed to nondiscrimination on the basis of disability: “As an association, we believe that valuing and supporting diversity, equity and inclusion comprise a journey of both moral and educational importance.”

A failed attempt at accountability

DPI says it may intervene only to stop discrimination against voucher students with disabilities in the admissions process, not after enrollment. In 2011, Disability Rights Wisconsin, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and others, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice seeking to change that. 

Calling on the DOJ to investigate Milwaukee’s voucher program, the ACLU alleged that “many families of students with disabilities are unaware of their rights to use vouchers for private schools, the schools receiving vouchers are not monitored for compliance with the ADA, and students with minor disabilities have been routinely suspended and expelled from the private schools,” according to its website. 

The result, they claimed, was “systematically excluding students with disabilities from participating in the voucher program and segregating them in public schools in disproportionate numbers.”

But after a couple years, little changed. “My sense is that it didn’t move the needle as much as we would have liked,” said Juhnke, who was not with the organization at the time. 

Communications between the DOJ and DPI show that federal attorneys instructed the state agency to take a number of actions to monitor the voucher programs and enforce compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

“Our position,” they wrote, “is that DPI must do more to enforce the federal statutory and regulatory requirements that govern the treatment of students with disabilities who participate in the school choice program,” including private and religious schools.

DPI responded that although it was “fully committed to ensuring” nondiscrimination of students with disabilities, it believed that it lacked authority — under state and federal law, as well as court precedent — to fulfill the federal government’s demands. 

“DPI has significant concerns about the DPI’s authority to ensure that Choice schools do not discriminate against students with disabilities,” the agency’s chief legal counsel wrote in a letter.

Years later, Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, a civil rights attorney and education advocate who filed the original complaint for Disability Rights Wisconsin, finds the conclusion “highly unfortunate and reprehensible.” He believes the state agency does not need explicit state authority to uphold federal law.

“If the U.S. DOJ says, ‘Hey, your state program violates federal law, but we’re going to look to your DPI to assure us, because you’re the one who runs the program, that it stops violating the law,’ DPI should have done it. But they didn’t,” he said. 

But DPI’s Swetz challenged that premise, saying by email: “DOJ has not concluded the private school choice program violates federal law. In many ways, the DPI wishes it would — then perhaps we would have leverage to make changes. That leverage would help kids because the current situation does not.”

One change DPI undertook was to establish a system to collect complaints about alleged disability discrimination in voucher schools. Juhnke referenced it in an interview with Wisconsin Watch.

But unbeknownst to Juhnke and her colleagues at Disability Rights Wisconsin, DPI quietly closed that complaint mechanism in 2020. In a letter sent to the federal DOJ, Assistant State Superintendent Robert Soldner said the agency lacked the statutory authority to act in all but one complaint it had received.

The agency was ending its formal complaint procedure, the letter said, to “avoid giving complainants false hope that DPI has the ability to address their concerns.” 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Federal, state law permit disability discrimination in Wisconsin voucher schools is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of six news outlets covering northeastern Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

As early as kindergarten, Robin Pierre started to notice that her daughter, Hattie, was falling behind. She wasn’t able to read the books they were sending home, despite being in a charter school known for its focus on literacy. 

Hattie started working with a reading interventionist during kindergarten and throughout first grade. But then her behavior started to escalate. She’d hide under desks and run out of the classroom. She was moved to another charter school for second grade, one focused on play-based learning and field trips in hopes that environment would better suit her.

All this time, Hattie’s trouble reading persisted. Pierre asked to have her evaluated for special education. 

Hattie was assessed; but when Pierre asked questions about dyslexia, she said the school told her they don’t acknowledge dyslexia without a diagnosis, and that could only come from brain imaging. 

“It was a fight at first,” Pierre said.

Dyslexia looks different for each person who has it. It’s a neurobiological learning disability that can make it difficult for people to decode words and read fluently. People with dyslexia may struggle with spelling and reading comprehension as a result of their challenge matching letters to their corresponding sounds. 

The International Dyslexia Association estimates that as many as one in five people could have symptoms of dyslexia, ranging in severity.

Often, people assume that dyslexia is just mixing up letters such as “b” and “d.” It can be that for some people — Pierre said Hattie experienced that — but it’s not the only symptom. For example, people with dyslexia might struggle with slow, choppy reading, memorization or even constantly confuse left and right. It ranges on a spectrum from mild to severe.

For Hattie, reading was “labor-intensive.” She’d often read a sentence three times before she’d actually comprehend what it said. The first few reads were spent trying to identify the sounds for each letter and then trying to put them all together more smoothly, so she could get to the point of comprehension.

Currently, Wisconsin does not require students to be screened specifically for dyslexia, but the state passed legislation three years ago to create an informational guidebook on dyslexia and related conditions to be shared on the state Department of Public Instruction and all school district websites.

In the years since the guidebook was created, Wisconsin and the rest of the country has turned up the volume on a discussion about literacy after standardized test scores have shown significant declines in language arts during the pandemic. 

But those conversations usually don’t include students with dyslexia. Families are often left on their own to get their children tested, diagnosed and supported through outside tutoring. And local tutoring agencies are feeling the burden of an increased need to support these students, who are now often even further behind because of the pandemic.  

“It’s something the public school should have done; they should have been able to teach her how to read,” Pierre said.

What Wisconsin school districts do to support students with dyslexia

By state law, schools are required to screen students in 4K through second grade annually for “literacy fundamentals.” This includes letter sound knowledge and something called phonemic awareness — the ability to identify individual sounds within a word — which are generally two areas of difficulty for students with dyslexia. 

DPI told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin these requirements are “generally agreed upon to be components of screening for dyslexia.” If a screening indicates they needs more testing, there are additional screening options listed in the state’s guidebook that parents and teachers can consider.

In 2021, Republican lawmakers proposed tripling the number of literacy tests for young students to boost low proficiency rates, but Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill, saying it lacked evidence and funding. 

The state may mandate early screening, but district by district, the overall approach to literacy can look different. 

The Menasha Joint School District is focused on being “diagnostic” with students, said Renae Braun, a literacy coach.

It does this by screening students in kindergarten through eighth grade three times a year. Those screenings look at students’ comprehension, fluency and knowledge of phonics. Through those, the district identifies a student’s strengths and areas of concern. 

For students behind grade level or who show other challenges on those screenings, the district creates an individual plan — called a Response to Intervention plan — to help them catch up. It focuses on strengthening areas of concern.

There isn’t one method that works for teaching literacy to all students. But Braun said students with dyslexia need explicit teaching and multiple modalities — a combination of visual, auditory and tactile.

“We do dipstick check-ins every two weeks or every week to make sure the plan is accelerating or growing our students,” she said. 

Both Menasha and Kimberly school districts see teacher expertise as vital to teaching students who struggle with literacy, whether it’s diagnosed dyslexia or other challenges.

The Kimberly Area School District added a phonological interventionist to its staff in August 2022. The role was designed to be “an in-house expert on decoding and fluency,” according to Holly Prast, assistant superintendent. 

This interventionist is trained in a specific dyslexia intervention, among other reading interventions, and works with students directly, Prast said. They also collaborate with teachers to provide new strategies to support students who are struggling.

Many districts have hired reading interventionists to support students through pandemic-induced learning loss, but Prast said Kimberly decided to add a phonological interventionist independently of that.

Carrie Willer, director of elementary education for the Appleton Area School District, echoed the need for a variety of teaching methods to support students. The number of students in any given classroom is the number of different learning styles teachers need to work with, she explained. 

“You need a full bag of tricks and a full bag of tools to meet each of those students,” she said. 

Appleton has interventionists, teachers trained in a one-on-one reading recovery program and other methods of support, including small group work and collaboration with parents.

Still, fewer than half of Appleton students are reading at or above grade level. 

A recent audit of the district’s English language arts curriculum showed a need for more emphasis on phonics and letter sound awareness — strategies that would better support students with dyslexia in the classroom. 

Many families with students with dyslexia have to turn to outside tutoring

When Hattie eventually qualified for special education, the district focused only on her ADHD diagnosis. So, not only did Pierre pay out of pocket for neurological exams, but she had to fight to get the district to even recognize the dyslexia diagnosis in her individual education plan.

It was around then that Pierre found Dyslexia Reading Connection, a nonprofit tutoring organization based in Appleton. That was four years ago, and Hattie has gone twice a week ever since — even through the summers. 

DRC has been around for almost 20 years, but there’s been increased demand since the pandemic, said Kimberly Stevens, executive director. Earlier this year, there were 50 students on the waitlist — five times as many as the organization had pre-COVID. And Stevens said new students are coming in for consultations every week.

Today, Hattie is caught up to grade level and has even become “quite an avid reader,” Pierre said. She credits that success more to the tutoring she paid for from DRC than what the public schools provided.

“I didn’t think this day would come,” she said.

When asked how often Dyslexia Reading Connection is screening students for dyslexia, Stevens said, “constantly.” It tries to keep screenings to about five students a week since the Appleton-based nonprofit is already tutoring more than 110 students online and in person. 

But it’s not just an increase in the number of students. Stevens said students are coming in further and further behind. Before the pandemic, students would come to DRC a year and nine months behind, on average. Now, it’s not uncommon for students to be three or even four years behind where they should be. 

“Parents are desperate to get their kids the right interventions,” Stevens told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

While DRC can’t offer a medical diagnosis, the screening it offers is about an hour long and can usually tell with a high degree of certainty whether the student has dyslexia, Stevens said. After the screening results are explained to the parents, it’s up to them whether they want to move forward with tutoring. It’s first come, first served, since there’s a waitlist, but a family’s scheduling availability may be considered.

On average, students spend four years with DRC working through 10 levels of tutoring that will bring them up to a 10th-grade reading level.

The tutoring starts by breaking language into its smallest parts: individual vowels and consonants. As the levels progress, students move on to syllables, prefixes and suffixes, vowel placement in a word and even influences from foreign languages such as Latin and Greek root words. 

Karrie Brass, a tutor at DRC, said her husband, who has dyslexia, uses a car engine analogy to explain it: The brains of students without dyslexia works like driving an automatic transmission when learning to read, spell and write. They don’t need to work through every step of processing language. Most of it happens under the hood without conscious thought. 

But for students with dyslexia, their brains are more like driving a car with a manual transmission. They need to shift gears, understand the specifics of how letters make sounds and work through each step of the process; otherwise, it won’t be a smooth ride.

Life after high school for students with dyslexia

Hattie is still making her way through middle school, but Pierre said Hattie has dreams of going to college one day.

And she’s not alone.

Take, for example, Meghan Molthen.

A freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Molthen was diagnosed with dyslexia the summer before sixth grade. She struggled to spell simple words and saw her classmates read at much higher levels than her, but she didn’t understand why until she got her diagnosis. 

Figuring out that she had dyslexia helped give shape to the reason why she was struggling, but it didn’t fix everything. Molthen went to school in Fort Atkinson before moving to Pulaski her sophomore year, so she experienced two districts and their approaches to supporting her dyslexia. 

Although a diagnosis made accessing certain supports simpler, Molthen said there were still challenges because the school systems didn’t understand “how to fully accommodate students with learning disabilities.”

When she toured UW-Oshkosh in summer 2021, she asked the admissions office about accommodations for students with learning disabilities. They told her about a program called Project Success. 

Project Success is a remedial program for students with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities at the school. It starts with a six-week summer program focused on phonics and teaching students the relationship between letters and sounds. 

Director Jayme Reichenberger said the program has a reading and writing component, but it also supports students in other ways through the transition from high school to college. By completing the summer program, students can earn up to six credits, which can be a helpful GPA cushion for those early, stressful semesters of college. 

Students also learn about what laws protect their accommodations and what services are available to them. Reichenberger said many students come in not really understanding their diagnosis. They might have attended meetings during their K-12 education, but a lot of them didn’t put a name to their disability. 

It’s not uncommon for Reichenberger to hear students say that their dyslexia was essentially ignored, so she said they try hard to actually say the word “dyslexia.” There are even campus events where students will write messages like “Say dyslexia” on the sidewalk. 

“When a disability is hidden, it’s easy to stereotype and have misconceptions about it,” Reichenberger said.

For Molthen, the program gave her agency over her learning disability. She had a hard time even talking about her dyslexia before, but Project Success taught her how to see it as a benefit. 

“I’m so thankful I have it,” she said of her dyslexia. “It pushes me to be a better person.”

One in 5 could have dyslexia, but Wisconsin students, parents feel school support falls short is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of six news outlets covering northeastern Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin’s child care crisis affects you, even if you don’t know it.

Perhaps the only expense greater than the cost to sustainably fund our child care system, however, would be the price we’d pay if we don’t. The Council for a Strong America estimates the child care crisis already costs Wisconsin families, businesses and governments a combined $1.9 billion every year.

Nearly nine in 10 working parents say child care costs them time and productivity at work, which may mean more work for others or jobs that don’t get done. Lost wages and fewer sales mean less tax revenue for local, state and federal governments. 

Wisconsin’s broken child care system must be fixed for the sake of families, businesses, workers and the state’s general economic prosperity. 

“An investment in (the child care) industry is an investment in all industries across Wisconsin because parents work in every industry,” said Ruth Schmidt, Wisconsin Early Childhood Association’s executive director. 

There is no single solution that will address the shortage of care, centers’ high operating costs, workers’ very low wages and the exorbitant prices families pay for care.

Instead, industry experts and child care providers say effectively address industry needs requires government, employers and families to collaborate.  

“It’s like a three-legged stool,” said Julie Stoffel, owner and administrator of Cradle to Crayons Learning Center in Kimberly. “If you take one of those legs out, it’s not going to stand up. It’s not going to be good.” 

The USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, in collaboration with the NEW News Lab, talked to early childhood education experts, child care providers and parents to identify the gaps and discuss possible solutions to close them. Here’s what we found:

Child Care Counts sparked optimism — but its funding was just cut

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the state created Child Care Counts to provide monthly stabilization payments to qualified child care businesses. The funding may have served as hope that Wisconsin was finally beginning to realize how essential child care is and the importance of the job done by early childhood educators.

“Everybody is expecting child care will continue to limp along as it has historically done,” Schmidt said. “What’s changed is the industry had a taste of what it’s like to be supported.”

Child Care Counts monthly payments helped about 3,000 child care businesses stay open. For the first time, many providers had a stable revenue source outside of the cost parents pay for care. In some cases, it allowed for wage increases (although child care is still a notoriously underpaid profession), long put-off updates and even prevented substantial tuition increases.

“For us, Child Care Counts has been able to make us stable in the sense that I don’t worry about how I’m going to make ends meet because I know we’re going to be supported … but I am still conscious of every penny that is spent,” Renae Henning, administrator at Community Care Preschool and Child Care in Beaver Dam, told The Post-Crescent.

Child Care Counts funding is set to run out by 2024 — and recently, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families announced the total monthly amount will be cut in half beginning with the May 2023 payment. 

Six in 10 operators said if support ends they’ll have to raise tuition; one in three will cut wages, according to a survey of 1,173 Wisconsin centers.

Corrine Hendrickson, a licensed family child care provider in New Glarus and co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed, said the grassroots group’s research found many Wisconsin providers may have to increase their rates by 20%-40% to make up in lost revenue if Child Care Counts is not included in the state budget. With DCF’s recent announcement, rate increases may occur sooner, but by how much remains to be seen. 

Advocates such as Hendrickson recognize Child Care Counts’ continuation is essential, but warn that it merely stabilizes the industry. For child care businesses to thrive, additional investment and structural changes are needed, she said. 

So, what can Wisconsin governments do to make an impact?

Wisconsin can sustainably fund child care programs shown to help families, businesses and child care centers with special attention to the full cost to provide care.

The Partner Up grant program, administered by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, helps businesses cover the true cost of child care and provides some families with relief from high costs. Partner Up dollars, in combination with Child Care Counts stabilization payments, helped many child care centers increase wages, renovate classrooms and complete necessary updates. 

However, Child Care Counts and Partner Up largely rely on one-time dollars, leaving states like Wisconsin searching for a sustainable level and method of support. Some states have taken action to find long-term dollars for child care programs. In New Mexico, legislators amended the state constitution to tap existing education funding sources for early childhood education funding. The move should make care more affordable and support the state’s child care workforce. 

Communities across Wisconsin also have found effective ways to use one-time dollars to address their area’s child care needs.

The North Central Wisconsin Workforce Development Board used American Rescue Plan Act dollars to start new regulated family child care programs — meaning those that are within a provider’s home — and help existing programs add slots. The Worker Advancement Initiative Child Care Project, as it is called, helped add 93 new, regulated family child care slots in Adams, Wood, Portage, Marathon, Lincoln, Langlade, Forest, Vilas and Oneida counties.

The regional program awards an average of about $4,000 per child care business. The money helps operators overcome barriers to expansion, said Elsa Duranceau, the previous WAI grant coordinator who spearheaded the project.

The city of Green Bay and the Brown County United Way in March allocated $100,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding to seed a similar program via Family and Childcare Resources of Northeast Wisconsin, a regional industry resource center.

‘We’re not just babysitters’: Early childhood educators need recognition, reasonable wages

Teachers need specialized education to provide high-quality child care that helps young children develop vital social, emotional and cognitive skills. It can take time and require on-site field work.

Child care providers said poverty-level wages and minimal benefits contribute to high staff turnover, which can affect availability and quality of care. 

“It’s unfortunate we can’t treat being an early childhood educator as a career choice anywhere in our country,” Schmidt said. “(Early childhood educators) often earn no benefits, no retirement savings. And they’re doing some of the hardest work at the most important time.”

When Vanessa Hanagan, a student in Fox Valley Technical College’s early childhood education program who also works at Apple Tree Connections Early Learning Center in Appleton, tells others about her career aspirations, she’s often told she’s “wasting (her) time and talent.” Her classmates agree it’s a frustratingly common response. 

“I think if society comes to realize that we’re not just ‘babysitters’ to your children, I think that could change so much (about) pay and benefits just based on how people see us,” said Ysa Villagomez, another early childhood education student at FVTC.

It may not change public perceptions, but higher education institutions have recognized the industry’s workforce struggles and found small changes can have a big impact.

Appleton-based Fox Valley Technical College during the pandemic revised its field experience criteria to allow students with enough credits to work at a local child care center, according to Kathy Meetz, chairperson of FVTC’s Early Childhood Education Department. Centers can then factor their student workers into their child-to-staff ratios.

So far, five Wisconsin technical college systems have also introduced early childhood educator apprenticeships. David Polk, director of Wisconsin’s Bureau of Apprenticeship standards, said the agency continues to gauge early results. In general, 80% of apprentices stay with their employer for at least five years, Polk said.

He expects the apprenticeship will gain momentum, and could serve as a solution for an industry currently grappling with turnover rates of over 40%.

“As we onboard more of these individuals, that helps the greater community because if we have more teachers — more apprentices in the classroom — those child care centers can take on more (children),” Polk said.

In addition to apprenticeships, state Rep. Joy Goeben, R-Hobart, a former home child care operator, said expanding child care courses to high schools, streamlining child care center startup and certification, and making it easier for teachers to meet continuing education requirements could help the industry.

“If you have to spend so many hours to get certified when you’re trying to work, that can get in the way,” Goeben said. “Where’s the time for that? What can we do to help this process? Child care workers have a lot of expectations on them.”

Businesses have several options to help. What’s important is they do something

The majority of business owners and working parents recognize child care challenges affect productivity and exacerbate workforce shortages. 

The question businesses face is how to effectively help their employees, and communities, when the options available can be overwhelming and their effects differ in each community. Actions can be small, like connecting workers with information about subsidies, resources and available care, or on something of a larger scale. 

Appleton-based U.S. Venture pays for employee subscriptions to Care.com, a website that connects families who need child, senior or pet care with available providers that have passed a background check. Lori Hoersch, U.S. Venture’s chief people officer, said it has been popular with employees.

“Providing our team members a free membership allowed them to have an additional option available without additional cost,” Hoersch said in an email. “Today, our team members are still juggling busy lives, and providing extra support to balance the demands of work and family is very important to us.”

Speaking with those in the industry can help employers understand their area’s particular child care issues — whether it’s a lack of centers, a lack of staffing limiting slots, lack of second-shift care or a mix of all — and therefore determine where to best focus their efforts.

“A lot of really important stakeholders need to be involved. There’s a great place for collaboration in communities,” said Anne Hedgepeth, Child Care Aware of America’s chief of policy and advocacy. “Employers can play a role as a resource and be a voice for why we need these supports overall.” 

Large employers might build on-site or near-site child care to help their employees, often by providing discounts and priority placement. When the center enrolls children from the broader community, benefits can reach outside just the company. But the construction of a new center may have unintended consequences on the existing child care landscape; many centers are limited in how many children they can serve because of staffing shortages.

“What we’re often concerned about is that when you stand up a new child care program, you’re going to be pulling staff from other child care programs. It’s basically shifting chairs on the Titanic,” Schmidt said.

More companies choose to give their workers monthly or annual stipends to help cover the cost of child care. Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry saw the connection between its worker retention and child care in early 2022 and has since provided employees with a $400 monthly stipend for care.  

However, employer-sponsored stipends do not target all facets of the child care crisis.

“While incredibly helpful to families and a welcome step in the right direction, employer-sponsored child care stipends alone do not net additional revenue for child care businesses and therefore do not fix the industry’s broken business model,” Schmidt said.

Should we approach funding child care like we do roads? 

Many in the child care industry fear that without immediate action, it faces imminent collapse. 

For the industry to thrive, not just scrape by, people need to reassess their perceptions of early childhood education. Advocates say the current system does not work — and all of Wisconsin pays for it.

The key lies in changing society’s perception — and the funding model — of child care from a service to a public good, like infrastructure, Hendrickson said. Between raising the future’s workforce to retaining the present-day ever-shrinking one, all benefit from a healthy child care system. 

“Child care is infrastructure, it is a core public service just like roads that we need to help the rest of society function properly,” said state Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, who is an advocate for state child care investments. 

Exactly how Wisconsin can make this shift remains to be seen. However, Hendrickson said two hallmarks must be present: it must consider the true cost of care, and be statewide as not to perpetuate inequities.

This story is part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab’s fourth series, “Families Matter,” covering issues important to families in the region. The lab is a local news collaboration in northeast Wisconsin made up of six news organizations: the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Appleton Post-Crescent, FoxValley365, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Journalism Department is an educational partner. Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative. The mission of the lab is to “collaborate to identify and fill information gaps to help residents explore ways to improve their communities and lives — and strengthen democracy.”

Madison Lammert covers child care and early education across Wisconsin as a Report for America corps member based at The Appleton Post-Crescent. To contact her, email mlammert@gannett.com or call 920-993-7108. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to Report for America.

Contact Jeff Bollier at (920) 431-8387 or jbollier@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffBollier.

Should Wisconsin fund child care like it does roads? Here are some solutions to the child care crisis is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of six news outlets covering northeastern Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

The old proverb says that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

Today, it takes the whole village, city or town — employers, families and government — to raise a child care center. 

Gabby Sorano needed support from all three to open the 35-slot Antigo Child Care Center last year in the city of 8,100 people 80 miles northwest of Green Bay.

Langlade County, where Antigo is located, is a child care desert: an area either without child care or where there’s fewer than one slot per three children. Langlade currently has one child care slot for every 4.3 children, the highest ratio in the 10-county North Central Wisconsin region.

Sorano was familiar with the region’s shortage after her son lost a spot during the pandemic. So when a child care center closed in Antigo, the former schoolteacher saw an opportunity to fill the gap.

To open, Sorano overcame pretty much every symptom of the early childhood education industry’s broken business model: low teacher salaries, space needs and costly building upgrades, regulatory reviews and inspections, and sky-high tuition fees that do not cover all of a center’s operating costs. 

Combined, she said, the hurdles can deter even the most passionate person from opening a center. Sorano’s idea needed a lot of community support before she could assure her family, children’s families, and the region’s employers that Antigo Child Care Center could survive long-term.

Fortunately, Langlade County was ready. According to Angie Close, executive director of the Langlade County Economic Development Corp., it only needed Sorano. 

“It definitely took collaboration and the right person. Gabby is the star,” Close said. “We were blessed to have Gabby come forward and take that leap.”

Here’s how the Antigo region rallied to support Sorano so she could open Antigo Child Care Center in July 2022. 

Antigo, Langlade already viewed child care as a workforce issue

Langlade County learned during the pandemic that a lack of adequate child care cost its economy about $15 million in 2019, Close said. The county formed a child care task force to foster community collaboration and to send the message that child care is a workforce issue.  

“Child care is such an important part of our talent attraction piece,” Close said. “Without child care, our workforce challenges will continue to grow.”

City agencies, county agencies, state grants and Childcaring Inc., central Wisconsin’s regional child care resource and referral agency, all provided necessary time, support and funding to help Sorano overcome some early hurdles. 

Sorano identified a building on Fifth Avenue, formerly used as a child care center, as a space for her new business. It turned out the building was owned by the Antigo Housing Authority, which agreed to renovate and remodel the space into classroom spaces for 35 children.  

“We wouldn’t have been able to afford that starting out,” Sorano said. 

Close and other city and county officials would also help Sorano apply for and secure a Main Street Bounceback Grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to help with startup costs. The public also contributed $7,100 to a GoFundMe campaign for playground equipment. 

It was not enough. 

Family fees don’t cover the full cost of care

Everyone knows child care is expensive. Some might know that early childhood teachers could probably get paid more to work in a convenience store. 

What much of the public doesn’t know or notice is that family fees and subsidies that help low-income families afford child care do not come close to covering a center’s entire budget. 

“People don’t realize their family fees go toward so many things,” Sorano said. “There’s paying for staff, toys, food, maintenance, rent, utilities, consumable supplies and so many other things.”

This is where Sorano was stuck. Her business plan showed tuition and program grants covered only two-thirds of the center’s projected operating costs. The business plan left little room for better wages and benefits for teachers, a priority for Sorano. There was no room to raise the already-high fees families would be asked to pay. 

Close said it was an eye-opening moment.  

“I did not realize what the people who are taking care of your children are getting paid because that’s all the centers can afford to pay them,” Close said. “You can assume all you want, but when you get real data that show these numbers, it’s ‘Oh, my gosh.’”

Sorano, Close and others tried to think of another revenue stream Antigo Child Care Center could tap, some innovative way to plug the gap and provide the service everyone in Langlade County knew was needed. 

It turned out Sorano was not the only one looking to do more about the child care challenge. 

‘Getting anybody in the workforce helps the community as a whole’

The answer Sorano found was to offer local employers a tiered partnership opportunity. 

Here’s how it works: Local businesses can pay Antigo Child Care Center a monthly stipend that Sorano uses to boost teacher salaries and to pay for a variety of items outlined in the partnership agreement.

In exchange, the company’s workers get priority access to six, eight or 10 slots at ACCC, depending on the partnership level, and employees receive a weekly discount on care. Two organizations have signed up: Volm Companies Inc. and the Unified School District of Antigo.  

Volm, part of the Antigo business community since 1966, signed up for the six-slot tier. Linda Esker, Volm’s corporate human resources director, said it’s unclear whether the partnership directly resulted in retaining any of Volm’s roughly 550 employees. But she said Volm looked at other measures to gauge its importance and success.

“Our agreement with Gabby is really key to getting people into the workforce,” Esker said. “It could mean getting people into the workforce for Volm, which is the hope, but getting anybody in the workforce helps the community as a whole. I’m not as competitive with other employers if there are more people to draw from.”

Sorano said each partnership enables her to pay her teachers more, one of her biggest concerns about starting Antigo Child Care Center. She said she structured teacher contracts so that if partnerships are in place, teachers get paid a higher wage. She said the partnerships, and the business plan, are what sustains Antigo Child Care Center.

“I’m very thankful for these partnerships,” Sorano said.

The building blocks for growth

The community collaboration that helped Sorano launch Antigo Child Care Center has everyone involved thinking about what more they can do to address the region’s needs.

Volm’s operations run 24/7, but second- or third-shift child care is practically nonexistent in Antigo and many other Wisconsin cities. Additionally, Close and Sorano both noted many Langlade County residents live outside the Antigo area in smaller, rural communities that suffer from a severe shortage of child care.  

“This is a great step forward, but there’s a lot more work to do,” Esker said. “Part of it is providing care on an alternate schedule. It’s a struggle.”

Sorano focused on smaller growth, first. 

Antigo Child Care Center announced a summer program for school-age children, and about 40 kids have signed up so far. Sorano is also in discussions with the Antigo Housing Authority on additional building renovations that could enable it to add four more infant slots and four more toddler slots. 

“Everyone coming together is going to blossom and bloom into other things,” Sorano said. “When we have the support and financial stability, I feel comfortable opening a school-age summer program or expanding to the meet the need. Without the support of the community, there’s no way I feel like someone would want to take on something else.”

This story is part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab’s fourth series, “Families Matter,” covering issues important to families in the region. The lab is a local news collaboration in northeast Wisconsin made up of six news organizations: the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Appleton Post-Crescent, FoxValley365, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Journalism Department is an educational partner. Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative. The mission of the lab is to “collaborate to identify and fill information gaps to help residents explore ways to improve their communities and lives — and strengthen democracy.”Contact Jeff Bollier at (920) 431-8387 or jbollier@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffBollier.

It takes a village: How collaboration helped a small northern Wisconsin city add crucial child care is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Editor’s note: This story was updated Friday, May 5 to include additional response from School Choice Wisconsin.

In 2022, the two Fox Valley Lutheran High School students were a few months from graduating when they got called into the dean’s office. 

One was the cheerleading captain and National Honor Society inductee; the other a basketball player, homecoming queen and student council member. Both were accomplished and well-respected students. 

Yet in separate meetings with the dean, they learned they faced expulsion — not for cheating or plagiarizing or breaking the law, but because administrators suspected the young women of dating. 

The school’s handbook states that “any sexual misconduct,” including “homosexual behavior… on or off campus, will be treated as a serious violation of God’s will and may be grounds for disciplinary action or expulsion.” 

State law prohibits public schools from discriminating against students on the basis of sex, sexual orientation or disability, but it does not extend the same protections to private schools — even those receiving public funds. 

Fox Valley Lutheran in Appleton is one of 373 of Wisconsin private schools that currently receive public funding through tuition vouchers. According to this year’s preliminary numbers, they serve more than 52,000 voucher students, which amounts to 6% of all students at Wisconsin publicly funded schools. About one-fifth of voucher schools have 90% or more of their students on vouchers, what one scholar describes as “private in name only.”

Wisconsin spent about $443 million this year on the four choice programs. Some Republicans, including 2022 gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels, have pushed for “universal” school choice, which would allow any Wisconsin student, regardless of income, to attend a private school at taxpayer expense. 

The cheerleading captain, who spoke to Wisconsin Watch on the condition of anonymity to avoid harassment, recalled the dean saying he’d go easy on them because they were good students. The pair could remain enrolled and graduate, so long as they broke up and spoke with a pastor — and after he outed them to their parents.

Leaders from Fox Valley Lutheran did not respond to a request for comment on this account.

The next day, dozens of seniors quietly protested the decision by wearing their school-issued class T-shirts, which were tie-dyed rainbow. The next week, the young woman found herself again meeting with the principal, athletic director and her parents.

She suspected it was “retaliation after the whole rainbow shirt thing” because they’d believed breaking up, religious counseling and forced outing was the “extent” of their punishment. 

The principal, Alan Nolte, began with a prayer that asked the “Heavenly Father” to bless the meeting as they “help to build (the student) up,” according to a recording of the meeting. 

Nolte then proceeded to ban her from any extracurriculars or school activities that were “a little bit more public in nature” for the rest of the year.

He said their relationship was a sin because “the Bible is clear,” but that the administration was treating it as any other code of conduct violation.

“Our chief concern,” Nolte said. “is your spiritual welfare.” 

In an interview, the student said she did not mind a religious school instructing a student to meet with a pastor — but she objected to a taxpayer-funded school meting out punishment based on “moral issues.”  

‘Little can be done’

The cheerleading captain didn’t know it, but another student had reached out on her and her girlfriend’s behalf, asking Gov. Tony Evers for help.

“This week two fantastic athletes, (REDACTED) and (REDACTED) were banned from all team sports for being in a homosexual relationship,” the student wrote in an online complaint. “The entire student body is very upset about this, as this could affect (their) careers in sports when it should not.” 

The student said: “This is discrimination, and I believe it should be addressed on a government level, as the school receives funding from school choice.”

In an email to Wisconsin Watch, Fox Valley Lutheran’s president said the “details” of the complaint were “not accurate,” but he declined to say how.

Records show Evers’ staff sought guidance from the state Department of Public Instruction on how to respond, but acknowledged that “likely little can be done as it is a private institution.” 

In response to questions from Evers’ staff, DPI said it lacked “apparent authority” to intervene on behalf of the student-athletes. It recommended the concerned student contact the school’s governing board or advocacy groups who might connect them with attorneys.

The first governor to raise the LGBTQ+ flag over Wisconsin’s Capitol could not help the gay students. They pretended to break up and laid low until graduation. They’re still dating today.

‘Choice’ for some, not all

Wisconsin is considered the birthplace of the “school choice” movement. The nation’s first publicly funded private voucher program began in Milwaukee in 1990. Initial restrictions, such as limiting vouchers to secular schools, have disappeared as the program has expanded. Today, 32 schools — including at least one with an anti-LGBTQ+ stance — have their entire student bodies on publicly funded vouchers.

Legal discrimination against students who are LGBTQ+ or have disabilities results from a lack of state-level protections; a federal exemption that allows religious entities to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and another that requires schools taking federal funds to make only minor adjustments for students with disabilities; and a state education agency constrained by punctilious rules and decades of litigation.

“It’s unfortunate,” DPI communications director Abigail Swetz told Wisconsin Watch by email. “We want children to be included, welcomed, and safe in all schools, especially those that receive public funding. It is what we expect as good stewards of public dollars and as educators who value all children.” 

The president of School Choice Wisconsin, Nicholas Kelly, said by email that his organization “support(s) and encourage(s) compliance with all rules and processes set in place to address issues of this nature.” He did not respond to specific questions.

After publication, Kelly disputed that private schools discriminate. He provided a statement that read, in part, “Fundamentally, parental choice and educational freedom provide accountability. If parents or students are not satisfied with the education they receive they can choose another school.”

Wisconsin Watch reviewed public materials for about one-third of the state’s voucher schools and found that nearly half had policies or statements that appeared to discriminate against students who are LGBTQ+ or have disabilities, often citing religious principles or lack of capacity to accommodate certain conditions. 

Some handbooks say administrators may decline to enroll students with disabilities whose needs they cannot meet. Others say they might refuse enrollment to students whose families support LGBTQ+ people. Some, like Fox Valley Lutheran, might expel students who engage in “homosexual behavior” off campus. One will even expel students if their parents’ conduct is “contrary to the Bible.” 

“Let’s just stop calling it a ‘choice program,’ ” said Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, a civil rights attorney and disability education advocate. “And let’s call it a private discriminatory education program funded with your tax dollars.” 

Several other organizations that support voucher schools ignored repeated requests for comment.

Every voucher school contacted ignored or declined an interview to clarify its positions, as did every association, church or accreditor representing them. Some provided brief, written statements. Two hung up on calls, and one blocked a reporter’s emails. 

In records obtained from DPI, a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod pastor said he believes “that lifestyles and current viewpoints of LGBTQ individuals clearly oppose the teachings of Scripture and therefore constitute sin that must be addressed. … Within our circles, we would say that ‘this is not discrimination but rather love practiced in the same way a parent would raise a child and announce harm when it is near.’ ” 

Legal scholars and advocates for the LGBTQ+ and disability communities all objected to public dollars supporting institutions with such policies.

“I think it’s a common sense approach — and that the general public would typically agree — that a school that receives taxpayer money shouldn’t be able to discriminate against certain historically marginalized students,” said Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

“LGBTQ folks are members of the community, we’re taxpayers,” said Ali Muldrow, a Madison School Board member and co-executive director of GSAFE, which advocates on behalf of LGBTQ+ youth in education. “We shouldn’t have to contribute to entities and institutions that discriminate against us.”

‘Am I allowed to expel a student who comes out of the closet?’

Wisconsin lawmakers have declined at least three times to stop voucher schools from discriminating against LGBTQ+ students or those with disabilities. Proposals in 2007, 2013 and 2015 all died without public hearings. Leaders of the education committees in both chambers did not respond to emails from Wisconsin Watch asking if they condone the status quo.

Establishment of all four of the state’s voucher programs — the Milwaukee, Racine and statewide Wisconsin Parental Choice Programs and the Special Needs Scholarship Program — was tucked into larger budget bills and signed by Republican Govs. Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker. 

State law requires voucher schools to comply with a federal code prohibiting discrimination based on race, color or national origin, but no other protected classes. And while they cannot discriminate against LGBTQ+ students or those with disabilities during admissions — limited by statutorily described eligibility criteria — they may do so once that student is enrolled.

It is even legal for a private school to enroll a voucher student “one minute” and expel them “the next,” confirmed Swetz.

Over the years, records show, faith leaders considering joining the voucher program have inquired about this distinction in blunt terms. 

The Rev. Brett Naumann, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Kiel, asked if he could expel a student who came out as gay or transgender, “provided that it is clearly laid out in our handbook.” A DPI consultant responded: “Once a student has been offered a seat and the student accepts, school policies apply.” 

Naumann’s school is not currently a member of the voucher program, and he referred all questions to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), whose spokesperson, Lee Hitter, did not answer specific questions.

He provided a statement that said, in part: “We operate our schools in accordance with all state and federal laws… Prospective families can determine if the mission and beliefs of WELS schools meet the needs of their families and whether to enroll their children.” 

WELS considers it a sin to be transgender or gay. Wisconsin Watch found 17 WELS schools participating in the voucher program with anti-LGBTQ+ policies. 

Enrollment required; expulsion OK

DPI’s authority to protect students who are LGBTQ+ or have disabilities at voucher schools stops at enrollment. 

Take Fond du Lac Christian School. The school sought to join the voucher program in 2017, submitting materials indicating it would deny enrollment to voucher students who were gay or transgender. A DPI consultant directed the school to change the policy and resubmit, as it could only base voucher admissions on family income, prior year enrollment, prior attendance at a voucher school, residency and age. 

The official complied, adding a disclaimer that exempted voucher students from this anti-LGBTQ+ admissions requirement, while maintaining it for privately paying students — a distinction Wisconsin Watch found elsewhere. 

As permitted by law, Fond du Lac Christian School kept in its 2017-18 handbook an eight-point anti-LGBTQ+ policy against enrolled students, as well as parents, employees and members, which bans them from “practicing” their gay or transgender identities. 

Today, about 63% of Fond du Lac Christian School’s students are on vouchers. The current handbook is not publicly available, and school administrator Luke Wagner and other staff blocked a reporter from emailing them after asking for the policy. A receptionist hung up on the same reporter when inquiring by phone.

A ‘cautious’ DPI

DPI risks a lawsuit if its response to claims of discrimination appears to overstep its authority as explicitly described in statute. And a lawsuit, DPI’s Swetz said by email, could create “bad law (court precedent) that would further harm kids.”

DPI also can’t establish rules granting itself additional authority without agreement from the Republican-controlled Legislature.

In the 1990s, at the beginning of the state’s first voucher program, then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bert Grover crafted a rule requiring participating private schools to serve students with disabilities similarly to public schools. But it was short lived, with a judge deciding Grover lacked the authority to establish such a rule.

And even after the U.S. Department of Justice ordered DPI in 2013 to end discrimination based on disability in its voucher school program, the agency said it lacked the specific statutory authority to act.

“There is this long-standing pattern in the space of courts and the Legislature of looking for ways to limit DPI’s authority,” said Elisabeth Lambert, attorney and founder of the Wisconsin Education Law and Policy Hub. “All (DPI) can do is apply these very specific procedural mandates that are written into the statute, and there’s no authority outside that.” 

This history has made DPI, in Lambert’s view, “cautious” and “defensive.” Spitzer-Resnick, the other education attorney, has a blunter description: “completely wimpy.” 

“We have to be cautious,” Swetz said. “When it comes to the private school choice programs, we so much as sneeze, and we get sued, and then more kids get hurt.”

‘We operate under what is written in state statutes’

DPI declined to weigh in even when presented with possible violations of state law uncovered by Wisconsin Watch.

Faith Christian School in Williams Bay, which has 17% of its student body on vouchers, requires all families to undergo the school’s admissions process, including providing a “Christian testimony” from one parent, a student/family interview and agreement with the school’s anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion statement of faith. 

State law does not permit private schools to place these additional requirements on voucher students prior to enrollment.

Faith Christian School also vows to leave the voucher program if the state dictates it cannot make enrollment or admissions decisions “based solely on a student’s views or behavior related to … homosexuality; gender; and sexual identity, including the student’s own gender identification.” State law already prohibits that.

Peace Lutheran School in Hartford has a similar application process to Faith Christian, requiring parents to “permit their child to be instructed in the doctrines of Holy Scripture,” as taught by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, including “biblical truths” about “homosexuality, same-sex marriage, evolution, pre-marital sex, drug abuse, and the like.”

State law specifically requires voucher schools to honor a voucher family’s request to opt out of religious activities and instruction.

Swetz, DPI’s communications director, said whether Faith Christian’s approach or similar approaches violate state law comes down to timing. 

“If these policies are applied as part of reviewing the student’s Choice eligibility and before the random selection process for the program, then it would be considered a violation,” she said by email. But if it came after the random lottery, it was fine.

Added Swetz: “Wisconsin DPI cannot weigh in on whether certain school’s policies are legal or illegal because we operate under what is written in state statutes.” 

Faith Christian School did not respond to emails or phone messages. But a spokesperson for Association of Christian Schools International, which provides its accreditation, said “it is not discrimination for Christian schools to teach and live out the truths of the historic Christian faith with respect to marriage and human sexuality.”

Federal disability protections limited

Federal law ostensibly provides protections to students with disabilities, but various exemptions limit the effect.

Education legal scholars, lawyers and disability rights activists say that ultimately, when students with disabilities opt out of public school, they waive their most robust protections to an equal education.

Religious schools — nearly all of those receiving Wisconsin vouchers — are exempt from federal laws barring discrimination based on disability unless they take federal funds, and even then, the law requires only “minor adjustments.”

Fond du Lac Christian School, for example, states it “desires to serve” those it is “equipped to accommodate,” but “is not qualified to adequately address all learning disabilities, behavioral disorders or emotional disturbances.” Like Prairie Hill Waldorf School, it reserves the right to expel students if it determines the school cannot meet their needs. 

Joanne Juhnke, an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, said her organization “fairly regularly” receives calls from parents asking, “ ‘Oh my goodness, can they actually do this?’ ”

Even parents who enrolled their children on Special Needs Scholarship Program vouchers, which lists the rights of students with disabilities in the program compared to public schools, can feel blindsided.

“If you have any memory left of that plain black-and-white document that said you’ve given up some of your rights, it can still come as a surprise to you,” Juhnke said.

How Title IX protects religious freedom, allows LGBTQ+ discrimination

When it comes to LGBTQ+ protections, private religious institutions that receive federal funding are exempt from Title IX, the federal law barring gender-based discrimination in education, if complying with the law would violate a school’s religious tenets. This year, 95% of the state’s voucher schools are religious, Wisconsin Watch found.

Immanuel Lutheran School of Brookfield, which has 71% of its students on vouchers, embodies the exemption. Its handbook tells families that to receive federally subsidized free and reduced lunch, it must display a poster professing it does not discriminate on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. 

But alongside what they call the “offending poster” is one reaffirming the school’s Christian beliefs that it is a sin to be gay or trans. Elsewhere, the school’s handbook warns that pupils should not “intentionally present their physical features or dress to be opposite his/her sex at conception.”

The basis of a religious exemption to non-discrimination laws has a fraught history. Scholars Suzanne Eckes and Julie Mead write that in the mid-20th century, segregationists attempted to use the theory of “sincerely held religious beliefs” to justify exclusion of Black students. In 1983, the Supreme Court determined private religious schools cannot justify discrimination through faith and still claim public benefits, such as an IRS tax exemption.

Today, Eckes and Mead believe the question has moved to LGBTQ+ students. There’s a potential for litigation challenging Title IX’s religious exemption to LGBTQ+ discrimination, “in the same way that we saw in the ‘50s, ‘60s, all the way up through the early ‘80s of African-American students who weren’t being admitted to private schools,” Eckes said. 

Mead argues that despite the various obstacles DPI faces, Wisconsin has a legal obligation to prevent discrimination within the voucher programs because they are public, state-administered programs.

Mead and Eckes have proposed passing state and federal laws prohibiting private schools taking public funds from discriminating against students who are LGBTQ+ or have disabilities. 

But how that might stand against Title IX’s religious exemption is unclear. As of 2021, Maryland was the nation’s only state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in voucher schools. It is currently defending its position in court. 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Voucher schools are private schools that use taxpayer dollars to subsidize the cost of private education for K4-12 students from lower-income families in the form of a voucher. The payments go directly from the state to the school based on the number of voucher students enrolled at the school at the beginning of each semester. 

Parents who qualify may choose to send their children to private voucher schools instead of their local public school.

In Wisconsin, voucher schools are those currently participating in at least one of four state-run, state-funded programs: the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the Racine Parental Choice Program, the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program and the Special Needs Scholarship (SNSP) Program. 

For 2023-24, the annual voucher payment is $8,399 for K-8 students, and the schools cannot charge additional tuition from these families. For grade 9-12 students, the annual payment is $9,045, and schools may charge additional tuition if the family’s income exceeds 220% of the federal poverty level, which is $61,050 for a family of four.

Voucher schools cannot charge voucher students fees for registration, but it may charge “reasonable fees for certain personal use items,” according to the Department of Public Instruction. 

There are 373 participating schools for the 2022-23 school year. According to a Wisconsin Watch analysis, 95% of the currently participating schools are religious. Voucher students have a legal right to opt-out of religious activity.

These programs often are referred to as “choice” programs or “choice schools.” Because there are additional educational programs advocates refer to as “school choice,” Wisconsin Watch has chosen to use the narrow, specific term “voucher.”

What makes a student eligible for a voucher:

All students must meet certain eligibility criteria, such as residency, income and age. 

For the 2023-24 academic year, the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs cap family income at 300% of the federal poverty level, which is $83,250 for a family of four, and the statewide voucher program caps it at 220%, which is $61,050 for a family of four.

Students in the SNSP must also have a disability as reflected by an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or services plan. 

Private schools may not consider factors beyond what the statutes describe when making admissions decisions. In the Milwaukee and Racine programs, if there are more voucher applicants than available seats, the school must do a random drawing. This means private schools are not supposed to consider a voucher applicant’s disability or LGBTQ+ status in the admissions process.

What the voucher program costs the state: 

Funding for the statewide and Racine voucher programs and the Special Needs Scholarship Program comes out of the funding for public schools. Districts levy the per student amount to cover the total cost of vouchers, and that total is deducted from the district’s overall aid from the state.

The Milwaukee voucher program is funded through state general purpose revenue and local funding, and also reduces the amount of aid to the public school district, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

In the 2022-23 school year, Wisconsin spent about $443 million on the four choice programs. 

The latest available numbers from DPI show in the 2021-22 school year, Wisconsin spent $7,728 in state revenue per public school pupil. By comparison, the voucher payments that year were

$8,336 in kindergarten through eighth grade, and $8,982 in grades nine through 12th in the Milwaukee, Racine and statewide programs, and $13,013 for Special Needs Scholarship Program vouchers.  

If your child is part of the LGBTQ+ community, they may be legally discriminated against as a voucher student.

After enrollment, LGBTQ+ students attending voucher schools may legally be discriminated against due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although private schools cannot deny admission to voucher students on the basis of LGBTQ+ identity, school policies apply once a student enrolls. There is no state law prohibiting LGBTQ+ discrimination against enrolled students. And religious entities — which comprise 95% of current voucher schools — are exempted from federal Title IX protections against discrimination if complying with the law “would be inconsistent with the religious tenets of the organization.”

A Wisconsin Watch investigation has found that many voucher schools have policies targeting LGBTQ+ students for disparate treatment. Some warn they may discipline or  expel students for being gay or transgender. Others ban recognition of a transgender student’s chosen name or pronouns, or will deny them access to transition-related medication or facilities that align with their gender identity. 

As policies and procedures vary by school, parents or guardians of LGBTQ+ youth should contact the schools they are interested in directly to ask for a copy of the handbook or discuss their application. Many schools also have their handbooks publicly available on their websites.

If your child has a disability they may not have protection as a voucher student.

Students with disabilities lose a host of rights under federal law when they leave public schools. Private voucher schools are “only required to offer services to assist students with special needs that it can provide with minor adjustments,” according to DPI. This document compares the rights afforded to students with disabilities in public schools versus in the Special Needs Scholarship Program.

Although schools cannot consider a voucher student’s disability during admissions, they may expel students if they determine they cannot readily accommodate their needs. A Wisconsin Watch investigation has found some voucher schools appear to have such policies.

As policies and procedures vary by school, parents or guardians of children with disabilities interested in voucher schools should contact the schools they are interested in to ask for a copy of the handbook or discuss their application. 

In some cases, students with disabilities can qualify for services provided by the local public school district. DPI  recommends that parents contact the public school district in which the private school is located to see what services, if any, it  provides to private school students. 

What to do if you think your child has faced LGBTQ+ or disability discrimination at a voucher school:

If you believe your family has experienced discrimination on the basis of LGBTQ+ or disability status during voucher admissions, you can contact DPI. 

If you believe your family has experienced LGBTQ+ or disability discrimination before or after enrollment, and you would like to challenge it, you can file a federal complaint with the Office for Civil Rights. You may also connect with advocates at groups such as Fair Wisconsin or Disability Rights Wisconsin about your options. Education advocates say you may have more luck in federal court, but a challenge in state court might have the chance to change state law. 

To find more information about voucher schools in Wisconsin:

Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction has extensive information on its website. It provides an overview of the programs, which discusses student eligibility. Application guidelines describe how to apply for enrollment in the 2023-24 school year, including the open application periods. Frequently asked questions cover everything from religious activities, transferring and the type of residency documentation required. 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Considering a Wisconsin voucher school? Here’s what parents of children who are LGBTQ+ or have a disability should know. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. The story was originally published by The Markup and Chalkbeat.

Last summer, administrators at Bradford High School in Kenosha, Wis., met as they do every year to plan for the incoming class of ninth graders. From a roster of hundreds of middle schoolers, assistant principal Matt Brown and his staff made a list of 30 to 40 students who they suspected might struggle the most to graduate.

Over the course of the summer break, Brown and his team went down the list and visited each child’s home. The staff brought T-shirts for the students, introduced themselves to parents, left behind their contact information and, they hoped, a positive first impression.

“It’s like, ‘Hey, we want to hook you up with some Bradford gear. You’re gonna be part of aBradford family now,’ ” Brown said. “It’s kind of coming out from that standpoint of, ‘Hey, we’re here to support you,’ not necessarily, ‘Hey, your kid really messed up last year’ … because we don’t want parents to feel like you’re already labeling their kid as somebody that’s a troublemaker.”

But in most cases, the students on Bradford’s list for summer visits land there because of a label — “high risk” — assigned to them by a racially inequitable algorithm built by the state of Wisconsin, one that frequently raises false alarms.

Since 2012, Wisconsin school administrators like Brown have received their first impression of new students from the Dropout Early Warning System (DEWS), an ensemble of machine learning algorithms that use historical data — such as students’ test scores, disciplinary records, free or reduced lunch status, and race — to predict how likely each sixth through ninth grader in the state is to graduate from high school on time.

Twice a year, schools receive a list of their enrolled students with DEWS’ color-coded prediction next to each name: green for low risk, yellow for moderate risk, or red for high risk of dropping out.

Education officials once held up DEWS as a key tool in their fight against the state’s graduation gap. While 94% of white students graduated on time last year, only 82% of Hispanic and 71% of Black students completed high school in four years.

DEWS was intended to put personalized predictions in the hands of educators early enough that they could intervene before a child showed obvious signs of falling off track.

But after a decade of use and millions of predictions, The Markup has found that DEWS may be incorrectly and negatively influencing how educators perceive students, particularly students of color. And a forthcoming academic study from researchers based out of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared data and prepublication findings with The Markup, has concluded that DEWS has failed at its primary goal: improving graduation rates for the students it labels “high risk.”

An internal Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) equity analysis conducted in 2021 found that DEWS generated false alarms about Black and Hispanic students not graduating on time at a significantly greater rate than it did for their white classmates. 

The algorithm’s false alarm rate — how frequently a student it predicted wouldn’t graduate on time actually did graduate on time — was 42 percentage points higher for Black students than white students, according to a DPI presentation summarizing the analysis, which we obtained through a public records request. The false alarm rate was 18 percentage points higher for Hispanic students than white students.

DPI has not told school officials who use DEWS about the findings nor does it appear to have altered the algorithms in the nearly two years since it concluded DEWS was unfair.

The DPI presentation summarizing the equity analysis we reviewed did not include the underlying false alarm rates for Black, Hispanic and white students that DPI used to make its calculations. It also did not include results for students of other races. The department declined to answer questions about the analysis and, in response to a subsequent public records request, DPI said it had no documentation of the equity analysis results beyond the presentation. (A video of the presentation can be seen here.)

A separate DPI validation test of DEWS’ accuracy in March 2021 shows it was wrong nearly three-quarters of the time it predicted a student wouldn’t graduate on time.

Students we interviewed were surprised to learn DEWS existed and told The Markup they were concerned that an algorithm was using their race to predict their future and label them high risk.

“It makes the students of color feel like they’re separated … like they automatically have less,” said Christopher Lyons, a Black student who graduated from Bradford High School in 2022.

Wisconsin DPI spokesperson Abigail Swetz declined to answer questions about DEWS but provided a brief emailed statement.

“Is DEWS racist?” Swetz wrote. “No, the data analysis isn’t racist. It’s math that reflects our systems. The reality is that we live in a white supremacist society, and the education system is systemically racist. That is why the DPI needs tools like DEWS and is why we are committed to educational equity.”

In response to our findings and further questions, Swetz wrote, “You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this system works. We stand by our previous response.” She did not explain what that fundamental misunderstanding was.

To piece together how DEWS has affected the students it has judged, The Markup examined unpublished DPI research, analyzed 10 years of district-level DEWS data, interviewed students and school officials, and collected survey responses from 80 of the state’s more than 400 districts about their use of the predictions.

Our investigation shows that many Wisconsin districts use DEWS — 38% of those that responded to our survey — and that the algorithms’ technical failings have been compounded by a lack of training for educators.

DEWS is a voluntary program, and DPI encourages educators to use the predictions in combination with other local data about students to make decisions. The agency does not track whether or how schools use the predictions. Principals, superintendents and other administrators told The Markup they received little or no explanation of how DEWS calculates its predictions or how to translate a label like “high risk” into the appropriate intervention.

In districts like Kenosha, students of color don’t need data to understand the consequences of being judged by biased systems. In 2020, the city grabbed national headlines following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. And earlier this year, the family of a 12-year-old Black student sued the Kenosha Unified School District after an off-duty police officer working security placed her in a chokehold in the lunchroom of her school.

In 2018, the year Lyons entered Bradford High School, a teacher there was filmed repeatedly using a racial slur in front of students. That year, DEWS labeled 43% of Black ninth graders in Kenosha as high risk, compared to 11% of white ninth graders.

By that point, Lyons said he’d already lost motivation academically. “It kind of felt like we weren’t expected to do much,” he said. “It felt like they knew that we were just destined to fail.” Then something unexpected happened his sophomore year: The COVID-19 pandemic hit, classes went virtual, and, as he put it, his grades “skyrocketed” from a 2.9 GPA pre-pandemic to a 3.8 GPA after the switch to remote learning. 

What for many students was a disorienting interruption to their education was for Lyons a reprieve that allowed him to focus. “I didn’t have that social pressure of, like, the teachers around me or the administration around me,” he said. “It was just me, the computer, whoever I was talking to.”

Last year, Lyons began his freshman year at Carthage College in Kenosha on a full-ride scholarship. His journey illustrates the quirks in personality, learning style and environment that, some experts say, make it counterproductive to predict an individual student’s future based on a population-level analysis of statistically similar students.

Nonetheless, early warning systems that use machine learning to predict student outcomes are common in K-12 and higher education. At least eight state public education agencies provide algorithmic early warning systems or are currently building them for future use, according to a Markup survey of all 50 states. Four states did not respond. 

Montana was the only state besides Wisconsin that said it had examined how its early warning system performed across different racial groups. Montana Office of Public Instruction spokesperson Brian O’Leary said that his state’s equity study was not yet finished.

‘Is DEWS fair? No…’

At the beginning of and midway through each year, DEWS calculates how likely each incoming sixth- through ninth-grade student is to graduate from high school on time on a scale of 0 to 100. A score of 90 indicates that students with similar academic, behavioral and demographic features have graduated on time 90% of the time in the past. Any student whose DEWS score (plus margin of error) is below 78.5 is labeled high risk of not graduating on time.

To make it easier for educators to understand the predictions, DPI translates DEWS scores into a simple, color-coded format. Next to every student’s name in the DEWS tab of the statewide information system is a label showing their score and a green “low,” yellow “moderate,” or red “high” risk designation. During the 2020–21 academic year, more than 32,000 students — 15 % of the state’s sixth through ninth graders — were labeled “high risk.”

Experts say the system is designed in ways that may inadvertently bias educators’ opinions of students and misdirect scarce school resources. Of particular concern is how heavily DEWS draws on factors like race, disability and family wealth, which are likely to encode systemic discrimination and which neither the school nor student can change. Other data points fed into DEWS, like discipline rates, have clear racial disparities — DPI knows this and has written about it on its website.

“I wonder at the ways in which these risk categories push schools and districts to look at individuals instead of structural issues — saying this child needs these things, rather than the structural issues being the reason we’re seeing these risks,” said Tolani Britton, a professor of education at UC-Berkeley, who co-wrote the forthcoming study on DEWS. 

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing that students receive additional resources, but at the same time, creating algorithms that associate your race or ethnicity with your ability to complete high school seems like a dangerous path to go down.”

When DEWS predicts that a student will graduate, it’s usually right — 97% of the time those students graduate in the standard four years, according to the 2021 validation test, which shows how the algorithms performed when tested on historical data. But when DEWS predicted a student wouldn’t, it was usually wrong — 74% of the time those students graduate on time, according to the same test.

This is partially by design. DPI calibrates DEWS to cast a wide net and over-identify students as being at risk of dropping out. In a 2015 paper describing DEWS in the Journal of Educational Data Mining, former DPI research analyst Jared Knowles wrote that DPI was “explicitly stating we are willing to accept” 25 false alarms that students won’t graduate if it means correctly identifying one dropout.

But in its equity analysis, DPI found the algorithms don’t generate false alarms equally.

“IN LAYMAN’s TERMS: the model over-identifies white students among the on-time graduates while it over-identifies Black, Hispanic and other students of color among the non- on-time graduates,” a DPI research analyst wrote in notes for the presentation. The presentation does not specify what DEWS scores qualify as on-time graduation, for the purpose of the equity analysis.

The notes for the slide, titled “Is DEWS Fair?” end with the conclusion “no ….”

“They definitely have been using a model that has systematic errors in terms of students’ race, and that’s really something that’s got to get fixed,” said Ryan Baker, a University of Pennsylvania education professor who studies early warning systems. “They had demographic factors as predictors, and that’s going to overemphasize the meaning of those variables and cause this kind of effect.”

A decade of DEWS demystified

Recently, a team of researchers working primarily out of UC-Berkeley — doctoral candidate Juan Perdomo, Britton, and algorithmic fairness experts Moritz Hardt and Rediet Abebe — have examined DEWS’ efficacy through a different lens.

Their research using nearly 10 years of DEWS data — which DPI voluntarily shared — is the largest ever analysis of how a predictive early warning system affects student outcomes. While previous studies have asked how accurately early warning systems perform when tested against historical data, the UC-Berkeley study examines whether DEWS led to better graduation rates for actual students labeled high risk.

The researchers tested whether graduation rates improved for students whose DEWS scores were just below the 78.5 threshold to put them in the high risk category compared to students whose scores were just above that threshold, placing them in the moderate risk category. If the system worked as intended, students in the high risk category would see improved graduation rates because they received additional resources, but the study found that being placed in the high risk category had no statistically significant effect on whether students graduated on time.

“There is no evidence that DEWS predictions have in any way influenced the likelihood of on-time graduation,” the authors wrote.

If the system was working as intended and schools were directing more resources to students labeled high risk, the UC-Berkeley study suggests, it would have a different but also inequitable impact. 

“If schools select students for intervention by ranking their (DEWS) scores and selecting those with the lowest predicted probability of graduation, underserved students would be systematically overlooked and de-prioritized,” the authors wrote.

That’s because DEWS’ predicted graduation rates don’t accurately reflect students’ true graduation rates. White students, in particular, graduate at much higher rates than their DEWS scores would suggest, according to data shared with The Markup by the UC-Berkeley researchers.

For example, students of color who received DEWS scores of 83 went on to graduate on time 90% of the time. That’s the same as Wisconsin’s statewide average graduation rate last year. White students who received the same DEWS score of 83 went on to graduate on time 93% of the time, above the state average.

But crucially, white students who received significantly lower DEWS scores of 63 graduated on time at essentially the same rate as the higher-scoring white students: 92% of the time. But students of color who received DEWS scores of 68 graduated on time only 81% of the time, below the state average.

In other words, if educators followed DEWS’ advice and prioritized white students with scores of 63 for help over students of color with scores of 68, they would have prioritized students who ultimately graduate at above-average rates over students who ultimately graduate at below- average rates.

That particular quirk of the algorithm likely hasn’t exacerbated inequality in Wisconsin, the study concluded, because DEWS isn’t improving outcomes for anybody labeled high risk, regardless of race.

Advanced algorithms, second-class school system

From its earliest days, DPI promoted DEWS as a cost-effective tool to combat the state’s “unacceptable” graduation gap. But the early warning system wasn’t the agency’s first-choice solution.

As part of its biennial budget proposal in 2011, Wisconsin DPI, which was under the leadership of then-State Superintendent Tony Evers, now the governor, requested $20 million for an “Every Child a Graduate” grant program that would send resources directly to struggling districts. That year, 91% of white students in the state graduated from high school on time compared to 64% of Black students.

But then-Gov. Scott Walker had a different plan for public education. He cut nearly $800 million, about 7%, in state funding for public schools from the two-year budget. That included the $20 million for “Every Child a Graduate,” of which Walker’s administration redirected $15 million to build a statewide student information system to house all pupil data in one place.

Denied its grant program but in possession of a wealth of new data, DPI looked for a high-tech solution to its graduation gap. In 2012, it began piloting DEWS.

At the time of its creation, DEWS was one of the most advanced predictive early warning systems in the country. Its accuracy was “on par with some of the most well regarded systems currently in use, but is done at a larger scale, across a more diverse set of school environments, (and) in earlier grades,” Knowles, the former DPI research analyst who built the system, wrote in the 2015 Journal of Educational Data Mining paper.

DPI quickly decided to expand its use of predictive analytics and in 2016 launched a sister algorithm, called the College and Career Readiness Early Warning System (CCREWS), which predicts whether students are “ready” or “not ready” for the ACT and college. In The Markup’s survey of Wisconsin school districts, seven out of 80 respondents said they use CCREWS in some capacity, compared with 30 districts that reported using DEWS.

In 2019, DPI piloted yet another algorithmic model based on DEWS that purported to predict which students would succeed in AP (advanced placement) courses. Schools in 11 districts signed up for the pilot, but the project was abandoned after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to documents obtained through a public records request.

Over the past decade of the state’s experimentation with predictive algorithms, Wisconsin’s educational inequality has hardly improved.

The graduation gap between Black and white students has shrunk by only four points since 2011, from 27% to 23%. Meanwhile, the gulf between Black and white eighth graders’ reading scores in Wisconsin has been the worst of any state’s in the nation on every National

Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) going back to 2011. Wisconsin has also had the widest gap of any state between Black and white eighth graders’ math scores on every NAEP since 2009.

“The question I always ask when that data comes out is not just how bad are Black kids doing, (but) how is it that white kids are doing so well?” said Gloria Ladson-Billings, a national expert on education inequality and a retired University of Wisconsin–Madison professor. “It’s not like we don’t know how to get these kids through. The problem is they have to look like Division I athletes for us to care enough.”

Black and Hispanic students in Wisconsin told The Markup that they often feel part of a second- class school system.

Kennise Perry, a 21-year-old student at UW-Parkside, attended Milwaukee Public Schools, which are 49% Black, before moving to the suburb of Waukesha, where the schools are only 6% Black. She said her childhood was difficult, her home life sometimes unstable, and her schools likely considered her a “high risk” student.

“I was the only Black kid in all of my classes. No other representation of anyone who looks like me, and my peers were extremely racist,” she said. “It was really traumatic. … I was just so angry and I didn’t know how to place my anger. I was miserable. So then, of course, the labels and stuff started.

“But I feel that the difference between people who make it and people who don’t are the people you have around you, like I had people who cared about me and gave me a second chance and stuff. (DEWS) listing these kids (as) high risk and their statistics, you’re not even giving them a chance, you’re already labeling them.”

Waukesha’s school district did not respond to The Markup’s survey or request for comment. However, documents obtained through public records requests show that Waukesha North High School, which Perry attended, signed up to participate in the pilot for DPI’s algorithm designed to predict which students would succeed in AP classes.

Milwaukee Public Schools, the state’s largest district, does not use DEWS or any kind of machine learning for its early warning system, spokesperson Stephen Davis wrote in an email to The Markup. Like many districts and states, it instead uses a low-tech approach that identifies students as on or off track based on whether they’ve hit certain benchmarks, such as being absent for a predefined number of days.

Last year, students at Cudahy High School created its first Black Student Union in response to racist incidents they felt the school’s administration wasn’t properly addressing.

“You know that (white students) already have a leg up,” said Mia Townsend, a junior and vice president of Cudahy’s Black Student Union. “You already feel that separation. … They have more opportunities and they have more leeway when it comes to certain things.”

Students in the BSU have organically provided the same kind of supportive interventions for each other that the state hoped to achieve through its predictive algorithms.

During the 2020–21 school year, 18% of white students in Wisconsin took AP exams compared to 5% of Black students. Townsend, an honor roll student, said she was on path to avoid AP courses until fellow junior Maurice Newton, the BSU’s president, urged her to accept the challenge. She asked to join an AP English class next year.

“They make it seem like it’s more challenging and it’s honestly the same,” Newton said. “You can pass the class with a good grade.”

In response to The Markup’s questions about DEWS, Cudahy district Superintendent Tina Owen-Moore shared an email thread in which staff members expressed that they hadn’t known about and didn’t currently use the predictions but that counselors were “excited about this resource.” After reviewing our findings, however, Owen-Moore wrote, “That certainly changes my perspective!!”

‘They just handed us the data and said, ‘Figure it out.’ ’

Many districts that responded to The Markup’s survey said they use DEWS predictions similarly to the way Brown and the staff at Bradford High School in Kenosha do — to identify which new students in their buildings may require additional attention.

In the Appleton school district, high school case managers use DEWS and other data to identify incoming first-year students in need of support and to determine special education caseloads, for example. Relying “heavily” on DEWS data, the Winneconne School District sends letters to parents informing them their child may be at risk, although those letters don’t reference the algorithm.

But some schools have found other, off-label uses for the data. For example, Sara Croney, the superintendent of Maple School District, told The Markup that her staff has used DEWS’ “perceived unbiased data” to successfully apply for a staff development grant focused on reaching unengaged students. In Racine, middle schools once used DEWS to select which students would be placed in a special “Violence Free Zone” program, which included sending disruptive students to a separate classroom. 

The Racine School District is “not currently utilizing DEWS or CCREWS,” spokesperson Stacy Tapp wrote in an email.

Many administrators The Markup interviewed said they had received little or no training on how DEWS calculates its predictions or how to interpret them.

“They just handed us the data and said, ‘Figure it out,’ ” said Croney. “So our principals will analyze it and decide who are the kids in the at-risk area.”

DPI provides documentation about how DEWS works and its intended uses on its website, but much of the public-facing material leaves out a key fact about the system: that its predictions are based in part on students’ race, gender, family wealth and other factors that schools have no control over.

For example, the department’s DEWS Action Guide makes no mention that student race, gender, or free and reduced lunch status are key input variables for the algorithms.

DPI’s webpage describing the data used to generate DEWS predictions lists four distinct categories of information: attendance, disciplinary record, number of districts attended in the prior year (mobility), and state test scores. It states that “demographic attributes are used,” but not which ones or how they influence the predictions.

Similarly, when educators view students’ DEWS predictions in the statewide information system, they can examine how students’ attendance, disciplinary record, mobility and test scores affect the overall risk label, but they are not shown how students’ demographic features affect the prediction.

Shari Johnson, director of curriculum and instruction for the Richland School District, said her schools were starting to create action plans and assign staff mentors to “high risk” students with the goal of getting them out of that category, especially those at “most risk” because she said it wouldn’t be possible to mentor everyone.

However, when she spoke to The Markup, she didn’t know that characteristics such as a disability or being economically disadvantaged affected a student’s score.

“Whose responsibility is it that we know about these things? That’s my concern in this position, for me to only have found out by chance,” Johnson said. “What I do is directly correlated to DEWS and the information that’s there, and that’s scary to me.”

The disconnect between how DEWS works and how educators understand it to work isn’t news to DPI.

In 2016, researchers with the Midwest Regional Education Laboratory wrote a report for DPI that was never published, based on a survey of middle school principals’ experiences with DEWS. 

The report, which we obtained through public records requests, concluded that respondents “desired more training and support on how to identify and monitor interventions” and that “time, money, and training on DEWS” were the top impediments to using the system.

Bradford High School Principal Brian Geiger said he remembers hearing about DEWS around the time of its launch, back when he was an assistant principal at another Kenosha school, and has used it for various purposes, including summer home visits, ever since. 

Now Brown, his assistant principal at Bradford, has picked up the practice. Even knowing there are flaws with DEWS, Brown said the predictions are the best data he has for incoming students.

“It’s not a 100% predictor. My perception on this is that we kind of use it as a guide,” Brown said, adding, “I wish we could go visit every single house of all 1,400 kids (enrolled at Bradford High School). We don’t have a summer school budget to do that.”

Todd Feathers is a New York–based reporter covering algorithmic decision-making and surveillance, with a particular focus on how technologies affect children, people with disabilities, and groups underrepresented in Big Tech boardrooms. The story was originally published by The Markup and Chalkbeat.

False alarm: How Wisconsin uses race and income to label students ‘high risk’  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

A nearly 30-year ban on the use of federal grant money by incarcerated students will end this summer.

And Milwaukee Area Technical College, or MATC, has been an important part of this change.

Starting in July, incarcerated students across the country will be able to apply for a Federal Pell Grant, a financial resource for college students.

This money is usually used for expenses such as tuition, housing and books and, unlike student loans, does not typically need to be repaid.

Since 1994, incarcerated students, who would have otherwise qualified, have been unable to apply for this grant.  

In the fall semester of 2016, MATC became the first institution in Wisconsin to admit incarcerated students as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative.  

The goal of the initiative was to determine “whether expanding access to college financial aid increases incarcerated adults’ participating in postsecondary educational opportunities,” according to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, a national nonprofit providing technical assistance to both educational institutions and corrections departments participating in the initiative. 

The answer to this question is clear: Yes, it does.

Even in the face of pandemic-related challenges, the number of incarcerated students in the country enrolled in a participating school increased each year from 2016 to 2020, according to a four-year survey conducted by the Vera Institute. 

The number of students in 2016 was 6,116, and in 2020, the number increased by over 75% to 10,897 students. In total, over 22,000 students have participated in the initiative over the course of those four years, and over 7,000 students have earned either a degree, certificate or diploma.  

The number of participating students is expected to vastly expand, , Ben Jones, education director of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, or DOC, said. 

Closer to home

The initiative also has an impressive track record here in Milwaukee.

Since admitting its first cohort of incarcerated students, the response from both students and professors at MATC has been “phenomenal,” said Sadique Isahaku, MATC’s dean of General Education Academic & Career Pathway. “We’ve been expanding ever since it started.”  

During the first semester in 2016, there were roughly 12 Second Chance students, and there will be 153 students this coming spring, he said.

“Students see it as an opportunity they have never dreamt of,” he said. 

Courses available to students at MATC also have been growing. The initiative began with two programs – welding and computer numerical control, or CNC – and, eventually, it expanded to include associate of arts and associate of science degrees. Soon, associate degrees for business administration and human services also will be available, Isahaku said. 

Lori Geddes, economics instructor and lead faculty for the Second Chance program at MATC, often points to grade point averages, or GPA, and completion rates to prove the success of the program.

Over 75% of these students have a GPA of 3.5 or higher, and their completion rates “far outweigh our traditional students,” she said. “The students are very dedicated to their education because they see education as a means to an end. They realize … they have a lot of hurdles to overcome, and they look at getting a degree as a way to get past some of those hurdles. So, they are very dedicated, and they take their education very seriously.”

In addition to the curricula, MATC provides training for other skills, including those related to getting a job. 

“We prepare them very well,” said Isahaku. “We give them mock interviews. We bring in what I call ‘offender friendly’ employers to interview them days before the graduation.”

Jones of the Wisconsin Department Of Corrections said he believes communities as a whole also are the beneficiaries of increasing educational opportunities for people who are incarcerated.

“One thing that I like to say is that about 93% of the people who are incarcerated today are going to be returning back to their communities,” he said. “And the question that we have to ask collectively is: ‘How do we want their time with us to look like?’”

Ban that prohibits incarcerated students from using Federal Pell Grants ends in July is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Most students who responded to a survey about free speech on University of Wisconsin campuses said they’re afraid to express their views on controversial topics in class because they fear other students won’t agree or it could hurt their grades, according to findings released Wednesday.

A third of respondents, meanwhile, said they’ve felt pressure from an instructor to agree with a certain viewpoint. Almost half said they at least somewhat agree that administrators should bar controversial speakers if some students find the message offensive.

“I want the University of Wisconsin System to be looked upon as a beacon across the country where people want to go if free speech rights are very important to them,” Republican state Rep. David Murphy, chairman of the Assembly universities committee, said during a panel discussion on the survey results at UW-Oshkosh on Wednesday afternoon. “Our ideas need to be unsafe on campus. They need to be something we expect to be challenged and we cannot be offended by that.”

Free speech issues have come to the forefront in academia, as Republicans push schools to crack down on students who disrupt conservative speakers and to allow conservative speakers on campuses. The GOP also has maintained that liberal professors are indoctrinating students or making them feel uncomfortable about expressing conservative views.

The survey findings are certain to provide talking points for Wisconsin’s Republican legislators looking to cut UW funding in the next state budget.

UW-Stout’s Menard Center for Public Policy and Service sent the survey to undergraduates at all 13 UW System campuses last fall. The Menard family, a major Republican donor that founded the Menards home improvement store chain, donated $2.6 million to the center in 2019 and contributed $100,000 toward the survey. Republican Ryan Owens, a UW-Madison political science professor who ran unsuccessfully for attorney general in 2021, sat on an advisory board that reviewed the survey before it went out to students.

UW-Whitewater Interim Chancellor Jim Henderson was so incensed with plans for the survey that he resigned over it in April. He said then that he was upset over then-Interim System President Michael Falbo’s decision to send out the survey after initially deciding that institutions wouldn’t do it. He accused Falbo of changing his mind because he feared political consequences from Republican lawmakers concerned about campus leaders stamping out conservative viewpoints.

Falbo countered that the university board overseeing human research had approved the survey.

The survey was emailed to students at all 13 UW system schools last fall. Nearly 10,500 of the system’s 161,000 students responded.

The survey asked students if they there have been times when they’ve wanted to express their thoughts on a controversial topic in class but decided to remain silent. Almost 57% of respondents said yes.

A little more than 60% said they were afraid other students would disagree with them and 31% said they were afraid someone would file a complaint about them. About 40% said they were afraid their grades would suffer if they spoke up. Three-fourths of those students identified themselves as “very conservative.”

Nearly 37% of respondents said they’ve felt pressured by an instructor to agree with a specific viewpoint, with 64% of those students identifying as very conservative.

When asked how strongly they believe that university administrators should disinvite speakers if some students feel those speakers’ messages are offensive, one-third responded “not at all” or “a little.” About a quarter said “somewhat,” about 20% said “quite a bit” and 10% responded “a great deal.”

About a third of the students said they’d been taught at least something about the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, in their classes.

Franciska Coleman, a UW-Madison assistant law professor who served on the advisory board with Owens, said during the panel discussion at UW-Oshkosh that college students don’t know how to disagree without taking things personally.

Owens, who also sat on the discussion panel, agreed. He said students are taught since kindergarten to avoid conflict, which is a “real problem.” He added that college classrooms aren’t always supposed to be “cathartic experiences.”

Democratic state Sen. Kelda Roys, who sits on the Senate universities committee, said students shouldn’t be “intellectually coddled” and shouldn’t be afraid to be questioned.

“It’s an opportunity for you to learn,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to persuade. … The university should not be an arm of censorship.”

Survey: UW students afraid to express views in class is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.