Appleton superintendent: state funding gap, voucher payments and reassessments drove recent property-tax increases

Greg Hartjes, superintendent of the Appleton Area School District, said in a district video that three developments combined to raise many residents’ school property-tax bills this year: a statewide revenue-limit increase that outpaced state aid, growing voucher payments to private religious schools, and local property reassessments.

Hartjes said the legislature set a higher two-year revenue limit for school districts but “then didn't increase the state aid,” adding, “which meant that this entire amount of increase had to be funded by local property taxpayers.” He said the district’s revenue increased 7.9% and that historically state aid has risen along with revenue limits; this year it did not, he said.

Why that matters: when the revenue limit grows and state aid does not follow, school districts and local taxpayers absorb the difference. Hartjes also told viewers the state had “close to a $5,000,000,000 surplus” that, in his view, could have been used in the state aid formula so local taxpayers would not have absorbed the full increase; that characterization was presented as his statement in the video.

Hartjes identified a second factor as rising payments to Catholic and Lutheran schools under Wisconsin’s private-school voucher program. “Your financial support of Catholic and Lutheran schools in Appleton increased by 12.1% this year,” he said, and added that the district’s payments to those schools total about $9,300,000 this year. He walked through a sample Grand Chute tax bill to show that property owners pay levies to multiple taxing bodies — county, municipal, Fox Valley Technical College and Appleton Schools — and that the voucher payments appear under the Appleton Schools line.

Hartjes noted the voucher-related local tax obligation began in 2015, when the district’s related outlay was about $650,000, and that the payments have grown each year since. He did not provide the official program name or cite a statute in the video.

The third reason, Hartjes said, is how local reassessments change who pays more. Using Grand Chute as an example, he said municipal market adjustments raised residential assessments 57% while commercial assessments rose 40%, shifting a larger share of the tax burden onto owners of residential property in that municipality.

Hartjes said that in most years the district’s revenue limit increases are in the 1–2% range, so this year’s 7.9% was atypically large. He also said the district will ask voters to approve a referendum in April but did not specify the referendum’s size, language or ballot placement.

The video presented Hartjes’s explanations and figures without on-screen citations. The claims and numbers in this article are attributed to Hartjes as they were presented in the district video.

The district did not propose or adopt any formal action in the video; it was an informational presentation.