The cost of secession

Monday meeting to detail price tag on Caledonia leaving Unified

BY BRIDGET THORESON and PAUL SLOTH
Journal Times

Sunday, June 22, 2008 10:56 PM CDT

CALEDONIA — Residents interested in seceding from the Racine Unified School District are about to learn what it would cost.

Representatives from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance will present their report on their feasibility study at Olympia Brown Elementary School, 5915 Erie St., at 7 p.m. Monday.

The village commissioned the $30,000 study last fall. The possibility of creating a new school district has apparently been on some residents’ minds for almost a decade.

“This thing keeps surfacing all the time, and nobody has any real facts,” said Caledonia resident Kathy Burton. “We actually need to know the facts, and that will determine what we need to do.”

Burton collected 500 signatures last year from people asking the village board to pursue the study. She started collecting signatures after the village did not pursue a referendum about the issue, which had been brought forward by the village’s Community Development Authority.

“I think that there is a dissatisfaction with the school system, but more and more as Caledonia is growing and developing, we’re wanting to become our own sustainable community,” Burton said. “Good schools trigger good economic development.”

Although the village’s economic development plan does not specifically call for a new district, it does recognize the value of strong educational components in the community, said Village Administrator Tom Lebak.

While Caledonia residents consider creating their own school district, Racine Unified School District officials aren’t really saying much about the village’s secession movement, which has been an issue, to a certain extent, during Unified School Board elections in the recent past.

“We gave Caledonia some numbers for their study, mainly financial information. We aren’t really commenting on the report until we’ve seen it,” said Stephanie Hayden, Unified’s spokeswoman. “At this point, we have to wait and see, until we can read the report and see what it says.”

During the 2007-08 school year, 2,722 Racine Unified students resided in Caledonia, about 15 percent of the district’s 18,803 enrollment (not including 4-year-old kindergarten students and 12th grade students).

Caledonia residents have the second-highest number of children attending Racine Unified schools, after Racine. The village is followed closely by Mount Pleasant, where 2,676 students came from in 2007-08, according to district data. The Mount Pleasant Village Board opted not to join Caledonia in its secession study.

If the study’s results are favorable to creating a new district, Burton said, the decision should be made by residents.

There are no concrete plans for action after Monday’s presentation, Lebak said. Instead, the presentation is a way to gather how people in the community feel about the possibility and to give the village board information, he said.

“I think we’re all eager to see what it says,” Lebak said. “My thinking is that it’s a piece that the board needs to have before they decide where to take this thing.”

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