If you’re a Wisconsin voter this election cycle, you will likely see a public school referendum on the ballot  — an outcome of the Legislature’s misplaced funding priorities.

According to the Wisconsin State Journal, nearly half of Wisconsin’s 400 school districts will pose a referendum funding question to local voters. To make up for budget shortfalls, school districts across the state are seeking a total of $6 billion from local taxpayers. This is in addition to the $1 billion that voters approved in school referenda this spring. With school districts so desperate for money, state Superintendent Jill Underly places the blame squarely on the Legislature, charging it has failed in its duty to adequately fund public schools in Wisconsin. The numbers certainly agree.

A 2022 report published by the Wisconsin Policy Forum indicated that in 2020 Wisconsin spent $12,740 per pupil on elementary and secondary education. That is about 5.6 percent below the national average. And the rate of growth in per-pupil spending on public PreK-12 schooling between 2002 and 2020 was the third smallest rise of any state, after Idaho and Indiana. Thanks to a deal struck by Gov. Tony Evers, funding for public education did receive an increase this past legislative session, but it came at a cost. To get the funding bill passed, supporters of the bill were forced to also increase voucher spending as a compromise.

While it’s difficult to track dollar-for-dollar the shortfall in school funding that could be tied to private school vouchers, there is no question that Wisconsin has both a massive education funding deficit and a voucher scheme siphons enormous sums of tax money away from public education. Citing the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Public Education Network said that in the current school year alone, voucher schools are costing taxpayers $573.6 million. When non-school district (independent) charter schools are included, the total price tag reaches $701 million.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has long warned about the dangers of vouchers, not only constitutionally but also from a cost perspective and a student outcome perspective. Public tax dollars that get funneled to private, usually religious schools are not subject to safeguards from discrimination or corruption. Once a religious school has received the funds, they are free to discriminate in any way they choose. Similarly, because there is no oversight of these funds once they are moved from the public to the private school, fraud can run rampant. Report after report of private and charter schools mismanaging public dollars have come to light since voucher schemes have spread in states across the country. And while religious schools discriminate based on their arbitrary principles and waste taxpayer dollars, public schools are left to fend for themselves thanks to the voucher-shaped hole in their budget.

In the meantime, taxpayers are being forced to fund pervasively sectarian instruction that permeates every aspect of private religious education, including creationism and other anti-science postures — while receiving no accountability.

“I’m so disheartened to see what is happening in our home state of Wisconsin,” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The fact that public schools are left to scrape by and hope a referendum passes so they can provide students with crucial services is absolutely unacceptable. Our public schools — the bedrock of our democracy — deserve better.”

The Madison, Wis.-headquartered Freedom From Religion Foundation is the largest national association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics), with 40,000 members, including more than 1,700 in Wisconsin. FFRF works to educate the public about nontheism and to uphold the constitutional principle of separation between state and church.