School district wants more referendum input

Listening sessions among suggestions from board

By Kellen Olshefski

SLN Staff

Following up the announcement of the pursuit of a third referendum at its June 10 meeting, the East Troy Community School District Board of Education began to hash out how they intend to approach the referendum at its meeting Monday.

While the board is still not working out anything formal on the third referendum, they still feel that reaching a minimum of a 60 percent support from the community is vital.

District Administrator Christopher Hibner explained the 60 percent support will be the key indicator with this referendum.

“If the voters tell you they’re only going to give you 40 percent support on something we’re recommending, we either have to keep going and going at it – meaning keep informing, keep understanding – until we change that 40 to 60, or we need to change the solution, product, to get to the 60,” he said.

“My theory is you start with what will they maybe approve of 60 percent with, what will get 60 percent of the people to go, ‘there it is,’ and then you go wow, we have 75 percent of the people approving that.”

Hibner explained the board will have to adjust the referendum as it moves forward based on maintaining that 60 percent support.

“If that dipped off because of any adjustment we made, we have to decide, go back to what was going to give us the 60, or drop to 52, we’re going to have to work to get it to 60 for them to understand the changes,” he said.

Board member Martha Bresler noted she would like to see the board take a step back and get a plan in place of how the board intends to get community input. She noted while she’s not a fan of surveys, she would be open to listening sessions.

“I’d much rather do listening sessions, where anybody that really has something to say, advertise them well, do them in every building, but I think if we could get a plan in place of how we plan to collect community input first and make sure we are letting everybody that has something to say (contribute),” she said.

Bresler continued to explain this method would differ from how the board approached the last referendum.

“Even when we went to community organizations, we weren’t listening to them. We already had our plan in place. We were explaining to them what we were going to do.”

Board member Ted Zess also noted the importance of explaining the relationships among all the components of the referendum and suggested coming up with a few sample plans to show those relationships.

“If you do this, then you don’t have enough to do this, this and this, but if you don’t do this, then you can’t do this and you can’t do this,” he said. “There’s so many variables there that you almost have to come up with sample plans.”

Currently, the board is looking at having the referendum on a ballot at some point in the next year, though nothing is set in stone and the board will continue to discuss the matter at upcoming board meetings.