This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker, and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
I'm Dr. Johnny Lupinacci from Busted Pencils.
No Tim Slecker here with us today.
Dr. Tim Slecker is at an AI workshop conference.
You know, he's a specialist in that AI stuff.
Not talking Alan Iverson, I'm talking artificial intelligence,
and you know, listeners that I tend to crack a lot of jokes on the AI stuff,
because I'm not the biggest fan.
However, you know, if you might check out one of our two or one or two of our past episodes
and surely more to come, we'll drop it up and discuss AI.
And I go at it hard and you know Tim loves that stuff,
so he's learning more about it and he's going to bring that.
But back to first downs and Friday night lights,
this segment drops weekly.
Of course, Collars, if you want to chime in, you can always give us a call,
leave us a message in our mailbag at 608-557-8577.
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You could chop it up with us too.
I got special guest, Civic Media's own Jimmy Casca, Jimmy K.
with us today.
We're going to check in because last week started playoff football in Wisconsin,
actually all over the country.
It's big Friday nights for so many football fans and scholar athletes in our school programs.
Football is part of American schools.
It's a stalwart.
It's important to so many aspects of things.
Jimmy K, first things, how you doing my guy?
Well, that's one of the teams not in the playoff field this year as a coach.
You know, we got through that.
Oh, but yeah, we're doing, we're doing great.
It is wonderful that we are now deep into playoff mode.
And every fall sport is in playoff mode.
In fact, we've had golf and cross-country championships.
And we're coming up on volleyball, football and the rest.
So it's a great time of the school calendar, especially with winter sports,
only a couple of weeks away.
Oh, I love that, Jimmy.
You know, myself as a hockey coach wearing our winter sport season here.
But love in the Friday night stuff.
Give us a quick update on week one.
Any big things coming out of week one heading into week two for football playoffs?
Well, you know, one of the things, you know, we have two different levels of at 11 and eight.
And eight, a lot of the bracket went chalk.
But you expect that a little bit because the A player field is much more exclusive to conference champions on defeated teams, etc.
In fact, a team with two losses didn't make the the A player field,
which is a kind of a point of contention when it comes to a player is that they feel like they need an expanded field to get some of these teams that go six and two in a season.
Make sure they get into the playoffs.
But the first bracket, I think only one road team won.
So it's a lot of one and two seeds advancing.
And that will culminate, of course, here in a couple of weeks on the 11 player side.
There was a lot of discussion over the seating process, the computer seating process to the point that it was, you know, ignored head to head.
Conference champions were being seated third, fourth, even fifth or sixth in their brackets.
You were getting rematches, you know, between the top two teams at a conference as lower seeds in level one.
You know, a lot of teams going on the road that felt like they'd earned a home game with only one or two losses.
So there was a lot of talk about the fact that the processes and transparent.
And there's not really any recourse for teams that disagree with where they get placed.
And there were also some questions about the actual tie breaking criteria needed to actually place the field as there was an eight player team that was swapped out.
After the brackets got released due to an error in the tie breaking.
And there was an argument that there were two teams, a total four teams affected, but two teams in the field in 11 that shouldn't have been there based on interpretations of the tie breaker rules.
So it was a lot leading in a lot of people unhappy with where things shook out level one came and went.
We saw a few teams like the division seven runner up last year, get knocked out.
And we are on to level two.
And I'll just say at the teams that advanced from this week to next week, you are the elite teams in Wisconsin is where we're.
I love that. Hey Jimmy, just real quick, because here we are busted pencils, educated educators, talking education and we're talking about extra curriculars, especially about sports.
So for listeners, little mini lessons, Jimmy, can you explain what it means to go chalk?
I mean, it means that if you're seated higher in a bracket, you're the team that gets to go that advances.
So if you have teams seated one through eight, one through four all win, and they move on in the, in our case, the player bracket, the one and two seeds largely defeated three and four.
There was one three over two game.
So going chalk means the teams that were favored by seating all advanced.
Yeah, so minimal upsets and that when you say we go chalk, it means like kind of the expected outcomes went through it.
I love a mini lesson.
Thank you for that.
I was confused.
I saw your eyes go big.
Jim says, you know, when it's all like this, my first update anchor took over on me there.
Hey, it's familiar discourse for me, but I know our listeners, like that's part of why we do first downs on Friday night likes folks is because these are often disparate parts of an educational experience.
And we're here bringing them together because they matter.
On that note, it busted pencils.
We've done a lot of discussing, especially it's an election year.
We've covered a lot of the impacts of this massive, you know, and the massive importance of this upcoming election really had all elections, but especially the one that we're a week out from right now.
So, you know, this drops really even closer to when that election is happening.
So we're days away from an outcome.
Well, hopefully fingers crossed.
And it has major implications on education.
But for the past few years, we've been really talking a lot on busted pencils about referendums and really about school funding.
And you know, we've really been hard on states because education is a state, right?
And we say, come on states, you have to do better to fund our public schools holistically.
You know, it's not just about getting a new stem lab or updating the textbooks.
That's really important work to or making sure teachers are paid well.
We know those are all really important aspects of a quality public education.
And we know states have been, you know, paying less and less per student to schools.
That makes a huge difference in the quality of their education.
But what's included in that oftentimes are the things that get cut art programs, band programs, theater programs.
All the things here at busted pencils that we've argued aren't extra curricular, although they're called that.
They're essential to a really high quality public education experience.
Not only for the students, but for the strength of our local economies, for all of the families and the participants in the community that rally around these events.
As there's a close connection between a great public school and a strong local community.
So Jimmy, I'm asking you today, let's check in.
Let's talk about the importance of referendums and what's happening in terms of how that connects to sports programs and those extra curriculars that we know aren't extra.
They're essentials.
Well, let's start with this of the referendums that we've got going up on Tuesday.
There's 140 questions on the ballot.
That's a lot, right?
82 of them are operational.
And what an operational referendum means is it's money that's being used to help pay for things like maintenance and salaries and think non capital expenses.
When those don't pass, usually when you put these up, it's because you have a hole in your budget, you're trying to fix.
And a lot of school districts this year, I mean, when you have 243 questions on a ballot in a given year for refer over half of the districts in the state want to referendum this year.
When you have a hole in your budget, this is the only means you really have of covering it because you can't, you know, public schools can't charge tuition.
So you don't get a revenue income there.
These and grants can only take you so far.
So when you got to cover millions of dollars in a budget, this is your mechanism you pull.
And for school districts that don't pass these when you have that hole in a budget, typically the first things that school boards and administrators look to cut are those extra curricular activities.
So maybe, maybe there's a sport that has a lot of travel or a lot of equipment.
Maybe, you know, there's a program that uses a lot of resources, whether it's, you know, a music program if it's very robust or if it's something that has a high cost to it.
Maybe there's a facility that isn't, you know, it hasn't been kept up for 50, 60, 100 years.
Maybe it's, you know, maybe you exit that and not worry about that deferred maintenance or all the things you got to do to make it ADA accessible.
There's a lot of factors that go into it, but typically the first discussion on what to cut centers around extracurricular or, or your, your elective courses, you know, a language program or something like that.
Stem has been a popular focus. Now, I know that in school districts, you know, Stem has met really bad, you know, CTE programings they call it, you know, that's really been a driver for certain districts because there's a lot of grant money available for it.
And there's a lot of public support for those because they go directly ties you to career, tech education, science, things like that.
But these are the things that are kind of in the crosshairs when an operational referendum fails.
And if you look at the past year since last February, when we had now well over almost, I think almost 60% of districts going to referendum, when you look at the passage rates, they've been pretty low compared to the historical averages in the last five elections.
That's two, that's three elections in the primaries or two elections and they're sort of, sort of primaries.
So you've, you've got a lower passage rate, a lower appetite for this because the cost of things has increased inflation last year, really, really soften that appetite.
And then obviously local property tax dollars. Well, there's a competition now because municipalities are also going to referendum and they're also doing assessments and that's raising taxes.
So people are kind of being hit from all these directions and school referendums, unfortunately, as the only mechanism schools have to raise that revenue limit to get additional funding in to pay for teachers pay for programming.
That is, that is one of the unfortunate outcomes is that sports are usually targeted.
And I want to follow this up by saying that I'm on a school board. So we actually went through the referendum process last year in the spring election.
And our survey maker, the people who send out the surveys to the people in our district, they warned us ahead of time that athletic facilities tend to be very polarizing on a ballot.
So if we put up, we're going to renovate a basketball gym or we're going to do a football turf field or whatever it is, those tend to have a very very wide, you know, a very polarized split of people strongly for and people strongly against and we saw it in our own polling where it was one clear thing that had a good amount of support.
But then there wasn't really a lot of middle ground. It was a lot of people against it as well.
We ended up being the only district in last spring 2023 to actually build a new athletic facility off of a red referendum.
We've only district out of over 80 that had a referendum. We are the only one couple others got some like less than a million dollar renovation, but we actually ended up with an over $10 million basketball gym out of ours.
And we've seen it bear out this year where a lot of the capital referendum, they have an athletic facility in it, but those those tend to be very unpopular in a way because they split communities that way where they where people acknowledge and need for educators and they acknowledge and need for academics athletics tends to be a very very polarizing factor in these.
And schools have been very careful about where they place it in the language when they put these up and there are several obviously on the ballot on Tuesday. But, you know, and there's needs for it too because these aren't just playing services.
These are classrooms for fiat and health education. These are assembly areas that are used for concerts and other purposes, but people see athletic facility. They see gym and immediately their head goes to well basketball is getting $15 million dollars. Well, why are we spending that on education?
Jimmy, I love that. That's such a great overview of that, especially for our listeners. You've heard us talk about referendums and we've connected it to these important, you know, compliments to traditionally what we think about when we think about educational referendums and a need for more school funding.
You know, in listener, if you have a question or you have a comment or you'd like to hop in the conversation about the importance of or even some of the some of the woes right of referendum.
You know, as part of our election process and like Jimmy has said, how as schools, we really are putting a position to have to ask, you know, for this support, it should be state funding. It should be just as simple as, hey, we've got a lot of kids. This is what we need in order to give them the best education possible.
And then a lot of cases, you know, keep the lights on literally right. And so it should be coming from the state. However, it's not. So that's a big plug. Hey, pressure, your state legislators to do better by public education in the meantime.
We've got to take it on and we've got to support it locally as we can and pass these referendums to support all these programs that are part of an education. If you want to chime into that, you can always give us a call or shoot us a text at 608 557
8577 that's 608 557 8577. Now, check this out. Okay. So Jimmy's talking about this and he highlighted something I want to I want to really emphasize as a teacher, you know, as someone who's done administrative work and also as a coach.
There's a strong connection like Jimmy talked about passing a referendum. They got a new school gym right really our facility for not only basketball for so many other things.
We talked about, you know, in this era where we do want to make really explicit the connection between our community involvement and our students learning not only just learning content in the sort of flat traditional way, but learning content that translates to career.
And so many of our students when we bolster these what we call extra curriculars, they get an opportunity firsthand to have really relevant and meaningful connections through sport.
That's not only for the athletes, but we think about like if there's an athletic trainer that's part of these sports programs and they're part of our school and they're teaching an AT class.
That's a pathway to a STEM career where they're learning about, you know, kinesiology and the physiology, the movements of the body and how to do some basic things like some taping and some stretching and some different aspects that help complement their lifelong health.
And oftentimes we know through the research as a catalyst is an inspiration and a foundation for their furthering the education in the medical professions or the health sciences.
That's just one connection so many others like marketing classes broadcasting classes journalism classes where we're learning about what we are doing in our schools and how we report that how we market that how we share those things.
So so many connections to the traditional learning we think about schools we think about reading writing arithmetic and then the fun stuff we got to do after we completed our reading writing arithmetic with so many teachers and so many innovative schools out there are finding unique ways to tie together.
These referendums make that possible Jimmy appreciate you here and talk a little bit more about just off the cuff one of the one at some of the big takeaways you've seen benefiting right as a school board member as a coach as a sports guy but also connected to quality public education.
Just tell us off the cuff how that referendum passing in your district made a huge difference.
Well for our district we were still using 125 year old building for for students for elementary school we had another building on that that was projected to have some some serious maintenance coming up in between those two.
The cost of our 21 and a half million dollar referendum on the maintenance costs on those two buildings alone we would have met it probably at some point in the next 20 years so it was really just a matter of posing it as you know we can maintain all six of these school facilities.
With the idea that the cost of maintaining the buildings we want to close is going to cost us the same amount of long ground as it would be to just get rid of those buildings as a school facility and start investing in our best facilities which are also 60 years old so they're not new by any means this district hasn't had a capital project.
They had a sports facility project on heavy on donations about 45 years ago what other than that the schools itself themselves hadn't really been touched in decades in generations really and so there's a there's a positive momentum in just that transformation with the branding and the marketing of the school of you know a fresh tone of paid you know as they say can do some things well this this is adding you know this is adding a couple of pretty significant.
There's a lot of extensions to the school one of the form of an elementary wing in the second in the form of of a gym which will alleviate having a middle school practices for basketball for example start at 10 o'clock at night because there's only one other gym in town you know so there's there's definitely some benefits to just that to the community getting another community facility to the fact that this was even pitched as a a FEMA grant project where the town had just been hit with a tornado a few years ago and there wasn't really a public shelter suitable if people had been
replaced they were talking about having to move them out of the city so there was talk about what can be used to school while the school wasn't suitable for that which is really incredible when you think about it if a disaster hits the school wasn't a suitable place for it so you know making sure that the school it can be used as a as a community facility and also in the case of emergency using it as kind of a launching point for those efforts so there's a lot of different ways that it's impacted if you go through our town now you can see the cranes you can see the new facilities coming up.
Some of the knock is that a lot of the attention has been paid to the athletic part of it because there were you know we lost a baseball field here locally and they had to renovate a softball field into a baseball one right on the edge of town and then obviously the gym took a lot of discussion but on the other hand having a lot of money going to an elementary wing the fact that we're not using 125 year old structure to educate elementary students and we're not having them cross the street in the middle of winter for lunch every day these are all big wins for us locally.
I would say for any community that goes through it whether if it's a facility project I guarantee you that your school boards administrators have thought long and hard about what what is a priority project in fact they've probably pulled their district to find out what it is and there's some very clear needs all of it in the interest at a lot of it lately has been in the interest of safety for students and making sure there's secure entryways making sure in our case that we're not again sending kids across a street to go eat lunch and then send them back in the winter and have to track all the coats and hats and things for that.
But obviously with the operational end of it that is what's paying for your teachers for your programming for operations to keep the lights on and keep things going with 140 questions on the ballot pretty much everybody in the state in the last year two three years has seen one of these on their ballot.
I guarantee that there's a very valid reason for it and schools definitely this isn't what I think they would ideally want to do but you know it's up to local taxpayers now to decide if they're going to support their local school.
Thank you Jimmy K and this is huge folks so summarize it you heard it here vote in favor of your referendum support so many aspects not only a public education but of the the improvement and the opportunity and the sustainable you know you know economics.
Of strong public schools in your community so when you vote make sure you include those in favor of reparandums help keep it going Jimmy K love having you here.
This is first downs and Friday night lights a special drop every week busted pencils folks we appreciate it if you can or you want to join the conversation you could give us a call or send us a text at 608 557 8577 it's week two of football playoffs and Wisconsin don't forget we'll check in with you next week and we'll have more thanks for listening to busted pencils.
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