Superintendent Zach Pethan
For the second consecutive election cycle, the Sheboygan Falls School District has had a referendum fail to pass.
After last year’s November general election, district officials did some serious thinking to rework the referendum to make it more appealing to those living in the district.
This included a collecting large amounts of public input, reducing the price tag by $20 million, and prioritizing the biggest needed for the district.
Sheboygan Falls Superintendent Zach Pethan spoke with SeehaferNews.com after this second failed effort to pass a referendum for the district.
“As a board, we have decided to hit the pause button, especially over the summer. We will probably reevaluate how we approach and look for next steps moving forward,” he explained. “Nothing really has been decided yet, again, disappointment, but more focused on those next steps.”
For those in the district who voted in favor of the referendum during the Spring election, the initial results seemed quite positive.
When the election results were first reported, the referendum question was said to have earned enough votes to have passed.
However, a clerical error in vote counting was corrected, resulting in the referendum failing for a second time.
But Pethan went to bed on election night knowing that the results were not accurate.
Despite it not passing, Pethan says there are things that can be done in the meantime.
“The school district has several different funding sources that we can tap into,” he noted, “We have a fund 46 which the district has used for the last 10 years to pay for close to $4.5 million worth of capital improvements that we’ve done. So we have some money from there that we’ll use to address our high school elevator and some roof segments.”
However, the Superintendent is aware of the situation at hand in the district.
“These needs aren’t going anywhere, we’re going to have to come up with a way to solve that,” he said bluntly. “If that means we have to start adjusting some of our operational budget to cover more of these things then there’s going to be impact in other areas that benefit from our operational budget.”
With two failed attempts at passing a referendum, Pethan and the Sheboygan Falls School District must now go back to the drawing board as they figure out a solution to correct the issues they, their students, and their facilities are facing.
