Quality Education

Save Our Schools

Every Wisconsin child has a constitutional right to an adequately funded public education. Despite what was touted as historic funding levels for public schools during the 2023-2025 state budget process, Wisconsin continues to fail to provide school districts with adequate and sustainable funding. Wisconsin is predicted to have a $3.1 billion surplus by 2025, and I’d argue this is largely due to the consistent underfunding of our public schools.

That is why I introduce the Save Our Schools bill to do just that–Save Our Schools. This bill includes more funding for special education, more state funding for our students (indexes per pupil funding to inflation), and grants to get more qualified teachers into our classrooms.

As the legislature has failed to adequately fund public schools, school districts around Wisconsin are increasingly relying on referendums. In 2023, referendum-approved spending totaled $650 million. The legislature has not adequately funded public schools and has left Wisconsin families to raise their own taxes to save their schools. Wisconsin families shouldn’t have to do this–the referendums are a referendum on this legislature. We, as a legislature, need to do a better job. We, as a legislature, need to do our job and fund the schools!

Special Education

I introduced the Save our Schools bill to increase the special education reimbursement rate to 90%, because that is what voucher schools get, and it’s what public schools also need.

Special education deserves to be properly funded so our students can receive the attention and resources they need to succeed. Special education has suffered from budget cuts over the last decade, but we were able to win some small increases during my time in office, and we need to win more. Increasing aid to special education helps all students, and it’s what our students deserve.

Mental Healthcare

Every student deserves the mental healthcare that they need. I introduced the Mental Healthcare is Healthcare package of bills to get students the mental health resources that they need. This package invests in the expansion of the school mental health workforce, provides training to meet the mental health needs of LGBTQIA+ students, and supports mental healthcare access for all K-12 students. Our communities need support in accessible mental health services, and that starts in schools. 

I support expanding mental health care services in school by bringing psychologists directly into schools to ensure students have the access to this critical care. I voted for legislation from the Assembly Task Force on Suicide Prevention that was passed into law to provide grants to high schools for peer-to-peer suicide prevention programs, such as Hope Squad.

After attending the annual youth mental health update in 2020, and learning Wisconsin kids were at a crisis point related to their mental health (this was before the pandemic!), I quickly began work on a package of bills that has more than doubled in size over the past two legislative sessions to ensure that Wisconsinites, including kids, have the mental health resources that they need.