Gillett School District Superintendent Nathan Hanson walked back a claim that the district would have to start looking at closing the schools if an April referendum is rejected by voters, saying he “overstated” it.
Hanson’s walkback came after a district resident expressed concern about it during a public information meeting held Feb. 26 at Gillett Secondary School and demanded that he rectify the situation. During an interview earlier in February with NEW Media, Hanson said the district would have to call the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and ask about the procedures to dissolve the district.
“I will publicly apologize for overstating it,” he said. “I didn’t say that it’s closing, but I know it came across that way. What we’re going to do is we’re going to study what the process is, and we’ve studied a little bit already. I will totally own that being overstated.”
Hanson noted that dissolving the school district is still a possibility if the district can’t get its finances in order. It’s one of three scenarios right now, along with passing the five-year referendum or looking at about $1.5 million in cuts to the budget, as the district has used its fund balance to keep itself in the black, and it has been drained to the point where the district has had to get a line of credit for short-term borrowing, which has to be paid back at a high interest rate.
Dissolution is not a scenario that anyone affiliated with the district wants to see. Gillett School Board member Kimberly Schaal said that is a reality that “could happen” but is one that she wants to find a way to avoid.
“We also don’t want the public to say, ‘You didn’t tell us that this could happen,’ because chances are, if this doesn’t pass, eventually it could happen,” Schaal said as the resident who brought up the statement talked over her. “We do have to have a reality that this could be a possibility.”
Closing the district would result in residents in Gillett being split up among neighboring school districts, with Board President Jamie Heroux noting there was no way one school district could absorb the entire student population of more than 500 students. Neighboring school districts are in Bonduel, Oconto Falls, Suring and Pulaski.
“There’s two different processes,” Heroux said. “One is consolidation, and the other is dissolving. Consolidation, even with a single school district, would be difficult, but multiple districts would be almost impossible, because it would require the other school districts to agree.”
Hanson said the school district is directly linked with Gillett, and losing the local school district would have a negative effect on the community.
“Losing local school districts, even when you look at places that have closed even elementary schools, you watch what happens to the local community and what happens to those businesses,” Hanson said. “I think that really devastates the community.”
Much of the money received from a successful referendum would go toward bringing teacher salaries more in line with other districts. Gillett’s teacher pay ranks last in the CESA 8 schools and eighth-lowest in Wisconsin, according to Hanson.
If the referendum is approved, for the first two years, the district would implement higher raises than normal, averaging 12.15% in the 2026-27 school year and 11.27% for the 2027-28 school year. Hanson noted that newer teachers are in better shape, salary-wise, and that the teachers who have been in the district the longest will get bigger pay hikes to bring them into alignment with what other school districts pay teachers with more experience and more education.
“The reason we got to the point where, I think, our staff is so far behind in compensation is that I don’t think the board members were made aware of that situation,” said Hanson, who took charge of the district in 2024. “We need to keep the board better informed. Being last in the region was a surprise.”
Residents at the meeting also questioned if other possibilities had been explored, including combining both schools, which are already next to each other on the western edge of Gillett, into one building to save costs. Some suggested that a capital referendum to improve the buildings might be better, noting that there’s a concern about whether the existing safeguards could prevent someone with firearms or other weapons from accessing the building.
One resident took the district to task for data from Baird, a consulting firm for school districts, showing what other area school districts have asked their taxpayers for in referenda money, as the data combines schools’ operational and capital referendum campaigns.
Shawano School District has asked for the most at $85 million, but the referenda have all been for capital projects, including building a primary school in 2010, making improvements to its aging middle school in 2017, and a recent $53 million project to expand its high school facilities and modernize its other three schools. Capital referenda, by law, cannot be used for teacher salaries or other operational costs.
Others at the meeting asked if residents would be asked to approve future referenda, considering the district has previously asked voters to override state-mandated revenue limits twice, once in 2018 and again in 2022, both for three-year terms at $600,000 annually. Now the district is asking for $2 million in the first year of a five-year referendum, going up to $4.3 million in year five.
Heroux said that, until the state gets with the times and provides adequate funding for schools, the burden will come back to local taxpayers, and he expects the school district will likely be back in 2031 asking to extend the override. He said the case has been made to Rep. Elijah Behnke, who represents the 6th Assembly District, and while nothing has changed in the last year, Behnke spent a lot of time in Gillett studying the budget situation.
“Right now, the amount of money that the state puts in is not enough to run the majority of school districts,” Heroux said. “The theory is that the community decides how much money gets to be put into schools, and that’s why we go out to referendum and ask this question.”
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
A Gillett School District resident questions why data for area school district referenda combined operational and capital figures when Gillett is only pursuing an operational referendum in April during a Feb. 26 public information meeting. She called the information “disingenuous.” (Lee Pulaski | NEW Media)
Gillett School Board President Jamie Heroux, right, offers his thoughts on why it’s important to pass a five-year operational referendum during a public information meeting Feb. 26 at Gillett Secondary School while board member Kimberly Schaal looks on. (Lee Pulaski | NEW Media)
