- I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Tonight on "Here and Now," a "First Look" at what more money
for schools as proposed in Governor Scott Walker's budget
could mean for one school district in northern Wisconsin.
After that a "Closer Look" at the turbulent first weeks of the
Trump administration.
Then, in our "Look Ahead," the uncertain future for refugees
and immigrants in Wisconsin.
It's "Here and Now" for February 17.
- Funding for "Here and Now" is provided, in part, by Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television.
- A "First look" tonight at Governor Scott Walker's state
budget proposal, which increases funding for public K-12 schools
by nearly $649 million over the 2017-'19 budget period.
The increases come in the way of per-pupil hikes, taking it from
$250 this year to $450 in 2017-18 and $654 in 2018-19.
The governor's budget also increased funding for rural
schools by nearly $31 million, addressing needs arising from
declining enrollment and high transportation costs.
And we go now to a rural district: Hurley.
Hurley is the county seat of Iron County and is located right
across the Montreal River from Ironwood, Michigan.
Hurley's school district encompasses more than 600 square
miles.
That's a lot of miles on school buses.
The district is administered by Chris Patritto, who joins us
now.
Thanks very much for being here.
- Thanks for having me.
- What's your reaction to the bump in school funding under the
governor's proposed budget?
- Well, I guess from past history I guess we're pleasantly
surprised right now, I guess.
I'd put it that way.
- How specifically would this per-pupil increase and increases
for rural schools benefit Hurley?
- Well, I think it would benefit us immensely at this
point in time.
With where we fit in the formulas, the revenue limit
formula, the equalization aid formula, we don't fit well in
those categories and lose a lot of funding.
Next year I think in the revenue limit formula, we're projecting
a loss of $195,000.
So right off the bat I've got a $195,000 deficit to deal with.
That's before any type of fixed increases in our budget.
With the governor's proposals, I think a lot of his proposals
would fill our hole, the $195,000 hole.
I would still probably need to deal with how I'm going to deal
with any future increases.
So what we're getting on one hand is very much appreciated.
It's filling a hole.
But it's still not going to solve my long-term problem.
- Because what has the financial situation been for
your district in recent years going back?
- Well, I've been superintendent in Hurley for 13
years now, and we've had to cut every year.
I believe my first year as superintendent we had to cut
$700,000, the second year we had to cut $500,000.
But then in some years there's been a little; some years has
been a lot.
We've changed transportation contractors.
Some things come up where you get lucky to balance it.
But we've had to make a lot of tough calls over the years.
We went from a three section school to a two section school.
Classroom sizes get bigger.
You can't pay people, give them the raises you really want to
cause they work hard every day.
It's been a struggle.
Hurley is no different than most schools right now.
- Well, what factors play into these budget woes
that you've had?
- Well, declining enrollment really hurts us.
As you decline in enrollment, your funding is going to get
nixed a little bit.
You know, insurance increases every year, transportation,
heating, cooling.
All those things, when you don't have a solid formula every year
to give an increase to your expenses, it gets kind of tough.
- So you were talking about having to make cuts of like
$700,000.
How do you even do that?
- Well, that's where I said there were a lot of tough calls
to make and unfortunately it meant people.
And I think the first year I was superintendent I think we had to
let about six people go, which is really tough to do in a
small, small school.
- And then how does that affect the students that you're trying
to educate?
- Well, like a lot of schools, that's the trend that's been
happening.
Classroom sizes get bigger.
You know, the supply budgets get a little smaller.
You can't do what you really want to do for the kids.
And you just struggle with it every year.
- Didn't the so-called "tools" of Act 10 kind of help smooth
some of that out with employees paying additional contributions
to their health care and retirement?
- Well, I think to a certain extent it helped in the fact
that the money that was taken away from us, you know, by Act
10, when the revenue limit formula was drastically cut, you
know, we were able to balance the budget that year pretty much
on the backs of all the employees.
But once again, that was a Band-Aid fix.
Now you look forward, you know, five, six years later, the
environment has changed a lot.
You know, we're struggling to find teachers.
We're struggling to pay them well.
You know, the market for teachers, especially in northern
Wisconsin, it's tough right now.
Replacing teachers in the future is going to be another challenge
for us.
You know, I think probably within five years I'm going to
probably have to replace probably 20%, 25% of my staff.
- Wow.
- In ten years, probably about 60%.
So it's a matter of--the pool of candidates and teachers out
there isn't what it used to be.
Can we afford to pay people to come to northern Wisconsin?
You got to be a special soul to live up here, number one.
And can we afford to keep them?
That's the other hard part, is retaining these people.
- So with all of these concerns, even in the midst of
some additional funding proposed at the state level, what do you
think needs to happen going forward?
- Well, I think all school district administrators would
agree that somewhere down the line we have to come up with
some type of sustainable funding system for schools.
You know, I don't have a silver bullet answer for you on that.
It's just we need something every year.
You know, like us.
Next year we got $195,000 deficit plus increases to deal
with.
Okay.
The governor's budget hopefully will help us a lot to fill that
gap.
But once that gap is filled, that gap's going to be there the
following year again because the formulas are going to do the
same thing to us.
So the second year, yeah, the extra $200 would help immensely
to fill some of that hole.
But we need to come up with something that's just
sustainable, where the school districts can plan from year to
year to know what they're going to have rather than the carousel
we have every two years and waiting for the governor's
budget and what's going to go and what's not going go.
- Yeah.
We need to leave it there.
Chris Patritto, thanks very much.
- Thank you.
- The breaking news out of Washington just doesn't let up.
A "Closer Look" now with our next guest, who calls it turmoil
in the Trump administration.
Turmoil, he says, that is unprecedented.
He should know.
UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer is an expert
on presidential powers, executive orders and war powers.
He joins us now.
Thanks very much for being here.
- Good to be with you.
- You called this turmoil.
What stands out?
- What stands out to me is from what we can observe of this
White House is that it deviates so profoundly from the
established practices and what we think we understand about the
types of things that presidents need to do that I think it
raises questions about whether we have a functioning White
House.
And the evidence of that comes from a variety of different
directions, and it's not just the leaks, which the president
is deeply unhappy about.
I think the leaks are a symptom of the problem rather than the
cause of the problem because it's not clear who's in charge.
It's not clear who has the authority to make decisions, and
you have the different stakeholders internally all
working to try to protect what they perceive as their own
positions.
- And this on your part is not just a partisan, liberal,
academic persuasion?
- No, it's not.
You can see, even for someone who's a Trump supporter, there
are consequences to this.
To give one example, one of the reasons federal judges put the
temporary restraining order on the immigration order is that it
was so sloppily drafted and so chaotically rolled out that even
the Justice Department lawyers when they were arguing before
the federal judge of the 9th Circuit, they couldn't really
tell the judges what the language meant or how it applied
and it was just a function of a casual process.
And I think that's one of the reasons why they lost.
And so it's actively causing the Trump administration to trip
over its own shoelaces.
- And yet in his press conference yesterday President
Trump described his administration as a fine-tuned
machine and described the roll-out of the travel ban as
very smooth and perfect.
- And that's what you would expect a White House to do to
defend itself, although I don't quite see what the disadvantage
would have been to say that they've hit some bumps in the
road and they're fixing it.
But at some point it calls to mind the old Groucho Marx line,
"Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?"
The indications are so clear that I think I find it hard to
believe that someone who isn't fully invested in this takes
that seriously.
- Couldn't this just be kind of chalked up to President Trump's
outsider status?
He came to Washington to shake things up, right?
And that's what his voters wanted.
- Well, in a sense, that's true, because one of the reasons
he got elected and one of the things his voters want is for
Trump to go in and start breaking things and to be
disruptive and to not show due respect for what they perceive
are ossified or even corrupt political relationships.
But one of the things we know from history is that presidents
going all the way back to Washington have been very aware
of the fact what they do and what they say matters.
And even the presidents that we regard as disruptive or
transformative - Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin
Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan - these are people who came in and did
institute significant change.
Even they understood that the presidency really ought not to
be -- ought not to function like almost a random walk or improv
exercise, because when presidents get that wrong, it
has implications for what they want to do later in their
administration.
- We were talking about what this might mean, this style of
governance, if you could call it that, to establishment
conservatives or Republicans like Paul Ryan.
- Right, so one of the issues here
and this has nothing to do with partisanship or policy.
I tell my students, one of the most important elements of any
political relationships is credibility, in part because
there's no way to enforce a political agreement.
It's not like a binding contract.
And people who are striking deals or are reaching agreement
need to be able to have confidence that the person at
the other side of the deal is going to uphold their end of the
bargain and do what they say they're going to do.
And take Paul Ryan, for example.
There are a number of things that he wants to do that are
controversial, whether we're talking Medicare reform,
repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.
These are risky things.
And if he's going to stick his neck out on his behalf and on
behalf of his Republican caucus to pass legislation to institute
these kinds of changes, there's significant political risk to
that.
And if he can't be confident that a President Trump is
actually going to do what he said he's going to do and if he
is thinking that the president may reverse himself or do
something unpredictable, it's going to interfere with his
willingness to do the things that he and other Republicans
want to do and at some point -- and you're already seeing some
indications of that in the senate, where some members of
the Republican Caucus are starting to express some
bewilderment or some opposition to what the president is doing.
If there are enough Republicans who start wondering whether this
is worth supporting the president, then he's got a real
problem.
Because the reason why people are getting along so far is that
the interests of Congressional Republicans they think are
aligned with the interests of the president.
But if they can't be certain of that, there are going to be some
bumps in the road.
- All right.
We leave it there.
Ken Mayer, thanks very much.
- My pleasure.
- If the political overload out of Washington has people
shutting down, tonight in keeping with expert heavy
hitters we turn to one of the ten authors of a paper in the
Journal of Communication this month titled "When We Stop
Talking Politics: The Maintenance and Closing of
Conversation in Contentious Times." "When We Stop Talking
Politics" actually looks at what happened in Wisconsin in the
midst of Act 10.
UW journalism professor Michael Wagner is here and thanks for
being here.
- It's my pleasure.
- Why did you look at Act 10 as a focus on this?
- Well, Act 10 came at a time of severe financial stress, both
in terms of growing economic inequality among regular
citizens and the need for a budget repair bill in Wisconsin
and it came at a time of growing political polarization both
within Wisconsin and around the country.
Act 10 itself became a symbol, a flashpoint for the divisions
between Republicans and Democrats, in some ways between
rural Wisconsinites and urban Wisconsinites.
In other ways between public employees and non-public
employees in other ways.
So there was lots of overlaps of clash that we really wanted to
understand in this context of financial stress.
- Now polling around this found that in the midst of Act 10, 32%
of all respondents said they stopped talking politics.
43% of public employees stopped.
Why did people stop?
- First of all, that's a really high number.
Typically if you ask somebody outside of a context like Act
10, have you stopped talking to someone because of their
political views, maybe one in ten say yes.
Certainly not a third of people.
So this is a remarkable finding that comes out of the Marquette
Law Poll surveys.
So one reason people stopped talking was that those who had
talked a lot, so people in rural areas who had talked a lot about
politics began to stop because they were encountering people
with whom they disagreed.
People who were public employee union members stopped talking
about politics because they were the center of this debate,
crisis, this set of proposals and protests.
And other people who were members of government unions as
well or private unions also kind of experienced that same sort of
situation.
And so it was -- the reason, I guess, is that politics affected
parts of lives that politics normally doesn't affect and it
highlighted other kinds of identities that we don't
normally think of overtly political, like being a farmer,
being a teacher, being a member of a union who works.
Those things became political and they became contentious,
resulting in some people stopping talking with their
friends, people who they had lived social and civic lives
with for years.
- So what is the consequence if people stop talking politics?
- So there's a few different things that could happen, right?
On the one hand, you could say we'll stop talking politics and
we'll redirect and talk about something else.
We'll talk about the Badgers or we'll talk about the weather or
something like that.
You could also just say we're going to stop talking
altogether.
And in some of the work done on this project, the work done by
Kathy Cramer, where she would go into communities and talk to
people who would get together and talk politics, she would go
back and back and back to these communities.
And after Act 10 she would find some people weren't showing up
anymore.
And she would say, "Well, gosh, what happened?"
And they would say, "Well, we've got different views on Act 10
than the person who's not here
and we've just stopped hanging out together."
So some of the consequences are the fracturing
of social networks that weren't political in the first place,
which is a pretty devastating consequence when you think about
how people just live their regular lives, especially when
they're not trying to be political in the first place.
- Because I know some of Charles Franklin's polling also
talked about it, it wasn't just kind of neighbors over the fence
who couldn't talk anymore, but families actually were split
in this way as well. - Right.
We saw that in the public opinion polling.
We also saw that in Professor Cramer's data where she would
talk to say, a farmer in a rural part of Wisconsin who would say
my daughter's a teacher and so now we're at odds because of
these decisions that are being made in Act 10 and where I stand
given what farmers believe are the set of scarce resources that
available and their perception that they're getting far less
and their perception that members of unions are getting
many more things.
And so it would even fracture families in some respects.
- Is what happened in Wisconsin happening at the national level,
in your mind?
- Many Republicans would like it to and so Governor Walker has
reportedly spoken with the White House and also spoken with
members of the Iowa state government about pursuing
similar kinds of legislation both in Iowa at the state level
and the White House is talking nationally.
So it could be that these sorts of things continue in terms of
policy, which we would then suspect would also begin to
affect national civic dialogues and informal conversations
people have about politics.
- So what kind of concerns do people who are -- who have gone
deep on this have if in fact the people stop talking politics
altogether?
- I think one consequence is an erosion of trust.
If we can't talk across lines of difference, it becomes very
difficult to see the world from someone else's point of view,
which makes it really hard to compromise, which is a central
requirement of a democrat system, especially in terms of
governing.
If different branches of government can't compromise with
each other, it becomes very difficult to get things done.
And if the citizens aren't encouraging lawmakers to
compromise because they're not talking to each other anymore,
then there's little incentive for lawmakers to compromise.
- Michael Wagner, thanks very much.
- My pleasure.
- President Donald Trump says his administration is writing a
new executive order on travel bans that is tailored to address
the court decision that blocked it.
Tonight, we hear from a group trying to help refugees who are
caught in the middle of presidential action on travel
into the U.S.
Mary Flynn oversees immigrant and refugee programs for
Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.
Thanks very much for being here.
- Thank you.
- So as we've just described, the president says that he will
issue a new executive order sometime early next week having
to do with this travel ban.
But in the midst of all of this, what has been the impact of this
ban on your organization and the people you serve?
- Well, the impact has been two-fold.
First of all, as of January 27 there was a great deal of
uncertainty put into our work and that is that there was a
complete halt of refugee arrivals for at least 120 days.
Every arrival who comes to the United States and comes to a
resettlement agency, we receive a relatively small amount of
funding to serve the refugees.
And that's what we pay staff with and pay rent and
operations.
So that income stream has effectively been cut off for the
time being.
The other thing that's happened has been really positive and
we've seen this happen again and again.
When there is an outpouring of what appears to be national
sentiment against immigration and refugee resettlement,
actually the community steps up in a really big way.
So we're seeing a great outpouring of support and
concern and volunteering and donations.
So very positive.
- What number of people did you have that you were helping to
resettle that might have been coming from some of these
countries that were pinpointed in this executive order that
might have had to not arrive as scheduled?
- We actually get about two-weeks notice before a case
arrives.
So as of the date of the executive order, we were
expecting upwards of about 30 people to arrive.
So that effectively stopped.
We were particularly concerned about one young man who was from
the Sudan and he was 24 years old and had been in the camps
for already six years.
So, you know, he had arrived there at age 18, which tells me
that he was probably in flight for a very long time, fleeing.
And he was also alone.
So who knows what happened to his family.
He was probably a very young boy when he had to flee for his
life.
And he was supposed to arrive on the Monday after the executive
order.
So he was literally in transit on the way to the airplane when
the executive order took hold, and his travel was canceled at
that time.
So that was just one of the examples that we have of people
that really needed to be here and were stopped.
- Do you know what his status is now, or is he back in the
camp, or what happened to the people who were in transit or
very soon going to be in transit that were turned back?
- Once again, there's been a lot of instability, uncertainty.
So we really are making efforts to cautiously and thoughtfully
do our work each day.
A week after the executive order took place,
a court put a hold on it for a while.
And so the Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugee
and Migration, also known as PRM reinstituted all of the valid
visas and travel that was already scheduled.
So there's a happy ending to this, because he was
the first person to arrive. - Oh.
- And he arrived about a week ago.
The other 30 people we were expecting to receive have also
arrived.
But that's been very changing thing for our office.
Are they coming? Are they not coming?
Yes, they are. Are we sure?
And so they have.
But we have no further travel scheduled for anybody in the
near future.
- Especially because it's unknown exactly what the new
executive order on this might say.
- Yes.
- And so these people that were turned back or held but then
arrived, what is their demeanor now, now that they're here, and
what did they describe that was like, that uncertainty?
- We are really lucky to welcome people to the United
States, because when they arrive, they are so grateful to
be here and they are so excited about the opportunity of the
United States.
Part of our job is to really set forth a new life for them, help
them take their next steps.
We don't really ask them a lot of questions about what they've
been through, and we actually have no influence on pre-
arrival anyway.
So we really want to help them maybe put that hardship and hard
feelings behind them and really be hopeful, because that's why
they came here.
They often will tell us what happened.
But that will take a few days for that to come out.
So we haven't heard any stories quite yet.
- Just very briefly, with less than 30 seconds left,
how well-vetted were these people that arrived?
- Extremely well-vetted.
They go through a preliminary vetting process when they
register with the U.N.
Again when they're put on a travel list for any country in
the world and again, once again, that very thorough,
comprehensive vetting when they reach the United States travel
list and before they're allowed into the United States.
- We need to leave it there. Mary Flynn, thanks very much.
- Thank you.
- Now for other news and our "Wisconsin Look." Parents of
children with seizure-related health problems testified at the
state capitol Wednesday in favor of a bill which would legalize
possession of a medical marijuana extract.
The oil can alleviate symptoms of serious ailments, including
seizures but is currently illegal in Wisconsin.
Madison father Ron Jordan testified in support of the
bill.
His son Giovanni is 11 and has epilepsy and is severely
intellectually and developmentally disabled.
- But there is hope.
It's right here in front of us in the form of CBD oil.
We know so many people who have uprooted their lives to move to
states where their hope has increased as they have seen
their epileptic children thrive.
The seizures diminish because of a simple oil taken from a
natural plant.
We've seen it help our son.
His seizures have diminished.
He is starting to use sign language.
He is learning to be potty trained.
He is trying to speak.
Why then should we have to fear using this oil when it offers us
so much hope?
You all have a chance to let that hope grow for so many
families.
All we ask is that you remember holding your children for the
first time and remember all the hope you had for them.
Please let us have some of that hope as well.
- And finally tonight, a look ahead to next week.
That's when I will have a report on proposed changes to the
state's food stamp program and hear from FoodShare recipients
who under a 2015 change were required to work or train for
work in exchange for the benefit.
Did they get a job or were they bounced from the program?
We'll check in on that as the governor proposes expanding that
work requirement to parents of school-aged children.
Until next week, I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Have a great weekend.
- Funding for "Here and Now" is provided, in part, by Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television.