Constitutional Challenge to the WI Choice & Charter Program

School Leaders,
As some of you have seen in the media, the owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company and Julie Underwood, UW Madison’s anti-voucher champion, filed an Original Action with the Wisconsin Supreme Court (SCOWIS) yesterday. The suit challenges the constitutionality of the voucher programs and the Independent Charter Program – both 2x and 2r. In other words, all Independent Charters are included.
  
The normal course of a challenge is to file the case at Circuit Court and then progress up the Appeals and Court and finally Supreme Court, if needed. Original Actions must typically meet a high legal bar for the Court to even accept the case. It is uncertain if the Court will accept the challenge.
  
The case itself has four distinct challenges. Some of them are stronger than others. 
 

1) Public Purpose Requirement. The public purpose doctrine, which dictates that there can be no expenditure of public funds to satisfy a private rather than a public purpose has been used before to challenge the voucher program. It failed. A legal precedent was set as the court basically said that the legislature had the ability to create alternate ways to apply public education as long as the legislature met its constitutional requirement to fund traditional public schools. It is unclear to me why charters are included in this provision as they are public schools albeit non-traditional public schools.

2) WI Uniform Taxation Clause. This challenge is the one that directly impacts 2x charters and the decoupling draft WICSA will move has so much importance. By intermixing with local school district finances, the argument here is that the funds get comingled and local property taxes, which are required to remain with the local district, are sent to other entities outside the district. This legal challenge is why WICSA was pushing for decoupling during the budget negotiations and have a separate piece of legislation drafted and near ready for introduction.

3) WI Constitution Supervisory Clause.  This is a challenge that says DPI doesn’t have enough control over private schools.  While charters are listed in this section, they do not make a good case for this provision to be applied to charters. It is mostly focused on private schools.

4) Revenue Limits violate Uniform Taxation Clause.  This is not a challenge that appears to include either voucher or charter programs.  There is a long-held belief for some public-school advocates that forcing school districts to ask the voters for permission to raise property taxes is bad. This is an attempt to eliminate revenue limits.

The timeline is unknown at this point. The court could move quickly to accept or deny the submission or ask for legal briefs prior to making the decision on the Original Action. We will keep you updated as this case progresses forward.
 
The WICSA board will be meeting on Monday to discuss next steps on the best way to protect Independent Charter Schools.
 
Please let us know if you have any questions. 
 

Kristi Cole
Board Chair