The board got this spring’s raises substantially right. But the numbers live in loose motions and a spreadsheet — not in the district’s own codified policies, where they belong.
This spring, the River Valley School Board set out to do something straightforward: give its employees a raise. By every indication it got the substance right. The base wage increases track the 2.63 percent ceiling the state sets for bargaining with the teachers’ union, and the structure the board used — a capped base increase paired with a supplemental increase — is the standard, lawful way Wisconsin districts stay inside that limit.
What the board got wrong is where the decision ended up living (— and the motion, the motion was incorrect and unclear too).
Read the board’s own approved minutes and here is what you find. On March 12, the board approved “a 3% wage increase for all staff.” On April 9, it approved another “3% wage increase for all staff,” this time with a breakdown for teachers, and then, in a separate motion, “a 2% base wage increase” for the teachers’ union and hourly staff. Nothing in the April motions rescinded or replaced the March motion, so on paper both 3 percent increases still stand, with a 2 percent increase layered on for some employees on top. We do not believe the board meant to promise a compounding 6-to-8-percent raise — it almost certainly did not. But a resident reading the minutes cannot know that without calling the district to ask.
Here is the deeper problem, and the one worth fixing for good: the actual numbers — what a custodian or a first-year teacher will be paid — appear nowhere the public can simply look them up. The motions point to “the Budget/ERC Committee’s recommendation,” but that recommendation was never in the public packet. The only document that lays out the real figures is a schedule the district’s finance director assembled and provided when our newspaper asked for it. The pay structure of an entire school district exists, in any concrete form, as a spreadsheet that has to be requested.
That is the heart of it. River Valley’s compensation is governed by motions too vague to be self-explanatory and by a schedule that lives off to the side, unattached to any binding, public, permanent record. A raise approved this way isn’t written down anywhere a taxpayer can find it without knowing to ask the right person for the right file. It can be lost, superseded, or contradicted, and the public would be none the wiser.
It does not have to work this way — and River Valley already owns the better way.
The district runs a numbered board-policy system. Anyone who watched the March meeting saw it: the board took first and second readings of Policy 345.5 on graduation requirements, Policy 420 on school admissions, and others. These numbered policies are the district’s local statutes — adopted deliberately, archived, and posted where anyone can read them. They are how River Valley already writes down the rules it intends to be permanent and public.
The compensation schedule and the annual budget should live there too — not as standalone files a policy merely describes, but as the numbered policies themselves. The salary and wage figures are compact enough to be the operative text of a policy outright. The adopted budget, far larger, should be adopted as a numbered policy of record rather than parked as a separate document. Either way the principle holds: the binding numbers — the dollar figures, the base-and-supplemental split, the substitute and stipend rates, the budget’s allocations — sit in the codified policy manual and exist nowhere else as the controlling version. Approving them each year becomes a single clean action: adopt the policy, which repeals and replaces last year’s in its entirety. No unclear or messy motions, and each fiscal action has a corresponding publicly-accessible document referenced.
This is how serious governments handle money. The State Legislature does not fund the state through a string of loose floor motions and a spreadsheet in a desk drawer; it enacts the budget as a statute and replaces it each cycle. A city sets its pay scale by ordinance. The figures are the law, sitting in the code where anyone can find them. A school board, which is the local legislative body for its district, has every tool to do the same — and River Valley has the policy framework already built.
We understand the wage schedule and the annual budget are different animals, and that the budget is the harder case. A salary schedule is a handful of pages at most; it can simply be the text of a numbered policy and an embedded table or two. The budget is a large, technical document — easily hundreds of pages — built on the Wisconsin Uniform Financial Reporting Requirements that state law and the Department of Public Instruction impose. No one is suggesting those figures be retyped into policy prose.
But size is not the obstacle it first appears, and the state itself proves it. Wisconsin’s biennial budget is an enormous, dense fiscal document, and it is still enacted as codified law and replaced each cycle — not parked as a loose file the public has to request. A school district can do the same: adopt the WUFAR budget document as a numbered policy of record — Policy 6250, say — in whatever format the state requires, repealed and replaced each fall. The point is not the typeface. The point is that the adopted budget is the codified instrument, filed under a number in the policy manual, rather than a standalone document that a separate policy merely describes the process for approving. How exactly to format and file it is the finance office’s job to work out; that it should live in the codified manual as the operative version is the board’s call to make. It already gets posted to the district website, just ensure it lives in a centralized location in the policy framework you already have.
The advantages answer directly to what went wrong this spring. The policy is the action, so there is no gap between what the board approved and what the numbers are — they are the same document. The repeal-and-replace mechanic makes the contradiction that snared the board this year impossible by design: adopting this year’s policy “which supersedes and repeals last year’s in its entirety” leaves nothing dangling. The math the state requires — base at or under the cap, the rest as supplemental — sits in a formal schedule in black and white. And above all, the binding figures live in a numbered, permanent, publicly posted document, not in a motion that has to be parsed or a file that has to be requested. The truth of what the district pays, and what it spends, would be a matter of public record in the most literal sense: written into the rulebook.
Done right, this is not a cure-all. It does not erase the district’s duty to document its math, it cannot override what has been bargained with the teachers’ union, and each year’s replacement has to be drafted so no gap opens between one policy and the next. But those are matters of careful drafting, not reasons to keep governing compensation by improvisation.
So River Valley should do two things. First, clean up the immediate record — at an upcoming meeting (the next one is June 11), rescind the tangled March and April wage motions and replace them with a single, comprehensive motion stating the actual figures. Second, and more lastingly, stop letting the most consequential numbers the district produces float free of its own code. Put the wage schedule into policy. Put the budget into policy. Let them live in the district’s statutes, repealed and replaced each year, where the public can read them plainly and in one place.
The board’s intentions this spring were sound, and its employees will, we trust, be paid what the board meant to pay them. But the public should not have to take that on faith, or take it by phone call. What a school district pays its people and how it spends its money are the clearest possible matters of public concern. They belong in the rulebook — not in a spreadsheet someone has to go find.
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On certain topics in areas of great community interest, the editors of the Valley Sentinel may take positions they believe best represent and serve the interests of the community. Any opinions or positions taken by the editorial board are separate and distinct in labeling and substance from the objective community journalism that appears in the rest of the publication and does not affect the integrity and impartiality of our reporting.