The board’s March and April votes were meant to deliver a single 3% raise. As written, the approved minutes can be read to promise far more — and the motion that was supposed to fix it was never spoken aloud. The district says it will clarify the record at its June 11 meeting.
When the River Valley School District Board of Education set out this spring to give its employees a raise, it appears to have settled on something simple — a single 3% increase for the 2026-2027 school year. What it left in the public record is anything but simple.
Across two meetings — March 12 and April 9 — the board passed overlapping wage motions that, read together as its own approved minutes present them, can be interpreted to authorize a compounding raise of 6% for most staff and as much as 8% for some, rather than the single 3% the district says it intended. Compounding the confusion, the April motion meant to clarify the matter was never actually stated aloud at the meeting, yet appears in the minutes in specific language no one spoke.
The district maintains the underlying numbers are correct and lawful, and that the discrepancy is a matter of record-keeping rather than pay. Director of Finance and Operations Brian Krey told Valley Sentinel the district plans to address it at the board’s June 11 regular meeting.
But the episode — surfaced through weeks of correspondence between the district and this newspaper — points to how little, under Wisconsin law, guarantees that a board’s official record reflects what it actually did.
MARCH 12 MEETING
District approves new district insurance plan, selects new cleaning service, sees the retirement of two staff members
On March 12, the River Valley School District Board of Education met for its regular board meeting, where it considered new plans for staff insurance, considered changing contracted cleaning services and accepted the retirement of a teacher.
Buildings and Grounds Committee reports budget restrictions
Board member Fred Iausly reported that due to a lack of quorum, the Buildings and Grounds Committee had no update for the meeting, as well as updating the board on upcoming committee issues.
“The agenda for the Buildings and Grounds is going to be very short for the next few months, because we have no money,” Iausly said.
The lack of funds is due to the district pulling funding from the Buildings and Grounds committee as part of an effort to reduce the tax levy on district residents. For the 2026-2027 school year, Krey informed the board at its Feb. meeting that to help bring the tax levy increase down to 5.1%, the district would have to cut funding to buildings and grounds, the textbook budget and a 3% wage increase for staff versus a previously planned 4%.
District has new insurance plan, staff wage increase
The board discussed changing the district’s health insurance provider. Quartz, the district’s current insurance provider, offered the district a 26.9% renewal rate. Renewal rates are the year over year increase in cost that insurance providers offer their covered institutions to allow the continuation of the same insurance plan.
Krey explained to the board that in meeting with his contemporaries from other school districts, Quartz had provided other districts with quotes that were beyond reason in terms of cost, or simply not providing a bid.
Krey provided the board with three bids from Dean Health Plan. Dean’s first bid provided an equivalent coverage plan to the district’s current Quartz plan, with the same deductibles, with a comparative 18.1% renewal rate. Dean alternate plan one increased deductibles by $500 and had a comparative 12.4% renewal rate and Dean alternate plan two offered embedded deductibles with a $900 increased deductible for a 10% renewal rate. Krey noted that current statistics from Quartz indicated the utilization rate of an embedded deductible plan would be less than 50%. Embedded deductibles issue a single deductible for each family member, as well as a total plan deductible, whereas non-embedded deductibles have just one single family plan deductible. The committee recommended to the board that the first Dean alternative plan would be most ideal for staff.
The board unanimously voted to accept the Dean alternate plan one for the upcoming school year.
The board also approved a 3% staff wage increase for all staff, to keep up with the projected 2.63% Consumer Price Index Inflation rate.
New district cleaning services contract
The Budget/Employee Relations Committee also provided the board with plans for district cleaning services. The district had previously worked with Dashir Management Services, Inc. for facility maintenance and custodial services, but three years ago the district individually hired maintenance employees. Krey relayed that the committee recommendation was to continue working with an outside company to contract after-hours cleaning services for school facilities, but the district should individually hire custodians for daytime cleaning or reactionary needs.
The committee recommended to the board to utilize Skyline Cleaning Services. Out of the bids, other finalists considered were Stratus Building Solutions and GSF Facility Management Services. Board member Jeff Maier questioned why, out of the three finalist bids, Skyline was recommended, as it was the most costly option.
“Looking at the finalists and some of the research that Brian did… Stratus was one that subcontracts everything, that was a red-flag,” Iausly said.
Krey reported the Platteville School District said their contract with GSF got off to “a rocky start.”
“Based on training, based on their ticket system, based on everything they shared with me, I felt very, extremely comfortable just like, boom, we can make this work with Skyline,” Krey said. “It’s a little bit more money, but over the course of the next three years and keeping our staff happy and maintaining our buildings, that I feel like they are obviously aging but we have maintained them well, and we would like to keep that up.”
The board unanimously approved the bid from Skyline for cleaning services.
Staff retirements
The board discussed the retirement of Erika Baldowin, a junior high school teacher. Baldowin was hired by the district as a 7th grade English teacher in 2012. The board unanimously accepted her retirement. Glasbrenner also announced the retirement of Rocky Dobyns, the district’s IT Assistant. As support staff, Dobyn’s retirement did not require action for approval.
Policy changes: Enrollment documentation, private economic interests, legal routing
Policy 420 School Admissions added an elaboration that in the student documentation submitted for enrollment, the documentation must contain the student’s legal name, as it had no previous mention of name.
Policy 524.2 Code of Conduct and for all River Valley Employees and Elected Officials added four bullets regarding advancement of private economic interests using a position in the district, accepting items of value for the purpose of influencing judgement, using a position or property in the district for partisan political or religious purposes and providing lessons or services unless entirely outside of district responsibilities.
Policy 529 Personnel Involvement in Legal Matters and Court-Related Actions is a newly drafted policy which details how staff should respond to legal matters within the district, including receipt of legal documents, subpoenas and testimonies, due process rights and court orders regarding student enrollment details. The policy directs staff to immediately inform administration upon receipt of any legal document naming them, prohibits staff from producing confidential records or providing testimony without notification of administration, absolves employees of liability for furnishing records in accordance with law or regulation and mandates strict adherence to due process in administrative actions such as suspension or expulsion.
No changes were made from the prior meeting and policies 420, 524.2 and 529 were unanimously accepted by the board in second reading and adopted into district policy.
APRIL 9 MEETING
District approves new district insurance plan, selects new cleaning service, sees the retirement of two staff members
On April 9, the River Valley School District Board of Education met for its regular board meeting, where it discussed the resignation of three teachers, the hiring of one teacher, voted to increase staff wages, and heard reports from school administrators regarding an all-staff bus accident reunification drill.
Resignations and hirings
The board discussed the resignation of three teachers. Fourth grade teacher Monica Lovell resigned from her position at the intermediate school, and Special Education teachers Laura Ellis and Anne Waters resigned from their positions at the high school. The board unanimously accepted the resignations from all three teachers.
Lovell’s resignation from the district negated the board’s plan for a reduction in force for the fourth grade teaching position.
The board discussed the hiring of Clay Caminiti for the position of high school Special Education teacher. Caminiti works with the district part time as a long term substitute and currently coaches the high school baseball team. Caminiti is not currently certified for Special Education, however, he is seeking emergency licensure for the position. The board unanimously approved the hiring.
Bus incident/accident reunification drill
Glasbrenner provided an update to the board regarding a drill which staff members performed during an all-staff inservice day simulating a bussing accident in the district and subsequent family reunification. Glasbrenner noted the need for creation of protocol and practice due to recent bus collisions in Madison and in other local districts.
School Resource Officer Andy Kurek created a simulation in which snowy road conditions resulted in a school bus sliding onto the shoulder and tipping over north of Spring Green on Highway 23, resulting in the non-life threatening injury of two students needing to be transported to a hospital.
Glasbrenner explained in the event of a real incident, the superintendent would proceed to the site of the accident and the pupil services director would proceed to the hospital, while the principals of each school and other administrative support staff would assist in communicating with parents and reunifying children.
“There’s very specific protocol on how to do that to make sure that we’re identifying the right people, the right emergency contacts, and how to make sure that we’re doing that,” Glasbrenner said. “ We have to notify teachers, parents, the staff, the press, you guys at the board, there’s all of these things that we have to do.” The staff performed three simulations, each with one of the three principals organizing the reunification efforts. Staff members also got to act in each role, as a student, parent or teacher, in each individual drill.
“I think what was good for all staff was to see all the different positions, so as they played a parent or child, they also got walked through all of those different things,” Elementary Principal Carla Peterson said.
Board approves staff wage increase, but unclear minutes leave the raise open to interpretation
The board considered wage increases for district staff members. The board unanimously approved a 3% wage increase for all staff, and specifically a 2.63% wage increase for all teaching staff, and a 0.37% supplemental increase for all teaching staff members. The 3% total wage increases are for current staff members.
Krey informed the board this was to comply with state law, as the board had approved a 3% wage increase at the March meeting. However, the approved meeting minutes neglected to mention that this motion was to supersede the wage increase made in the March meeting. Krey said the action was taken solely to comply with state law.
What the April motion was meant to do, and what the minutes say it did, are not the same thing.
According to audio of the April 9 meeting, Krey — who, as a district employee rather than an elected board member, cannot himself make motions — walked the board through a change he said was needed to keep the teacher raise within state law. Board member Kiley Cates then said she would “make a motion for that.” No motion was ever stated aloud. The approved minutes nonetheless record a specific motion: that Cates moved “to approve a 3% wage increase for all staff, with teacher wages consisting of a 2.63% wage increase and a .37% supplemental increase.”
The distinction Krey raised is real and rooted in state law. Under 2011’s Act 10, a school district can bargain base-wage increases with its teachers’ union only up to a cap tied to inflation — 2.63% for contracts beginning July 1, 2026, as set by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. To deliver a 3% raise while staying under that cap, districts structure the increase as a 2.63% base increase plus a 0.37% supplemental increase, which falls outside the capped base. River Valley’s teaching staff received exactly that. Its other employee groups — administrators, hourly support staff and non-union employees — received a flat 3% base increase, none of them subject to the union cap. In other words, the substance of the raise appears to comply with state law. “The clarification on base wage and a supplemental wage is required by law and the only reason we took action was to ensure we met/followed the law,” Krey said.
The problem is the record. Because the April motion, as recorded, never rescinded, amended or replaced the March motion, both remain in effect under ordinary parliamentary procedure, in which a prior action stands until it is expressly undone. A resident reading the two sets of minutes could reasonably conclude that staff were granted a 3% raise in March and a second 3% raise in April — with the separately approved 2% base-wage increase potentially layered on top for some employees, reaching as high as 8%. The district says no such stacking was intended, but the minutes do not say so.
And the defect is not cured even if the minutes are taken as perfectly accurate. The recorded April motion approves a wage structure; it contains no language undoing the March action. The clarifying document that actually lays out the intended figures — a wage schedule Krey provided to the Valley Sentinel on request — was never part of the public meeting packet for either meeting, leaving the motions’ reference to “the Budget/ERC Committee’s recommendation” pointing to a document the public could not readily see.
Valley Sentinel asked Tom Kamenick — president of the Wisconsin Transparency Project and one of the state’s foremost open-government attorneys — whether the situation implicated Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law. It largely doesn’t, he said: the law has surprisingly little to say about whether a board’s minutes match what the board actually did. “It’s more a matter of parliamentary procedure, and how precise a motion needs to be, and what to do about inaccurate minutes,” Kamenick said, adding it was not something he could more comfortably weigh in on.
As a practical matter, once a body approves its minutes, those minutes generally stand as the official record of what occurred, and there appears to be no clear avenue — short of litigation — to force a correction. The result is that the accuracy of the public record rests largely on the diligence of the body that keeps it.
Some figures the district is now paying appear in that schedule with no clear board action behind them at all. The hourly rate for a before/after school student worker rises from $7.25 to $10.00 for 2026-2027 — an increase of nearly 38%, far beyond the 2% applied to other new-hire base wages. Asked what authorized the jump and where, Krey did not point to any motion, explaining instead that the existing rate was too low to recruit students: the increase, he said, was “based on the need to have them,” after conversations with interested students made clear $7.25 “was not a competitive wage in order to hire them.” Neither the March nor the April minutes reflect a motion setting that rate, nor any motion approving the wage schedule itself as a document.
The board also considered and subsequently approved two separate wage increases, the first, a 2% base wage increase for new River Valley Education Association union teaching staff, substitute, and hourly staff, and a second raising the Athletic and Activity Schedules by 2.63% and increasing event-manager pay to $80 per event and $100 for varsity football games.
Closed session
The board adjourned to closed session for the stated purpose: “Specifically to discuss requests from students to opt out of state testing.”
The agenda stated that the closed session would be called under Wisconsin statute 19.85(1)(f), which is used to discuss and take action when considering personal information or other data that if discussed in public would cause a substantial adverse effect on the reputation of the discussed parties. The agenda also noted that this would be used specifically to discuss requests from students to opt out of state required testing. The board unanimously voted to enter into closed session. Iausly made the motion, Cates seconded.
Legal Editor’s Analysis: The closed session that shouldn’t have been
We are reissuing the legal sidebar, with light edits to update, that we originally published in our May 15, 2025 print issue. That issue’s sidebar, which covered the school board’s April 10, 2025 meeting, opined on exactly the same issue: a potentially unlawful closed session held ‘to discuss requests from students to opt out of state testing.’ Because the issues are identical, the violation, the solution, and the significance all remain relevant.
At its April 9 meeting, just like its April 10, 2025 meeting, the River Valley School District Board of Education adjourned into closed session “to discuss requests from students to opt out of state testing.” The quoted language was included in the meeting notice along with the entire text of state statute 19.85(1)(f), which provides an exemption from the general requirement that all state business be conducted in open session.
The Board spent four minutes in closed session, then reconvened and voted in open session to approve six students for opt-outs from state testing.
So did that violate Open Meetings Law? I think it did, I also think the violation is pretty technical and harmless, but it’s interesting, and the decision to violate the law is something I still think is worth criticizing.
The violation
I have discussed in this space before what the law requires. Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law demands that a proper exemption exists and that the public notice shows why closing a meeting is necessary. The level of specificity required depends on the circumstances, but must always meet a certain baseline, and that itself means more than just the quotation of a statute. At very least it must be enough to show that the exemption actually applies to the particular portion of the meeting that the body seeks to keep closed from the public.
We can start with whether an exemption actually exists. The statute cited, § 19.85(1)(f), allows a closed session only where the body has a strong basis to believe that reputationally harmful or sensitive personal information will be discussed pertaining to one or more specific persons, and that disclosure of the information would likely result in substantial adverse effects upon those persons’ public reputations. That information can be financial, medical, social or disciplinary, employment-related or quasi-criminal. There is no general exception for educational data.
So the first question is whether a request to opt out of state testing is covered by that exemption. That may be the case, but not obviously so. Under Wis. Stat. § 118.30(2)(b)3 this kind of opt-out does not require a reason.
Another legal consideration is that for students in these specified grades, the statute says the board must excuse the student if the parent requests it. No exemption, justification, or evidence is required. So the only thing the board has to discuss is the existence of a request.
That means there is no obvious stigma attached to the request that would imply harm to a reputation, and no other material before the Board that could be stigmatizing. There could in theory still be some negative public perception of students seeking to utilize this legal mechanism, but I don’t see why there would be. If there is, then that would need to be made clear in the notice. It wasn’t. Not this year or last.
Unless one or more of the students included a medical, social, or disciplinary explanation so sensitive that public disclosure would truly cause reputational harm, then this wasn’t a proper use of § 19.85(1)(f). And if such information did exist, the Board had no reason to see it in the first place. It should have been redacted before even reaching the board.
There is one final piece here, which is the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which may not be familiar to everyone, but it is a fixture of the educational landscape. Boards of Education all over America know about FERPA. I think many administrators think that because FERPA is federal law, it overrides state statutes, but I have always argued in court that this is wrong. FERPA is intended to promote student privacy, but for reasons we do not need to discuss right now, its force over states is really quite limited when there are public transparency issues at stake. The state statute does not actually include any exception for FERPA. There have been cases where this could generate issues, but not here.
The solution
There was an easy way to satisfy both the state statutes and FERPA by simply de-identifying the student requests. The district administrator could have simply anonymized the requests by replacing the student names with other identifiers, say “Student #1, Grade 3,” and the board could have then considered them in open session. The board could easily vote on each request without discussing identifying details, thus respecting FERPA and sidestepping the Open Meetings trap. That way, transparency would have been preserved while causing no injury to student privacy.
That precise solution was emailed to the district administrator more than 24 hours before the April 10, 2025 meeting by Valley Sentinel staff. The board then proceeded to amend the agenda the day of the meeting, but not the closed session item. The district administrator presumably still had that emailed solution a year later, but did not implement it this year either.
The significance
In these instances, the injury to the public interest was minimal, probably entirely theoretical. The state statute in these circumstances appears to make the board vote a mere formality. The board had no real discretion, and no need for sensitive information. The public was not seemingly denied any information that they needed to understand what the board was up to.
So any significance of this violation does not arise from real-world consequences to that public interest. Democratic transparency hasn’t been preserved, exactly, but it hasn’t been marred either. The actual action of the board was kind of a nothing sandwich from an open government perspective.
But the system also assumes some self-policing, some humility. When a mistake is pointed out, the best thing a board can do is thank whoever caught it and do better next time — and they didn’t. Even if the stakes for openness are vanishingly small, the violation here is symbolic: it would have been pretty easy to follow the law, and the board decided to break it — again. That does not send a good message,
It just so happens that we are at a point in our nation’s history where the rule of law is under threat. This is a time to be standing up for the letter of the law. Not playing games with it.
I’m an attorney, I’m not your attorney. This is not legal advice.
—Gary Ernest Grass, esq., Legal Editor
Upon reconvening in open session, the board voted to approve the requests to opt out of state testing for two fourth graders, two fifth graders and two sixth graders. The motion was unanimously passed.
STATE IMPACT
School-funding deal dies twice in Madison, leaving districts to fund the gap locally
For months, Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature have tried — and so far failed — to agree on using the state’s projected budget surplus to fund schools and provide property tax relief, an effort that first broke down in February before collapsing again in a dramatic May Senate vote.
The earlier failure came in February. In January, Evers had proposed using the state’s roughly $2.4 billion surplus to boost state aid to schools while providing property tax relief, conditioning any deal on $200 million for special education reimbursement and $450 million for General Equalization Aid — the “state aid” that flows directly into district budgets. Four days before the Assembly adjourned for the year on Feb. 20, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos sent Evers a counter-offer that met his $200 million special education request but, in place of the $450 million in equalization aid, proposed $500 million for the School Levy Tax Credit — a mechanism that offsets municipal property tax bills but provides no new spending power to school districts. Evers’s equalization-aid condition went unmet, no compromise was reached, and the Legislature adjourned without acting on school funding.
The May package was the next attempt. On May 11, Evers, Vos and LeMahieu — all three retiring this year — announced a $1.8 billion deal drawn from the surplus, pairing tax relief with school funding: $300 rebate checks for individual taxpayers and $600 for married joint filers, the elimination of state income tax on tips and overtime, $300 million in new special education funding and $300 million in general school aid — more than $600 million directed to K-12 schools in all, plus $50 million in property-tax relief for the Wisconsin Technical College System. The special education money was structured to bring the reimbursement rate to a promised 42% for 2025-26, using $85 million, and to 50% in 2026-27, using $230 million.
While the bill passed the Assembly on a bipartisan 61 to 32 vote, it failed in the state Senate on an 18-15 vote, with all 15 Senate Democrats plus three Republicans — Steve Nass, Chris Kapenga and Rob Hutton — voting no.
Public sentiment ran sharply in favor of the deal even after it died. A Marquette University Law School poll conducted May 20–21 found 80% of Wisconsin adults said the Legislature should have passed it — support that, unusually, held across the spectrum: 77% of Republicans, 81% of independents and 80% of Democrats. Marquette pollster Charles Franklin told WPR that seeing one bipartisan group of leaders back the bill only for a different bipartisan group to vote it down was striking, and that such across-the-board agreement is rare in a polarized state.
The support survived even when respondents were confronted with the deal’s projected cost. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that, absent other changes, the bill would have left the state facing a $2.95 billion deficit at the end of the 2027–29 biennium; without it, the state is projected to end that period with a positive balance. Told that opponents called the plan fiscally irresponsible, 69% of poll respondents still said the relief should come now rather than wait — down 11 points once the fiscal concern was raised, but still better than two-thirds.
Opponents made that long-term cost their central objection. Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, whose caucus’s votes sank the bill, said the Fiscal Bureau analysis confirmed the bipartisan concerns lawmakers had raised about the bill’s effect on the state’s fiscal outlook; she pledged Democrats would pursue “fiscally sound and financially sustainable” alternatives. Republican Sen. Chris Kapenga of Delafield, one of three in his party to vote no, told WISN-12 that leaders announced the deal without first counting votes in either house, which he called “failed leadership on all three fronts.”
Much of the blame settled on U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the GOP gubernatorial frontrunner, who came out against the deal and whose staff called Republican lawmakers ahead of the vote to raise concerns, according to WisPolitics. Evers’s spokesperson, Britt Cudaback, said the bill had the 17 Republican votes it needed until Tiffany “started making calls.” Tiffany has said he did not tell anyone how to vote.
Gov. Tony Evers, who had called the package a “blockbuster deal,” blamed its collapse on Tiffany and the lawmakers who joined him, saying Wisconsin’s kids and schools would go without needed investment because a few legislators “chose to blow up a bipartisan plan” for the sake of the next election. Vos has said he wants to revisit the deal — pushing for a new vote as soon as this month — though Senate leaders in both parties have so far shown no appetite to bring it back.
For districts like River Valley — already trimming buildings-and-grounds funding, cutting the textbook budget and scaling a planned 4% staff raise back to 3% to hold its tax-levy increase down — the deal’s failure means the state aid that might have eased those pressures will not arrive. The Wisconsin Association of School Boards, which expressed “deep disappointment” at the bill’s failure, called it “not a cure-all” but “a productive first step” — and warned that inadequate state support is pushing a growing share of school costs onto local property taxpayers.
