All public employees in Wisconsin must retain records, per the state’s open records law. Except one group. The ones who wrote that law.

State legislators have exempted themselves from the retention portion of the law. Some want to change that.

“The public should not have to worry about legislators having secret conversations or deleting emails,” said state Rep. Clinton Anderson, D-Beloit, who is introducing a bill that would close this loophole despite the fact that the state Assembly adjourned last month for the rest of the year.

Anderson released the bill Monday because it is the start of Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan collaboration among groups in the journalism, civic, education, government and private sectors that shines a light on the importance of public records and open government.

In Wisconsin, state legislators must comply with a records request, but if they have destroyed the record, they have nothing to send.

“Obviously, it’s troubling,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. “It allows legislators to make things go away that they would rather not see the light of day.”

State Rep. Rob Brooks, R-Saukville, told the Wisconsin Examiner in 2021 that his office “frequently deletes emails during the normal course of business each day.”

And he’s not the only one.

“My office does not delete records on principle, and we should make sure every elected official is held to that same standard,” Anderson said.

In 2025, Gov. Tony Evers stepped in to close this loophole – his 2025 budget proposal included a measure to “remove the Legislature’s exemption from open records law by requiring that records and correspondence of any member of the Legislature be included in a definition of a public record to provide greater transparency for the people of Wisconsin.” The proposal also would have allocated funds and opened a full-time position with the Legislative Technology Services Bureau to carry out this new requirement. But the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee removed it from the final budget.

State Sen. Chris Larson, a Democrat from Milwaukee, has introduced bills to close that exemption for state legislators multiple times and is doing so again in the Senate this week in tandem with Anderson.

Before his election to the state Senate in 2010, Larson served on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. As a public official, he had to maintain all his records there and assumed the same when he arrived in the Legislature.

But as his email inbox filled up and ran low on space, Larson said he was told by IT staff to simply delete old messages.

“People often wonder why so many wildly popular policies go session after session without a vote or even a public hearing, while special interest slop rises to the top of the agenda,” said Justin Bielinski, Larson’s spokesman. “The Wisconsin Legislature’s exemption from record retention requirements creates a perverse incentive to do the people’s business in secret. If lawmakers aren’t going to be responsive to their constituents’ needs, the least we can do is allow people to find out who they are listening to, and whose voices they choose to ignore.”

Larson’s bills to close the loophole have been ignored by Republicans who control the Legislature, he said. The majority party generally pays little attention to bills from the minority.

But the fact the Wisconsin Legislature is even subject to the open records law, albeit with a caveat, makes it one of the more transparent states. Nearly a quarter of all states — 12 in total — do not even allow records from the Legislature to be accessed by the public, according to a study from The Journal of Civic Information. Congress has also excluded itself from open records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The exemption for legislators here “completely undermines Wisconsin’s public records law and the ability for citizens to trust their Legislature,” said David Cuillier, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Freedom of Information Project. “It’s really quite bizarre and an outlier in the United States. The right thing to do is remove it and restore accountability and credibility to the institution.”

The Badger Project is an independent, reader-supported newsroom in Wisconsin.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A loophole lets Wisconsin lawmakers delete public records is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A deputy known for making a large number of arrests, but who had a history of unreliability in his reports and court testimony, resigned from the Waushara County Sheriff’s Office in early December.

Scott Schaut had worked for the sheriff’s office since 2018 and was making about $34 per hour, according to county administration.

After The Badger Project requested records of his disciplinary record in September, Scott Schaut resigned a few days later from his leadership position as the night shift sergeant, dropping himself down to a patrol deputy. In November, The Badger Project published a story about Schaut’s work history, including a performance improvement plan he had been under, and at least two documented instances of the officer’s changing testimony led to a dismissal of criminal charges.

“After careful consideration, I have decided that it is best for me to move on,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which The Badger Project obtained from the county via a records request. “The current direction and internal environment of the department no longer align with what I believe is necessary for me to be successful in my role. For that reason, I feel it is in everyone’s best interest for me to step away at this time.”

The Waushara County Sheriff’s Office has been under great scrutiny in recent months, as an investigation from The Badger Project found that Sheriff Wally Zuehlke had collected more than $20,000 in stipends for his K9 after quitting the law enforcement trainings with the dog. The county board voted to force Zuehkle to repay that sum plus interest.

Another investigation by The Badger Project found the sheriff’s office promoted a deputy who had been sending and requesting lewd photos to and from officers in the department. That deputy resigned after The Badger Project requested his records.

And the sheriff’s office’s second-in-command, Chief Deputy Jim Lietz, resigned in October after pressure from citizen journalist Sam Wood, who makes online videos watched by thousands in the county and beyond, regarding his handling of the lewd photo investigation and other accusations.

Schaut had previously been on a performance improvement plan with the department, during which he conducted what may have been an illegal search, documents from the plan note.

Wood had also been criticizing Schaut in his recent videos, derisively calling him “Schnauzer” due to his aggressive and frequent searches for drugs.

But documents show that, on at least a couple occasions, Schaut failed to follow department policy, and the law, when executing searches.

Before conducting a house check in the village of Coloma in April, Schaut and other deputies received verbal permission from a caller to ensure no person was in the home. But body camera video showed Schaut looking in boxes, the refrigerator and a washing machine, areas too small for a person to hide, according to a sheriff’s office report.

For his breaking of department policy, the top administration of the sheriff’s office decided Schaut would be penalized with two unpaid days off, Lietz wrote in the report.

Upon Schaut’s resignation from the sergeant’s position, Lt. Stacy Vaccaro ended the improvement plan.

“Overall, Sgt. Schaut’s performance has been mediocre without much change,” Vaccaro wrote in the final report. “After speaking with Schaut about concerns or issues, he would acknowledge his understanding, improve for a short period of time, and then regress back.”

Schaut, Vaccaro and Zuehlke did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Schaut also had trouble with reliability in his police work in other documented instances.

In a case from 2024, Schaut reported receiving consent to enter a man’s home, in which he found drug paraphernalia. However, when a judge asked Schaut to note on an audio recording where he had received that consent, the officer said he could not, according to the court transcript. That led to the judge dismissing the paraphernalia charge because Schaut had not obtained consent and had no warrant.

In another case involving underage drinking in 2023, Waushara County District Attorney Matthew Leusink and Assistant District Attorney Joshua Zamzow alerted the court that Schaut had misremembered facts during his testimony, leading to the dismissal of a citation.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Waushara County deputy quits sheriff’s office following The Badger Project’s investigation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Back in her clowning years, Karen DeSanto got a call from the king of Morocco.

“We hung up on him,” she said. “We thought it was one of our friends pranking us.”

It was actually employees of the consulate, but the king wanted them. DeSanto and her then-husband were both professional clowns with the Ringling Brothers, and they also performed as a duo.

Somehow, King Hassan II had heard about the DeSantos, and he flew them in on his private jet to perform for his granddaughter’s birthday at his palace in the capital city of Rabat.

His royal majesty, sitting on his throne in the middle of a room, loved their performance. The little girl? Not so much.

“She hated it,” DeSanto said with a chuckle. “That was our first and only birthday party.”

Clowning has taken DeSanto all around the country and the world, from the most opulent spaces of Carnegie Hall to much humbler places — she has used a pig barn to change into costume before performing in a rural field — and now, to the Wisconsin State Capitol.

A longtime Baraboo native, she was elected to the state Assembly in 2024 after heading the Boys & Girls Club of West Central Wisconsin for more than a decade.

But it’s been a long journey on the circus train — both literally and figuratively — to get here.

Running away with the circus

Born in Sacramento, DeSanto, now 61, said she dreamed of seeing the world. Her father took her to see the circus every summer, and young Karen would go every day it was in town, so much that the clowns recognized her and even roped her into the act, pulling her out of the crowd to perform gags with them.

Her father was a big part of her life, she said, and she was his caregiver when he got sick in his early 60s. While sitting in the waiting room during one of his appointments, DeSanto came across an ad for clown college in a magazine. She tore it out and shoved it into a pocket. After her father died a few months later, when she was 27, she found herself “itching to do something different” with her life, so she auditioned.

“I’m a big believer in saying yes,” she said. “The world just opened up to me after that.”

After graduation, DeSanto got one of the few contracts offered to a female clown by the Ringling Brothers.

She lived and traveled on the circus train, where her quarters were next to the elephant car. The friendly beasts would reach their trunks to her window to grab bananas from her hand. One of the elephants she rode during performances was also named Karen, and she reunited with her friendly steed years later at the zoo where it had retired. DeSanto swears the much larger Karen remembered her.

She married another clown after meeting her husband under the Big Top. They toured the big-city circuit, visiting places like New York and Los Angeles, as well as the rodeo route, which took them to smaller cities, including Waco, Texas, and Erie, Pennsylvania.

One of her first brushes with politics came in 1995, when DeSanto and her comrades performed for then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, future presidential candidate and then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and other politicians in the parking lot of the U.S. Capitol. Gingrich had asked the Ringling Brothers, already in town for a few nights, to perform outside the halls of Congress to celebrate the company’s 125th anniversary. The entertainers executed the famous elephant long mount, where the massive animals line up, place their hooves on the pachyderm in front and pose.

“I have great stories of kings and queens and all in betweens,” DeSanto said. “You name it, we’ve done it.”

The Boys and Girls Club

Eventually, the DeSantos bought a home near the Ringling Brothers headquarters in Baraboo, where they worked as the resident clowns for the Circus World Museum, and raised their daughter Emily, now 27.

In 2012, DeSanto left the circus to work for the Boys & Girls Clubs of West-Central Wisconsin, most of it as CEO.

In her time there, she led the revamp of the financially failing organization, which included clubs in Baraboo and Tomah, putting it on firmer ground, she said. DeSanto also oversaw the expansion of new clubs in Reedsburg and Portage.

She and her staff made the organization self-sustaining by tapping into moms and dads, local businesses and philanthropic organizations like the United Way, she said. They connected with their elected officials, like state Rep. Dave Considine, a Democrat from Baraboo, and pursued state and federal grants to help fund their after-school programs for rural kids.

“I’m just going to toot the horn that our clubs were the rural footprint for the nation,” she said. “But don’t get me wrong, it was always a struggle.”

She retired in 2024 from the Boys and Girls Club, but another interesting challenge arose for the versatile performer. And DeSanto found herself saying “yes” once again.

The Wisconsin Assembly

After Considine announced he would not seek reelection in 2024, he went about recruiting several Democratic candidates so his constituents could have options, he said.

DeSanto, with whom Considine had worked to secure some grant funding, was one of his picks.

“She’s really good in front of people. She knows people really well,” he said of DeSanto. “I think she also is a really strong fighter for individual rights. It was all about fighting for people to have the right to be successful and happy.”

Having worked at her existing clubs and helped to launch the new ones, DeSanto said she got to know the district and the people who live and work there.

She saw how important institutions like schools and the health care system were to the well-being of rural communities and knew she could be an advocate.

“I felt I had the chops, I felt I had the experience, I felt I knew my communities quite well,” she said. “That’s why I threw my hat in the ring.”

And in an era where money is so rampant in politics, her fundraising background couldn’t hurt either.

A three-candidate race emerged in the primary, and some voices, mostly online, tried to “weaponize” her background against her, DeSanto said, suggesting a clown didn’t belong in the Wisconsin Legislature.

Considine had prepared her for that.

“One of the first things I said was ‘Karen, don’t run from it.’ Embrace it and run on it,” he said. “And she did and I think she ran a really good race.”

The circus is quite popular in the district, DeSanto said, noting that the Ringling Brothers had grown up in Baraboo and made it their home base of their internationally renowned organization.

The criticisms backfired. She cruised to victory, winning more than 53% of the vote in the primary, a greater share than the other two candidates combined. DeSanto won the general election with more than 54% of the vote against a Republican challenger. The district had become more friendly to Democrats in the most recent round of redistricting.

About half a year into her 2-year term, in which her party is in the minority and thus unable to do much without GOP support, DeSanto has been a sponsor on a couple bills, including ones that would provide free, healthy school meals, lower prescription drugs and expand the homestead tax credit, but Republicans looking to cut spending stripped those from the budget.

She cast one of her first contentious “no” votes last month on the state budget negotiated by legislative Republicans in the majority, Gov. Tony Evers and state Senate Democrats, saying it did not do enough on issues important to her district, like affordable housing expansion, broadband access and public school funding.

Asked what she’s hoping to accomplish in her first term, DeSanto said, “I really am concentrating on listening, and absorbing what this Legislature is, and how the state Capitol works.”

“People say the Legislature is a circus, and I say ‘no, it’s not,’” she said with a chuckle. “The circus starts and ends on time. The people there are talented and kind and friendly.”

Another one she hears is that “government is a bunch of clowns,” an assertion with which she vehemently disagrees.

“Clowns are highly trained individuals, and they can do just about anything,” DeSanto said. “And they take their craft very seriously. And they bring joy and happiness.”

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

From one circus to another: Professional clown serving in Wisconsin Legislature is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A police officer forced out of a suburban Milwaukee department for appearing to skip a lot of work and claiming many questionable comp days is now working for a small-town department in Waukesha County.

Amanda Lang resigned from the Glendale Police Department in 2021 after an internal investigation found she had more than 230 paid hours unaccounted for between 2019 and 2021. At her wage of $40 an hour, those hours added up to $9,300, the investigation noted.

“Based on the discovery of leaving early, along with the substantial number of full shifts not accounted for, one can only wonder how many other times she has left significantly early without documentation,” then-Captain Rhett Fugman wrote in his investigation, which The Badger Project obtained in a records request.

The captain recommended Lang be fired, and she resigned in April of 2021.

She worked for Glendale in the Milwaukee suburbs for more than 13 years, rising to the level of sergeant, before her resignation.

“As a sergeant, additional responsibility and trust was provided to Sgt. Lang,” Fugman wrote. “Her actions and inactions displayed regarding leaving early and posting off time over the last two plus years have displayed a lack of integrity, honesty and trustworthiness.”

“These characteristics are the foundation of what we are as police officers,” he continued.

Lang was hired by the Lannon Police Department later in 2021 and has worked there since.

Lannon Police Chief Daniel Bell said his department “follows rigorous background checks and screening procedures for all new hires to ensure they align with the standards and integrity expected of our officers,” including for Lang.

“During the interview process, we were satisfied with her explanation of the situation,” Bell said of her resignation.

Lang is “consistently demonstrating professionalism, dedication and a strong commitment to community policing,” he added.

She has been promoted to lieutenant, the second in command of the 12-officer department.

Another officer employed by the Lannon Police Department, Nathaniel Schweitzer, was forced out of the police department in the town of Waterford in Racine County late last year. Like Lang, he “resigned prior to the completion of an internal investigation,” according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s database on officers who left a law enforcement position under negative circumstances.

Number of wandering officers in Wisconsin continues to rise

The total number of law enforcement officers in Wisconsin has dropped for years and now sits at near record lows as chiefs and sheriffs say they struggle to fill positions in an industry less attractive to people than it once was.

Unsurprisingly, the number of wandering officers, those who were fired or forced out from a previous job in law enforcement, continues to rise. Nearly 400 officers in Wisconsin currently employed were fired or forced out of previous jobs in law enforcement in the state, almost double the amount from 2021. And that doesn’t include officers who were pushed out of law enforcement jobs outside of the state and who came to Wisconsin to work.

Chiefs and sheriffs can be incentivized to hire wandering officers, experts say. Hiring someone new to law enforcement means the police department or sheriff’s office has to pay for recruits’ academy training and then wait for them to finish before they can start putting new hires on the schedule.

A wandering officer already has certification and can start working immediately.

Nearly 2,400 officers in the state have been flagged by their former law enforcement employers as having a “negative separation” since the state DOJ launched its database in 2017.

Most are simply young officers who did not succeed in a new job during their probationary period, when the bar to fire them is very low, experts say. But some have more serious reasons for being pushed out.

Law enforcement agencies can look up job applicants in that database to get more insight into their work history. And a law enacted in 2021 in Wisconsin bans law enforcement officers from sealing their personnel files and work histories, a previously common tactic for officers with a black mark on their record.

About 13,400 law enforcement officers are currently employed in Wisconsin, excluding those who primarily work in a corrections facility, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Wandering officers make up nearly 3% of the total.

At least one major study published in the Yale Law Journal has found that wandering officers are more likely to receive a complaint for a moral character violation, compared to new officers and veterans who haven’t been fired or forced out from a previous position in law enforcement.

Sammie Garrity contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee-area cop quit last police job after appearing to miss 200+ work hours is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Since 1954, women in Waupaca and the surrounding areas could give birth at the local hospital.

No longer.

Last year, the health care system Thedacare that runs the hospital merged with another system, Froedtert Health. Last month, that newly formed health care system closed the delivery unit there.

The closest birthing center to Waupaca is now more than 30 miles to the northwest in Stevens Point. But many pregnant women will have to go even farther — to the Fox Valley to the east — to reach a hospital that accepts their insurance, said Dr. Russell Butkiewicz, who worked as a family physician at the Waupaca hospital for more than 30 years, including over a decade of delivering babies in the now-closed birthing center, before retiring from medicine last year.

“There’s going to be a delay in care,” he said. “And that delay in care could result in an adverse outcome. It could mean harm to the mother. It could mean harm to the fetus.”

Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.

“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.

In Waupaca, that means goodbye to the delivery unit. And that’s a problem for folks in the area. One that has repeated itself across the state and country.

The community tried to offer solutions to the health care system and keep the birthing center open, Butkiewicz said. The Waupaca City Council asked the health care system in December to reconsider the closure.

The health care system told the press it was struggling to recruit physicians and other specialists for the unit and said that most women in Waupaca were already delivering their babies in urban hospitals. But they also did not show data to back up those assertions, according to news reports.

The health care system did not respond to messages from The Badger Project seeking comment.

The past and the future

For more than 70 years, the community’s babies were born at the hospital in Waupaca. Thedacare took control of the hospital in 2006, but kept on delivering. Until the merger.

While the newly formed health care system is technically nonprofit, it is still driven by making money, Carstensen said. High-level employees must still be compensated competitively by nonprofit organizations.

“They’re really run in the interest of the executives and doctors, who are the managers, the owners of the not-for-profit,” he continued. “The goal is to increase your profits and lower your costs.”

Butkiewicz and others worry the Thedacare delivery unit in Waupaca won’t be the only casualty of the merger.

They also fear the closing of the birthing center at the Thedacare medical center in nearby small-town Berlin, with its relative proximity to larger hospitals in Oshkosh and Fond du Lac, could be next.

A closure there would again increase the size of the territory in central Wisconsin without a birthing center, Butkiewicz noted, further extending drive times and escalating the dangers of problematic deliveries.

The health care system did not respond to questions about Berlin or anything else.

The problem of profit-centered health care, the dominant model in the U.S., not wanting to serve less-profitable areas is a consistent problem; solutions do exist.

When the free market does not fill a need, the government can step in to help, Carstensen said.

That can take the form of direct payments to a health care system to help provide the needed care, or a government promise that the organization will have a monopoly in the area as long as they offer certain services to the public.

Something similar is happening in the state regarding high-speed internet. Across rural Wisconsin and also much of the rural United States, for-profit telecommunications providers mostly have been uninterested in making the necessary investments to bring fast internet access to the thinly populated customers here. Republicans controlling Wisconsin state government initially gave very little funding toward the problem. But after Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, was elected in 2018, he and the GOP-controlled state Legislature massively increased the amount of grants for internet providers to rural areas in the state.

The idea of government stepping in to subsidize the free market is generally one more appealing to Democrats than the GOP.

State Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican from Appleton who represents Waupaca and also runs her own health care practice as a nurse practitioner, has some other ideas for helping health care thrive, or at least survive, in rural areas.

“Patients deserve access, but first we need to make sure providers — particularly in high-demand areas like nursing — are incentivized to provide these critical services in needed areas,” she said via email. “This includes cutting unneeded red tape in the health care industry, especially for primary care providers.”

To specifically tackle this shortage of health care providers, particularly in rural areas, she argued for allowing them more independence to offer more services, enhancing investments in nursing student recruitment and retention, and supporting a tax credit for nurse educators.

State Rep. Kevin Petersen, a Republican who also represents the area, did not respond to messages seeking solutions.

Whatever happens, rural health care will need some help from somewhere, or much of it might go away, experts say.

“It’s going to involve a lot more regulatory oversight,” Carstensen said. “It’s the only way we’re going to get the results I think are essential.”

Former President Joe Biden’s administration had been very aggressive on business competition issues for the past four years, including challenging many attempts by large companies and nonprofits to merge, often arguing the results would be worse for consumers. It remains to be seen how strongly President Donald Trump’s administration will enforce antitrust law in his second term, though early moves have been promising, Carstenen noted.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Two health care systems merged, then closed the only birthing center for miles is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story has been updated to reflect recent police killings in 2022.

Law enforcement officers in Wisconsin kill people at among the lower per capita rates in the country. But some agencies including the sheriff’s departments in Marinette and Walworth counties have killed people at much higher rates since 2013.

“Police shootings — especially fatal ones — are statistically rare events,” Meghan Stroshine, an associate professor of criminology and law studies at Marquette University who studies law enforcement and use of force, wrote in an email. “Even in an agency the size of Milwaukee, you’re maybe talking a dozen shooting incidents a year, ‘only’ a couple of which will be fatal.”

Since 2013, law enforcement officers in Wisconsin have killed at least 149 people. Mapping Police Violence, which tracks killings by police based on reports in the news media, lists 148 killings, not counting a fatal police shooting in Appleton on Aug. 12. The project began collecting the data in 2013.

The FBI also maintains a national database of use-of-force incidents by law enforcement, but reporting is not mandatory, so many agencies do not report and the data are incomplete, Stroshine said.

Among people killed by police in Wisconsin since 2013, about 27% were Black, although Black residents make up just 6.2% of Wisconsin’s population, according to data Mapping Police Violence prepared for The Badger Project. All but four of the 149 killed were men.

Most have been deemed justified by an outside agency or a district attorney and have not resulted in criminal charges against the officer, according to the cases gathered by Mapping Police Violence. Law enforcement said the victims were armed in more than 75% of the deaths. Nearly all were killed after being shot by police; a few died by other means.

In Wisconsin, the number of police killings spiked in 2017 at 26, and bottomed out at 10 in 2014, but the trend has stayed relatively stable.

Wisconsin below national average

Nationally, law enforcement killed about 3.3 people for every million per year from 2013 through 2021, according to Mapping Police Violence. The annual average of police killings in Wisconsin in the same time frame is about 2.7 per million inhabitants, putting the state 36th nationally.

Starting from the most, New Mexico, Alaska, Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado killed people at the highest rates in the country, between about 6 and 10 per million people per year, the data show. Starting from the least, law enforcement in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey killed people at the lowest rates, between .8 and 1.5 per million people per year.

Nationally, police kill about 1,100 people per year, mostly from shootings, according to the Mapping Police Violence and a similar database maintained by The Washington Post. Despite increased attention, that number has stayed flat in recent years.

Some analyses suggest police killings in urban areas, mostly of people of color, have decreased in the past decade, while killings by police in suburban and rural areas, mostly of white people, have increased.

Jim Palmer, head of the Wisconsin Police Professional Association, the largest police union in the state, said he was not surprised that Wisconsin is in the bottom third of per capita killings by police.

“The training that officers receive in Wisconsin is ahead of our peers nationally,” he said.

Palmer pointed to the scenario-based training that all law enforcement cadets now receive at the academy. In 2016, the state increased the amount of this training that cadets must complete from at least 60 hours to approximately 110 hours, said Stephanie Pederson, an educational consultant at the state Department of Justice.

Palmer also noted that in 2014, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to mandate that an outside law enforcement agency conduct investigations of officer-related deaths. Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed the bill, which had been pushed by Michael Bell Sr., whose namesake son was killed by Kenosha Police during a traffic stop in 2004. Critics across the country have long bemoaned the conflict of interest of having law enforcement agencies investigate their own officers.

And since 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Justice has collected data on use of force incidents from law enforcement agencies and recently launched a database for public use.

Why police kill, and why rates differ 

There are “only two situations where deadly force is acceptable or allowable,” said Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor of law and police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If the officer feels like their life, or someone else’s life, is threatened.” 

Fatal shootings by law enforcement tend to have several things in common, Stroshine said. The majority involve male victims who are armed and have a drug addiction or a mental health issue, she said.

And use of force policies can differ greatly across agencies, Stroshine noted.

“What might warrant a particular level of force in one jurisdiction may be very different than what would warrant that same level of force in a different jurisdiction,” she said. “Some policies would allow officers to shoot at moving cars while some policies would definitely not allow that.”

Officers in suburban and especially rural areas are often working alone in places where gun ownership might be higher, Stroshine said. And big-city police departments usually have more funding for extra training and other resources that could decrease killings by police.

Patrick Solar, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and a former police chief, said some law enforcement agencies focus more on law and order, while others are more concerned with reducing police violence.

“The police are a reflection of community expectations. That’s always the case,” Solar said. “You’ll be able to explain a lot of the variance in per capita police killings based on that.”

Solar continued that the question in every incident is, were there alternatives that could have been exercised by the officer to avoid having to take a life?

“Some officers are not aware of those alternatives,” he said. “It’s not a part of their training, it’s not a part of their culture.”

Higher numbers at some agencies 

Unsurprisingly, the three biggest cities in Wisconsin have seen the most killings by law enforcement, according to Mapping Police Violence.

Milwaukee Police have killed 23 people since 2013. Madison Police have killed seven people in the same time frame, while Green Bay Police have killed six.

Some cases involve incidents in which there is little question about the need for use of force. Bruce Pofahl, one of the people killed in 2021 by Green Bay Police, had just shot three people, killing two of them, at a hotel connected to the Oneida Casino.

In a 2019 case, Javier Francisco Garcia-Mendez died after Green Bay Police tasered and handcuffed him following reports that he was pounding on doors and chasing people. He was unarmed, but had bitten a woman, police said.

And one officer stands out from others in Wisconsin when it comes to fatal police shootings. Wauwatosa Officer Joseph Mensah has shot and killed three men in five years. He was not criminally charged in any of the deaths, nor was he disciplined, though an outside investigator recommended his firing after one of the incidents. Mensah resigned from the department in 2020 and was hired by the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department as a deputy in 2021, where he currently works.

Marinette County Sheriff’s Department

Marinette County Sheriff’s deputies have shot and killed five people since 2013, a high number of police-involved deaths for a county of only 42,000 people. 

Two of those victims had just shot and killed another person, and all five were armed with a gun, the sheriff’s department said.

“I think it’s just been a cruel twist of fate to our agency,” Marinette County Sheriff Jerry Sauve said. “I think that the circumstances presented themselves, and our people were in harm’s way, and that was the end result.”

Three of the five killings involved multiple officers shooting the victims. Deputy Jesse Parker fired his weapon in three of the killings, and Deputy Steve Schmidt in two.

“We’re a small department,” Sauve said. “Those two particular officers are also part of our special response team. In a couple of those, they were there in that role.”

Unlike some of the larger law enforcement agencies in the state, the Marinette County Sheriff’s Department does not employ any mental health crisis counselors, Sauve said. In the midst of a statewide shortage of law enforcement officers, Sauve said his department is struggling to fill positions at the county jail, and sometimes has to use patrol deputies there just to staff at legal minimums.

Walworth County Sheriff’s Office

Similarly, deputies from the Walworth County Sheriff’s Department have shot and killed five people in the last decade.

One was incarcerated at the county jail. Deputy Richard Lagle shot 18-year-old Alfredo Emilio Villarreal, saying the man had attacked him and was trying to escape while at the hospital. In another case, Kris Kristl aimed a BB gun at a county deputy and an Elkhorn Police officer.

In an email, Undersheriff Dave Gerber wrote, “Every case of a fatal shooting involving one of our deputies has been reviewed by a District Attorney, and in every case the District Attorney has determined that the enforcement was privileged and a reasonable exercise of self-defense and/or the defense of others pursuant to Wisconsin Statutes.”

Two of the victims were driving vehicles when they were shot and killed. Gerber said in both situations, the deputy was unable to get out of the way. Law enforcement are generally trained to approach vehicles from the rear or side to avoid standing in its path, experts say.

“These situations evolve rapidly and although not specifically stated in our Use of Force Policy, our deputies are allowed to defend themselves (or another person) when the deputy reasonably believes they are in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm,” Gerber wrote in an email. “A vehicle about to strike them is an imminent danger of death or great bodily harm.”

Some law enforcement agencies have restricted the practice of firing at a moving vehicle, because shooting the driver doesn’t always stop the vehicle and could make the situation worse. An officer can shoot passengers, for example, or hit the driver and turn the vehicle into a battering ram, endangering bystanders.

This practice is “increasingly viewed as an unnecessary risk,” Stroshine said.

“Many reformers have called for a complete ban on shooting at moving vehicles, and some departments have moved in this direction,” she said. “Restrictions are necessary; however, a ban may go too far. Officers should be required to retreat or avoid shooting at moving vehicles whenever possible.

But, Stroshine added, “there may be situations when an officer reasonably believes there is no other alternative or the vehicle has taken aim at the officer or others.” She cited the 2021 case of Waukesha Police who shot at Darrell Brooks as he barreled through the city’s Christmas parade, killing six and wounding more than 60 others with his SUV.

“It should be the last resort,” Stroshine said, “but officers should have that option if they deem it necessary.”

Waukesha Police Department

Waukesha Police officers have killed four people in the past decade.

Two of the victims were armed with guns and one had a knife, the department said. The fourth, an unarmed man who police said had hit his girlfriend and resisted arrest, was tased multiple times and kicked by police and later died in custody.

Waukesha Police Captain Dan Baumann noted that independent reviews concluded that all the killings were justified.

“It is tragic,” he said. “We don’t want deadly force encounters.”

The family of one of the armed men, Randy Ashland, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2020 against the Waukesha department and the two police officers who shot him. The family claims Ashland was holding the gun by the barrel and didn’t point it at officers. Several other officers on scene did not fire at Ashland, the family argues. The suit is still moving through federal court.

The police department doesn’t comment on pending litigation, Baumann said.

The department sometimes uses a county-employed crisis counselor, and plans to embed another at the city level are in motion, Baumann said. Waukesha Police have not used body cameras, but hope to deploy them to every officer in the field by October, he said.

Eau Claire Police Department

Officers with the Eau Claire Police Department have shot and killed four people in the past decade.

Officer Kristopher O’Neill, who has worked for the department for about 25 years, has shot and killed two people in the past five years. In 2021, the victim LeKenneth Miller had just stabbed a woman and refused to drop a knife, police said. The other, Matthew Zank in 2017, called 911 to report an armed man, then pointed a gun at officers when they arrived, police said. Zank had a note in his wallet apologizing to the police officer who killed him, police said.

Eau Claire County District Attorney Gary King ruled O’Neill was justified in both shootings.

Per state law, all four killings were investigated by outside agencies, in these cases the La Crosse Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Eau Claire Police Lt. Ben Frederick said.

Frederick said the Eau Claire Police Department employs a community policing philosophy that prioritizes partnerships and problem-solving. He noted the department posts its reviews of use of force incidents on its website.

“The officer’s role is as a community partner and guardian of peace and freedom,” he said.

Frederick also mentioned the department launched a Mental Health Co-Response program in 2021 to bring clinical intervention workers into some police encounters and has incorporated crisis intervention into quarterly use-of-force training.

Marathon County Sheriff’s Office

Deputies from the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office have shot and killed four people in the past decade. The sheriff’s office said all four were armed, three had fired at people, two had shot officers and one had killed Everest Metro Detective Jason Weiland and three others.

Marathon County Sheriff Scott Parks noted that law enforcement made “many efforts in each event to negotiate a peaceful resolution in these incidents.”

Detective Brandon Stroik, a military sniper, was a shooter in two of the four, including one man who was holding another hostage at gunpoint, the department said.

As a first responder, Stroik “responded to the active incident, placing himself in harm’s way, which is what we would expect him to do,” Parks said.

New approaches eyed to lower deaths 

Because mental health disorders can be a large part of modern policing, and often an issue in police killings, some local governments and law enforcement agencies across Wisconsin are trying different strategies to lower the chance of a fatal encounter. 

The city of Madison and its police department have been leaders in this area, experts say. The police department has deployed mental health workers since 2004, a practice other agencies have followed. It city has also pioneered the use of teams of EMTs and mental health professionals to take some pressure off police as well as those in need.

And in September, Milwaukee County will open a mental health emergency center in the city’s downtown where law enforcement police can bring people in crisis, said Edward Fallone, a Marquette law professor who chairs the citizen board of the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission.

The type and amount of training law enforcement officers get can also reduce the need to use force, experts say. Some credit virtual reality scenario-based training with helping officers make good decisions in tight situations.

“You’d be hard pressed to prove it, but I would wager a month’s worth of my meager salary that that has made a great difference in terms of officers being able to deal with use of force situations,” said Solar, the UW-Platteville professor. “The fact is the more of that kind of training you get, the less reactionary you’re going to be, the less fearful you’re going to be and the more confident you’re going to be.”

In addition to their training at the academy, officers in Wisconsin must complete 24 hours of continuing education annually, Pederson said. But they can always do more. Waukesha Police officers complete at least 60 hours annually on a variety of topics, Baumann said.

Avoiding use of force

One type is nonlethal weapons training. Many law enforcement agencies across the state have increased their arsenals of nonlethal weapons, including devices that shoot beanbag rounds, foam projectiles and even kevlar bola wraps, Eau Claire County Sheriff’s Department Capt. Cory Schalinske said.

But comparatively, officers still receive far more training on firearms skills and defensive tactics than they do on nonlethal weapons, Stroshine said. In fact, officers spend more time in firearm skills training than they do being trained on ethics, communications skills, cultural competence, critical thinking, decision-making, and crisis management combined, she said.  

“While officers must be prepared when faced with a lethal threat,” she said, “officers need to be far better educated on how to avoid the use of force in the first place.”

At the academy level in Wisconsin, law enforcement cadets receive 68 hours of firearms training, two of which are “deadly force decision making.” They receive 52 hours of training on ethics, communication, cultural competence, critical thinking, and crisis management.

Of course, finding funding for mental health professionals, nonlethal weapons and additional officer training can be a problem for any agency, especially smaller ones, experts say.

Fallone said any “one action isn’t going to have major results.”

“It’s got to be a multifaceted approach to, how do we transform interactions between the police and members of the public to reduce the risk that those interactions spiral out of control and result in a police shooting?” he said.

Reporting this story for Wisconsin Watch was Peter Cameron, managing editor of The Badger Project, a nonpartisan journalism nonprofit based in Madison. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Police in Wisconsin killed 149 people since 2013, lower than national rate  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

One officer was accused by a supervisor of snoozing in his squad car while on duty. Another had multiple drunken run-ins with police, including after bar fights. A third repeatedly sent lewd photos to a female officer.

All of them were fired or forced out. And all of them are back working in law enforcement in Wisconsin.

Nearly 200 law enforcement officers currently employed in the state were fired from previous jobs in law enforcement, resigned in lieu of termination or quit before completion of an internal investigation, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Justice obtained through an open records request.

There are about 13,500 certified active law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, according to the state DOJ, so fired or forced-out officers make up a little more than 1 percent of the total.

And more than 1,000 Wisconsin officers have been fired or resigned before termination since 2017, when the state DOJ started tracking that statistic.

Some of the most serious offenses include Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff Janelle Gericke, who in January was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to burglary. Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Deputy Joel Streicher ran a red light in his police SUV and hit a vehicle, killing a man and injuring a woman. He was sentenced in April to six months in jail.

But the state revoked the law enforcement certification of both officers, meaning they can no longer work as police. As of July, Gericke and Streicher were the only Wisconsin officers decertified since January 2020, said Steven Wagner, director of the DOJ’s Training and Standards Bureau.

As long as officers keep up to date with their recertification training, only severe misconduct, such as criminal activity, usually results in a decertification, according to the state Law Enforcement Standards Board, which regulates police officers, sheriff’s deputies and prison guards. Officers named in this article who were fired or forced out were asked for comment but did not offer any; their chiefs answered questions on their behalf.

Some fired officers were simply novices who didn’t perform at an acceptable level during their initial probationary period, when the bar to fire them is very low, experts say. Or they couldn’t handle the high pressure of working in a busy urban area. But for others, misconduct including lying, public intoxication and sexual harassment triggered their termination.

Rehiring fired law enforcement officers can be a problem for good policing, said Meghan Stroshine, a social and cultural sciences associate professor at Marquette University who has studied policing, because “a lot of the folks who have been fired and rehired end up getting in trouble again.”

“That of course is not good for community relations and can really do a lot of damage to the relationship between the police and the public,” she added.

Repeated run-ins with the law

Jacob Ungerer was no stranger to the Waukesha Police Department when the neighboring New Berlin Police Department hired him in 2018. In 2016, Waukesha officers responded to a drunken fight that prompted a local bar to permanently ban Ungerer and a friend, according to a police report.

In 2018, Waukesha Police got called to a fight at another tavern. Ungerer, by then beginning his stint with New Berlin Police and out for a night of drinking, appeared to be “heavily intoxicated,” according to a police report. Video from the bar showed Ungerer swinging at a man, pursuing a man and getting punched in the head, knocking him to the ground.

Six weeks later, Ungerer was riding in the passenger seat with another off-duty New Berlin police officer when Waukesha Police pulled them over under suspicion of drunk driving.

A “visibly intoxicated” Ungerer held his police ID in his lap so it was visible to the on-duty officers, according to a police report. Still in his probationary period, he was fired a few days later for excessive use of alcohol and “unbecoming conduct,” according to documents from the New Berlin Police Department. About 18 months later, the Middleton Police Department hired him.

That agency conducted a thorough background check before hiring Ungerer, and it was aware of “the circumstances surrounding the ending of his employment,” Middleton Police Chief Troy Hellenbrand said in an email.

Hellenbrand said Ungerer “made some changes in his personal life all in hopes of preventing making further mistakes like he had in 2018.” He added that the officer recently completed his 18-month probationary period without incident.

Study: Fired officers often fired again

A huge study in The Yale Law Journal titled The Wandering Officer found that Florida cops who had been fired from a previous law enforcement job were more likely to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation,” compared to rookies and officers who have never been fired.

The study analyzed nearly 100,000 full-time law-enforcement officers from almost 500 agencies in Florida over a 30-year period.

“Although we cannot determine the precise reasons for the firings, these results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer,” the study concluded.

Union contracts can give police officers strong job security, sometimes even when misconduct is committed. The controversial Act 10 legislation passed by Republicans in 2011 crippled organized public-sector labor in Wisconsin, but largely left police and fire unions, groups that lean to the political right, untouched.

So departments must choose carefully.

David Bauer, chief of the Dodgeville Police Department, said job candidates he determined had lied is a “bright line rule for me” — one he will not cross. Because police officers are often required to testify in criminal trials, those officers’ reputations are incredibly important, Bauer said.

“I can’t put someone on the stand that had issues with honesty,” he said.

Patrick Solar, a criminal justice associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Platteville and a former police chief, takes an even harder stance: a termination for a cop should be a death sentence on his or her law enforcement career.

“Police officers hold positions of public trust, they are oath takers,” he said. “Once they have been proven to have violated that oath, I believe the possibility of re-employment in the craft should be forfeited,” Solar said in an email. “Others will disagree, stating that fired cops should be given a second chance just like criminals released after serving their time. I reject that argument. Cops are special and should be held to a higher standard.”

Solar makes a distinction, however, between officers fired because of misconduct and probationary officers who commit minor infractions during their probation, when the bar to fire them is much lower. “Any agency considering hiring an officer who did not make probation at another agency needs to be VERY thorough in investigating the reasons why,” he wrote.

Transparency bill mulled

A tactic of some wandering officers is to agree to leave a police department without a fight if the agency seals their file, said Solar, who acknowledged he used to do that as small-town police chief in Illinois to avoid confrontation with powerful police unions.

A bill that would require law enforcement agencies to maintain a personnel file for each employee and disclose that file to any agency that may want to hire them has bipartisan support, but has been tabled as the state Legislature takes its summer break. If enacted, the measure would bar future nondisclosure agreements that shield police personnel files from prospective employers.

“The purpose of this bill is to provide law enforcement agencies across the state with better resources to recruit, hire and retain the best and the brightest,” said bill author state Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, testifying in an Assembly hearing on the bill in March.

The head of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, hopes the bill passes when lawmakers return in September.

“No one wants a bad cop out of the profession more than a good one,” WPPA Executive Director James Palmer said, adding that the “current system has served to substantially diminish the potential for wandering bad officers.”

Fired officer becomes ‘asset’

The sergeant at the Iowa County Sheriff’s Office noticed Deputy Riley Schmidt hadn’t moved his squad car for more than two hours, so he went to investigate, according to his report, obtained through an open records request.

The sergeant pulled up next to the vehicle, where he said he found Schmidt sound asleep, his cell phone resting on the wheel and playing a video. The sergeant knocked on the window a few times and said the officer’s name before he finally woke up, according to his report.

After a series of infractions during his probationary period, the county eventually terminated Schmidt for cause. He now works as a law enforcement officer for Darlington Police Department and the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Office.

Darlington Police Chief Jason King said in an email that his department conducted a rigorous background check and psychological assessment and Schmidt “has performed exemplary and has never had a complaint filed against him,” in his two years working there. King said Schmidt, who also works as an emergency medical technician, denies sleeping on the job.

“He is passionate about public service and has proven to be an asset to our department and community,” the chief said.

Supply of officers tight

For police chiefs trying to fill out their staff, times are tough.

The total number of law enforcement officers in Wisconsin as well as the total number of state police academy graduates hit at least a 10-year low in 2020.

That could put pressure on chiefs to hire less desirable candidates in order to fill positions, or at least incentivize them to conduct less thorough background checks, Stroshine said.

Time, and therefore cost, can be a big factor in who gets hired, Solar said. Law enforcement officers in Wisconsin must complete a 720-hour law enforcement academy program. The state DOJ covers the $5,000 tuition fee for individuals who complete the program, DOJ spokesperson Gillian Drummond said. But the employer or the individual are on the hook if they fail or drop out, agency spokesperson Rebecca Ballweg said in a follow-up email.

Fired officers already have that certification, so police departments can put them to work immediately, rather than having to pay a cadet for months while waiting for them to complete the training. This can be an incentive, particularly for smaller departments — to hire fired officers, Solar said.

The Lauderdale Lakes Law Enforcement Patrol near Elkhorn has five wandering officers on staff, the highest number of any police department in the state.

Lauderdale Lakes Chief Christopher St. Clair said via email his department runs a “detailed background check” before hiring officers and was aware of the job histories of all five officers. Those officers have performed “more than satisfactorily” and have not committed any misconduct, he added.

The Town of Madison Police Department, which will cease to exist next year when the city of Madison and Fitchburg annex the town, has three wandering officers on staff, as do the police departments at UW-Oshkosh and the Wisconsin State Fair Park Police Department.

Town of Madison Police Chief Scott Gregory said via email that psychological assessments and extensive background checks were completed on all the officers, and that the officers disclosed their terminations during the hiring process.

“All three officers have been doing an excellent job,” Gregory wrote, noting none had received complaints. “Needless to say, mistakes were made by the officers at their previous employment and additional training occurred here to ensure those mistakes would not occur again.”

UW-Oshkosh Police Chief Kurt Leibold said two of the three officers had previously and successfully worked for his department, and all three were terminated during their probationary period, “when an agency can let an officer go for any number of reasons, including that the officer simply was not a good fit for that department.” Leibold added that they were not fired for misconduct.

Wisconsin State Fair Park Police Chief James Bruno did not respond to questions about the wandering officers on his staff.

Alleged harasser rehired

Two female Dane County Sheriff’s Office employees described inappropriate messages and photos sent by Deputy Ben Dolnick.

One female deputy described the interactions to an investigator as “weird” and “not appropriate.”  Another reported receiving messages from Dolnick when he was “drunk.” Dolnick told investigators that one of the deputies had requested the photos — a statement she denied making.

An internal investigation found he had violated work rules and the office’s code of conduct. Part of the evidence against Dolnick was a certificate of achievement for completing a workplace anti-harassment training. He resigned prior to the investigation’s completion in December of 2018, served in the Town of Madison Police Department and is now working for the Elm Grove Police Department.

The chief there, James Gage, said his department “conducted a thorough investigation which substantiated that there was no wrongdoing committed by Officer Dolnick. He has been an excellent officer and an asset to our department.”

Wisconsin’s wandering officer registry

Just the fact that the DOJ keeps a publicly available database of wandering officers puts Wisconsin ahead of some states, some of which don’t disclose police misconduct at all. Police disciplinary records in Wisconsin are public unless they are related to an active investigation, under state law.

Law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin must report the firings or resignations under pressure of officers to the DOJ, according to state rules, but agencies are not required to check the registry before hiring an officer, said the DOJ’s Wagner. They are required to report the hiring of an officer, he said.

Click here to download a spreadsheet listing Wisconsin law enforcement personnel who have been fired, resigned in lieu of termination or quit before completion of an internal investigation. (Current as of February 2021.)

The list of fired law enforcement officers in Wisconsin is accessible to the public, Wagner said, but only through an open records request.

The DOJ will alert a law enforcement agency that hires an officer flagged for being fired or resigning before a termination, according to the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Standards Board Policy and Procedures Manual.

National registry pushed

At the national level, activists have pushed for a national “bad cop” registry. House Democrats passed the sprawling George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 that would enact one. It has stalled in the U.S. Senate. Such a registry would allow Wisconsin law enforcement agencies to check if a job candidate was flagged for misconduct in another state.

A National Decertification Database of police officers already exists, used by Wisconsin and 43 other states, yet it does not include officers who committed misconduct but kept their certification, said Michael Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors

of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, which manages the database. Becar said officer misconduct short of decertification may be added to the database in the future.

Stroshine said the National Decertification Database is a good start, but reporting is voluntary,  and it only collects a small amount of data. Also, many agencies are unaware of its existence, she said.

Some states are pushing for stricter enforcement on law enforcement. A state senator in New York introduced a bill that would prevent police who have been fired from working in law enforcement. Connecticut is considering strengthening its police accountability law, and last year Pennsylvania created a confidential database documenting police misconduct and also mandated law enforcement agencies consult with the database before hiring a new officer.

In the meantime, experts have advice for police departments who need to fill positions.

“Be extremely careful about who you hire and what their backgrounds are,” Stroshine said. “Officers with conduct problems are likely to repeat those problems … We know from a lot of research that there tend to be a small group of officers who cause departments the bulk of their problems.”

Solar has an even simpler piece of advice for law enforcement agencies.

“You can avoid personnel problems in your department if you don’t hire them,” he said.

Peter Cameron is managing editor of The Badger Project, a nonpartisan journalism nonprofit based in Madison. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Nearly 200 Wisconsin officers back on the job after being fired or forced out is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Democrats were flush with cash in the 2020 election cycle.

Billionaire liberals like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other super rich donors used a loophole in Wisconsin campaign finance law to dump money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, which routed a considerable chunk of contributions to state legislative candidates.

More favorable to Democrats in the last election, the loophole allowed four Democratic candidates and one Republican to destroy the previous record for most cash raised for a Wisconsin state legislative race. Each candidate brought in at least $1 million, most of it from their party. A seat in the state Senate pays an annual salary of $53,000.

Whether those candidates definitely shattered campaign spending records is somewhat unclear. The Wisconsin Ethics Commission has records dating back to 2008, with older records destroyed or housed in a state building somewhere, Administrator Daniel A. Carlton Jr. said. But in 2015, the GOP-run Legislature significantly loosened campaign finance laws that had limited spending in state political races, making it probable that new highs were, in fact, set last year. 

In that election cycle, Republicans complained about getting pounded by all the negative advertising those dollars bought. Liberals, highly motivated to beat then-President Donald Trump, felt good about their chances.

The result: Democrats achieved a negligible gain, picking up a couple of seats in the Assembly, where they remain outnumbered 60 to 38. The party’s Senate results were more discouraging, losing two more seats and handing Republicans 21 of the 33 seats.

Some Republicans said their strong showing was proof that their ideas were more popular.

Democrats see the results as Republicans reaping the benefits of political boundary manipulation.

“The fact that Democrats spent huge amounts of money on campaigns around the state, with little positive results, shows the strength of the gerrymandered legislative districts in Wisconsin,” said David Czarnezki, a Democrat and former state senator who now serves as a Milwaukee County supervisor.

Since Republicans, aided by hyper efficient computer programs, redrew the districts under great secrecy in 2011, they have consistently won a greater share of the seats in the state Legislature than their share of the total votes cast.

In 2020, Republicans won about 50% of all votes cast in state Senate races, but about 64% of the seats up for re-election, according to an analysis by The Badger Project. In the Assembly, Republicans won about 54% of all votes, but about 62% of seats.

Fewer GOP votes needed to win

In 2014 and 2016, Democrats received more than 50% of all votes cast for state Senate seats, but won only about 40% of the seats, according to an analysis by the Wisconsin State Journal.

Gerrymandered districts are “the most important driver of election outcomes,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Although there are improvements to be made in the campaign finance system and in other election rules and practices,” he said, “the configuration of districts has proved to be the most powerful determinant of state legislative election results.”

Burden noted both parties have won recently in statewide elections for president, U.S. Senate and governor — races that can’t be gerrymandered — calling it “a sign of the inherent political competitiveness of Wisconsin.”

“But that competitiveness has not been apparent in the state Legislature, where the majority party has been able to rely on extremely stable majorities that seem immune to partisan swings that affect other elections,” Burden said. “A wave election such as the 2018 midterm or a big financial advantage is not going to allow the Democrats to take back control of a state Legislature designed to resist public influence.”

Many experts, including a federal court, have called Wisconsin the most gerrymandered state in the country.

Big spending, few victories 

Thanks mainly to six-figure infusions of cash from their party, the fundraising of Democratic candidates dwarfed Republicans in many swing districts. (That does not count millions spent by independent and so-called issue ad groups in the fall election.)

But they got meager returns, at best, for their money.

State Sen. Brad Pfaff, D-La Crosse, was one of the few Democrats to win a swing district. Pfaff raised and spent a state record $1.5 million and squeaked past his Republican challenger Dan Kapanke, who raised and spent about $600,000, by less than half a percentage point.

Jonathon Hansen, a De Pere city councilman, raised and spent more than $1.4 million, while his Republican challenger Eric Wimberger raised and spent about $800,000.

Hansen lost by more than 8 percentage points and 8,000 votes.

“We raised a lot of money, but campaign spending can only go so far in terms of overcoming gerrymandering and the partisan lean of a district, especially given that the numbers of voters willing to ticket-split continues to dwindle,” Hansen told The Badger Project.

Neal Plotkin, a substitute teacher, raised and spent more than $1.2 million in his challenge to powerhouse fundraiser and longtime state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, who spent about $1 million.

Plotkin was beaten by more than 8 percentage points, a total of 10,000 votes.

And Paul Piotrowski, a Democrat and former police officer from Stevens Point, raised and spent more than $1.1 million in his challenge to incumbent state Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, who spent more than $700,000.

Piotrowski lost by more than 12 percentage points or 12,000 votes.

Loophole allows campaign cash to flow 

Huge donations from outside the state are becoming the norm in Wisconsin, where legal changes have allowed ever-increasing political donations in recent years.

Following the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case, McCutcheon vs. FEC, that deemed Wisconsin’s annual $10,000 limit on total political donations unconstitutional, the Republican-controlled Legislature went even further in loosening campaign finance laws, including doubling the limit on direct donations to political candidates.

In 2018, the Wisconsin GOP benefited from the loosened restrictions, outraising the state Democratic Party by millions.

In 2020, liberals turned the tables and flooded America’s Dairyland with cash.

Beyond that, independent groups on both sides of the aisle poured $8.5 million into the 2020 legislative races, according to tallies from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Big spenders on the Democratic side included A Better Wisconsin Together, which spent just over $2 million; and Service Employees International Union Committee on Political Education, which spent about $833,000.

On the GOP side, the largest spenders were the Koch Network’s Americans for Prosperity, which spent $748,000, and Jobs First Coalition, which spent $674,000. Dark money groups also weighed in on the right with “issue ads,” which do not require disclosure. The Democracy Campaign estimates the Wisconsin Realtors Advocacy Fund spent $500,000; WMC Issues Mobilization Council spent $660,000; and the Wisconsin Alliance for Reform spent $150,000, all favoring Republican candidates or attacking Democrats. 

Other reasons for GOP dominance? 

Bob Kulp, a Republican who served in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 2013 until last year, said money doesn’t really buy elections, at least at the state legislative level.

“A legislator who’s doing their job and is responsive to their friends and neighbors and they’re handling their business, I think that you could put a lot of money against the incumbent and it won’t necessarily change the election,” he said.

“Unseating an incumbent is a pretty tough thing.” he added.

Democrats are currently far behind in both houses of the state Legislature in terms of seats, so the party has to run against incumbents in many districts.

Like every state, Wisconsin must draw new district maps before the next state election in 2022. But Wisconsin is different from many states in that the governor can veto any maps drawn by the Legislature. That’s an almost certain outcome, considering Gov. Tony Evers is a Democrat and Republicans control both legislative houses. In that case, the courts must settle the issue.

Republicans are proposing that the state’s Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, take direct control of the bevy of likely lawsuits and make the final decision regarding the maps. But in a recent hearing, the court’s right-leaning Chief Justice Patience Roggensack expressed skepticism with the idea, saying the state court lacks the staff to draw maps.

The last time Wisconsin state government was split — in 2002 — the state Supreme Court flirted with overseeing a process for drawing districts, but ultimately declined and kicked the issue to the federal courts. Roggensack and Justice Annette Ziegler, both conservatives on the court then and now, rejected the state court overseeing the process at that time.

Anticipating the upcoming court battles for redistricting, Republicans have already hired lawyers that could cost the state $1 million or more in legal fees, according to a report from WisPolitics. Evers has launched The People’s Maps Commission to draw what he says will be fair maps. But the commission has no legal authority, as the state’s constitution gives the Legislature the ability to approve the districts.

Even if the federal courts give Wisconsin more competitive maps for the coming decade, Democrats still might face an uphill climb to win majorities in the Assembly and Senate.

Liberal voters tend to gerrymander themselves by residing in concentrated urban areas. Modern Republican voters are much more spread out across the state and country, including in vast rural areas where Democrats are less popular. That gives Republicans a natural advantage in the redistricting process, Burden said

While he lost ground in many urban and suburban areas from 2016 to 2020, President Donald Trump dominated rural precincts, helping Republicans maintain and even gain seats while he lost re-election.

Kulp, the former Republican Assembly member, scoffed at the idea that favorable redistricting helped him win his district in rural central Wisconsin that includes parts of Marathon and Clark counties.

“Hard left people indicate that I was only there because of gerrymandering, which is really stupid,” he said, “because you have to go a long way from my former residence in Stratford in the 69th District, in order to carve out a purple district, let alone a blue district.”

“We are just a heck of a lot redder than we’ve ever been,” he added.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Watch Managing Editor Dee J. Hall contributed to this report.

Republicans keep grip on Legislature despite Democratic spending spree is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

This piece is part of a collaborative reporting project called Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID-19 with the Institute for Nonprofit News and several member newsrooms.

One family reported driving to the community library parking lot, sitting there for hours each day so their children could use the wifi to do homework in the car.

Another student reported having to do the same thing in the parking lot of the local McDonald’s.

“I’m gaining weight,” the student said.

Another family complained about the thousands of dollars they’ve spent per month on a private tutor for their children.

Those responses came from a survey of 3,227 Wisconsin parents and students in 16 Wisconsin districts — most from the northern, rural part of the state — conducted by Curtis Jones, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Socially Responsible Evaluation in Education program. It found nearly half of the students were failing to keep up with homework as much as they had before the pandemic.

As the first full semester of U.S. students learning under the pandemic comes to a close, experts like Jones are particularly concerned about young people who already were behind. Only 15% of survey respondents said their child was learning as much as before the COVID-19 crisis. Some policymakers are pushing for a massive tutoring effort to help students catch up.

“Any type of negative impact on the education system hits people who have privilege less hard,” Jones said. “They can pick up that slack themselves. People who have less privilege, it’s more impactful. It hits harder.”

The full scope of the pandemic’s effect on academic progress is still unknown in Wisconsin. As part of a pandemic relief bill, the state Legislature suspended student testing requirements for the 2019-20 school year and prohibited the Department of Public Instruction from issuing school and district report cards covering this school year. 

Academic setbacks in rural schools could be related to how much face time teachers had with their students, especially those with poor internet access at home, said Kim Kaukl, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance.

And Jones’ survey suggests that the children who were already vulnerable and behind will be most affected by the pandemic and virtual schooling. Other research mirrors that, finding the most severe declines in math performance.

In Wisconsin, living in a rural area is a disadvantage — especially at a time when many schools have had to close their doors and deliver education virtually. More than 40% of rural residents in Wisconsin lack access to high speed internet, according to the Public Service Commission, compared to about 30% nationally.

Related coverage: Wisconsin’s rural students face a digital divide as some return to screens instead of school

A state Department of Public Instruction survey found that students in 69% of the 408 school districts that provided online instruction in the spring lacked access to reliable wifi or internet. 

That’s certainly the case for the Hellenbrand family, who live on a small farm in the village of Dane about 20 miles north of Madison. The family’s four children, ages 5 to 12, have had to attend school virtually all semester. 

“The internet has not been our friend,” said mother Amy Jo Hellenbrand during a school day last month. “It’s been down a lot today. They’ve been kicked off their meetings quite a few times. That’s been the story recently.”

One of her daughters, 9-year-old Reagan, was more succinct.

“Our internet sucks,” she said.

The local school district, Lodi, has kept its buildings closed but plans to reopen for the second semester. Students will initially attend half time, four days a week, with deep cleaning and teacher planning time on Wednesdays.

“It’s been rough,” Hellenbrand said. “They’re done with being homeschooled, and I’m kind of at the same point — the point of being burnt out.”

Chaotic semester better than feared

Partly due to concerns about internet connectivity, most rural school districts in Wisconsin started the academic year in person, Kaukl said. Most have also closed at least once — if not several times — and went all-virtual temporarily due to positive COVID-19 tests or community spread, he said. That has jostled students between learning in the classroom and learning from home.

But initial fears that schools — most if not all of which mandate mask wearing and social distancing — would become superspreader sites have not occurred.

The Albany School District, 30 miles south of Madison, started with its kindergarten through sixth graders in the building, gradually adding in-person instruction for middle and high school students. The district briefly closed schools early in the semester due to a positive COVID-19 test and has required a few students and staff to quarantine during the semester. But that’s been manageable for the 300-student district.

“If you would have told me that we would reach the middle of December and have as few outbreaks as we’ve had, knock on wood,” said Steve Elliott, a member of the school board and a father of three elementary school children there. “That’s been a real shock and a blessing.”

Emerging research finds infection rates in schools reflect rates in the community — and in-person instruction has not been a major source of viral spread. A 40,000-person study in Iceland found that children 15 and younger were about 50% less likely than adults to get infected and to transmit the virus. Nearly all transmissions to children came from adults, the study found.

Some school administrators and teachers in Wisconsin are finding the same thing.

The 500-student Hurley School District, on the border with the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, has yet to close its building this year, said Superintendent Kevin Genisot. There have been positive tests and quarantines of students and staff, but all have been traced to out-of-school transmission. In fact, the only times the district has even learned of cases inside its walls is when someone close to the student, such as a parent, tests positive, and then the child subsequently does too.

“If we could put a green light above every student and staff member’s head right now, we know there would be lights blinking (telling us) they were positive and asymptomatic,” Gensiot said. “They cycle through and then they’re done, and then someone else could be. That’s going to happen for some time.”

The release of new evidence has prompted the Public Health Madison & Dane County, which prohibited schools from opening to most students in August, to reverse itself last month, saying in-person learning can be safe. That was after the Wisconsin Supreme Court in September temporarily blocked the public health order; a final decision on the matter is pending. Still, a recent Madison Teachers Inc. survey found more than 90% of instructors oppose returning to in-person schooling.

Some districts have made extraordinary efforts to keep students in school buildings.

No matter the weather, Hurley School District props open its doors in the mornings so hundreds of students don’t touch the handle on the way inside. That also improves air circulation. Genisot said the district has a “hard rule” about maintaining 6 feet of distance and making sure no one spends more than 15 minutes close to anyone else.

“We believe that the processes and practices we have in place — and a little bit of luck, let’s be honest — have let us remain open,” he said, adding, “You can’t replace being in the building.”

The 235-student La Farge School District in western Wisconsin is using a hybrid model with its middle and high school students, in which two groups each come in two days per week. But high rates of COVID-19 in the community forced the district to twice send students home to learn virtually for two weeks. 

Even then, a group of 15 to 20 older students who needed the extra attention came in every day, said Amy Lund, a high school social studies teacher there.

“They know and we know that school is better when kids are here,” Lund said. “Where (students) had been last winter compared to where they were this fall wasn’t good. We want to alleviate that as much as possible while still maintaining safety protocols.”

Research: Virtual learning less effective 

Early studies from research organizations NWEA and McKinsey & Company suggest that students are falling behind, especially in math.

The NWEA study found that while student achievement in grades 3 through 8 was comparable to previous years in reading, progress in math dipped as much as 10 percentile points from levels  before the pandemic. 

Even those declines likely understate the problem, researchers noted, because “student groups especially vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic were more likely to be missing from our data.”

The McKinsey study found that, on average, students started school in the fall about three months behind expectations in math. Students of color were about three to five months behind, while white students were behind by about one to three months. In reading, students were only about a month and a half behind historical averages.

Related coverage: Wisconsin schools ‘whipsawing’ as COVID-19 hits rural districts

The pandemic could aggravate and expand already existing achievement gaps, experts say.

“We’ll find out what the impact is once things open back up and everybody starts taking the same assessments again,” Jones said.

Students can be vulnerable for a variety of reasons — lack of internet access, poverty, lack of motivation.

Elliott fears that allowing students to study virtually will make it even harder for educators to intervene and engage with at-risk children.

“I one hundred percent believe that that is a year where if a kid wants to slip through gaps, it’s a lot easier,” Elliott said. 

“We’re going to lose kids,” Gensiot agreed. “Every district is going to lose kids. Your high at-risk kids that are not in attendance are in serious jeopardy of not graduating.”

Even students without significant risk factors might take a hit. Matt Millar has good internet at his rural home in Blue Mounds, but when his three young children were forced to learn virtually from home when the Barneveld School District temporarily closed in November, the divorced dad had to manage them alone while trying to do his own work.

“It feels impossible at times,” he said.

The two younger Millar children, 7-year-old Sterling and 6-year-old Matthias, went back to in-person class on Dec. 14, and the district brought back older students, including 10-year-old Adara, right before winter break.

Millar said he is “super grateful” his children are back in school.

Pandemic’s full impact not yet clear 

Lund believes the pandemic learning gap will be apparent when life gets a little closer to “normal.”

“The kids just have not advanced at the same rates,” she said. “We’re all just going to have to work a little harder to get kids up to where they should be.”

To counter the blows the pandemic has landed on student progress, a bipartisan group of senators is advocating for expansion of national service programs including AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to add 300,000 members to work individually with at-risk children. 

Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Slavin is pushing President-elect Joe Biden for a similar effort, arguing that simply reopening schools “will not heal the damage students have sustained to their educational progress” — especially in high-poverty schools.

Fear of COVID-19 also has moved more children into homeschooling, and they may not come back, potentially jeopardizing the per-pupil funding that public school districts receive, said Mara Tieken, an associate professor of education at Bates College in Maine. 

Tieken, who focuses on rural schools, wants states to move away from education funding models that rely heavily on property taxes, which can force poorer districts to choose between cutting education budgets or raising taxes on property owners who can’t afford it. 

In a report released by the DPI last month, 343 school districts in Wisconsin — 82% — said they anticipated an increase in spending for the 2020-21 school year due to the pandemic. Nearly one-third are expecting an increase of  more than $100,000 in personnel costs.

Tieken advocates for more equity — giving districts whose students need more help more money.

“We’re going to have groups of students that need more support, that need more attention, that need more resources,” she said.

In Wisconsin, Gov, Tony Evers, a Democrat and former state Superintendent of Public Instruction, has pushed to tweak the state’s funding formula to give school districts with more poor students a greater share, but the Republican-controlled Legislature has  resisted the idea.

Amy Jo Hellenbrand said she has noticed her own children’s lack of academic progress in the way they speak and make grammar mistakes.

“They need to be back in school,” Hellenbrand said. “That was always my view.”

Reagan agreed, adding: “I can’t wait.”

This piece is part of a collaborative reporting project called Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID with the Institute for Nonprofit News and several member newsrooms. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

As semester ends in Wisconsin, COVID-19 fears shrink — while concerns of academic slide grow is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

This piece is part of a collaborative reporting project called Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID with the Institute for Nonprofit News and several member newsrooms.

For the first month of the school year, the Millar children of rural Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, stayed home.

“It wasn’t very much fun,” the oldest, 10-year-old Adara Millar, said of her virtual learning. “You’re looking at a computer screen for six and a half hours.”

To break up the screen time, their father Matt Millar took Adara and her two younger brothers Sterling and Matthias outside for “man stuff.”

He notes that description is tongue-in-cheek, but for the children it meant competitions around their yard: A foot race, a rope climb, target shooting, watermelon-seed spitting, chicken catching.

Millar and the children’s mother had the option to send them to class at the Barneveld School District, but Millar’s home has good internet, which can be unusual for rural Wisconsin. And Millar’s mother-in-law was available to supervise her grandchildren’s education. 

That made the decision to keep them safe at home — at least at first — easier. But on Thursday, the district announced that all students would attend virtually after a staff member or student tested positive for COVID-19, the second time the district has closed its school building because of a virus scare.

 Millar said the case came from one of his children’s classrooms — so the family will be on a “strict, personal quarantine” for the time being.

Related story: Wisconsin’s rural students face a digital divide as some return to screens instead of school

Hundreds of schools affected

Across Wisconsin — currently one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 hotspots — health officials have investigated nearly 500 COVID-19 outbreaks in schools. More than 15,000 children ages 17 and younger have been infected to date, state Department of Health Services data show. Numerous schools across Wisconsin have suspended in-person classes this fall, at least temporarily, because of cases among students and staff.

But in Wisconsin, no child has died of COVID-19, and early research elsewhere indicates that the disease does not spread easily within school buildings. 

Millar, a quantitative analyst, has gamed out various scenarios for officials on whether children should be in school. He believes a mixture of in-person and online instruction is safest and best. 

“It’s a tricky decision,” Millar acknowledged. 

Over in the village of Dane, 30 miles to the northeast, the Hellenbrands’ decision was made for them. The Lodi School District, where the four Hellenbrand children attend, decided to exclusively deliver instruction online at least through the first quarter, which concludes Nov. 6.

That’s really tough on the family, which has snail-like internet at their farm house. And just last week, Amy Jo Hellenbrand had to suspend her in-home day care business after she and her husband Andy both tested positive for COVID-19. She said the symptoms so far resemble a bad cold or flu, with “terrible headaches, body aches, fever, chills (and) nausea.”  

Wisconsin is behind the national average when it comes to high-speed internet coverage in rural parts of the state. About 43% of rural areas lack the service, compared to about 31% nationwide.

That’s one reason Wisconsin’s rural school districts overwhelmingly decided to return to face-to-face instruction last month, said Kim Kaukl, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance.

While big urban school districts like Milwaukee and Madison opted to start completely online, about 75% of the 100 rural districts that answered an optional survey from the state Department of Public Instruction planned to offer face-to-face instruction at least four days per week, a Wisconsin Watch analysis of DPI data shows. Most, if not all, give families the option of virtual schooling, however.

This is the second in a series of Wisconsin Watch stories examining how parents, students and educators in rural Wisconsin are managing this once-in-a-century crisis. For a look at how other states are faring, see Lesson plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID. 

Back to school — with masks

When the Millars put their children back in school on Oct. 1, it marked the first time they had been in a classroom since March. But most rural schoolchildren in Wisconsin are in school. Or at least they started that way. 

Brodhead High School suspended in-person classes for 10 days in early September after a group of students tested positive for COVID-19 from attending a party. As of Thursday, the school was operating at 50% capacity to stem the spread of the disease, which has hit at least 28 students and staff in the district and required 161 others to quarantine because of possible exposure to COVID-19.

To the frustration of some, the state is not releasing the names of the schools with outbreaks “at this time,” said Elizabeth Goodsitt, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

To fill the information gap, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin maintain a database of schools with positive tests based on news and public health reports. It lists nearly 800 positive tests in individual schools since the academic year began.

Goodsitt said when there is an outbreak, the state notifies anyone who was “exposed” — which means considered to be within close distance for more than 15 minutes. 

Nationally, schools returning to session do not seem to have triggered many mass outbreaks, as some had feared. The vast majority of young children do not get very sick from the virus, and evidence is growing that they are less likely to contract COVID-19 than adults, according to a group of researchers and public health officials who run the website Covid-Explained. Less clear is how likely children are to spread it.

Yet as children went back to school, Wisconsin did see a surge in infections among those ages 17 and under, DHS figures show. In response to such troubling numbers, Gov. Tony Evers last month extended the statewide mask mandate another 60 days to Nov. 21.

Amy Lund is a social studies teacher at the tiny La Farge High School in western Wisconsin. With a population of 65 students, the school decided initially to offer primarily in-person instruction. Ten students elected to attend classes virtually. 

But because of rising case numbers in Vernon County, the school district moved all of its 6th-12th grade education online for the first two weeks of October. On Monday, the district enacted a new model for the middle and high schools: in-person classes on Tuesdays and Fridays only, with “live, teacher-led” online classes the other three days.

Lund said schools have integrated mandatory face coverings and distancing into student life. She wears a purple and white gaiter with the school’s wildcat mascot printed on the front. Other students have matched masks to their outfits, incorporating them as accessories.

But as everyone knows by now, wearing even the most comfortable mask can get a little stuffy. To counter this, Lund says she takes occasional outdoor “mask breaks” with her students. The students are told to socially distance, but it gives everyone a fresh-air breather.

Beaming in — ‘Brady Bunch’ style

Schools have had to adjust to the shifting landscape as the pandemic has surged and retreated and now surged again. Districts face dueling political and popular sentiment that pressure them to reopen schools — or keep them closed. 

Steve Elliot, the president of the Albany School Board and a father of three students in the district, feared this school year would be marked by “whipsawing” — and he has been proven correct. The second week of school, the Albany district saw its first positive test and decided to go virtual for a week. Then staffing shortages forced suspension of classes for seven days.

He says teachers have had to figure out how to switch from in-person to online classes on the fly.

“I think we’re getting better every week,” Elliot said.

Unlike many rural districts, Albany, in south-central Wisconsin, brought back only its younger students, starting with online only schooling for students in grades 7 and up. On Oct. 5, freshmen returned to full in-person instruction, but students in grades 10-12 now go to school in shifts just two days a week.

According to the Department of Public Instruction survey, most, if not all, Wisconsin districts are offering virtual instruction for students and families who choose it. That means many teachers need to tend to both students sitting in their classes and those learning from home.

“Speaking as a parent and as a school board member, it creates a very high burden on our staff,” Elliot said.

In La Farge, Lund mixes the virtual students with her live classes. At the beginning of the period, she beams the virtual students up on the digital chalkboard, “Brady Bunch” style, and lets them say “hey” to their classmates before moving to that day’s lesson. She then shares her computer screen both to the board and with the students working from home on their laptops or tablets, so everyone can see her slides and hear her lecture.

An early attempt at breaking into smaller work groups was unsuccessful due to gaps in the technology, she said.

“We lived and learned and we don’t do groups like that anymore,” Lund said. “There have been some technological errors and mistakes and learning lessons that we’re working our way through.”

Everyone —  administrators, teachers, parents and students — knows that COVID-19 tests will return positive this school year, and they remain on standby to return to virtual instruction at any moment. Already, many are grappling with ensuring students who are exposed are quarantined and those who are sick are isolated, which also can disrupt learning.

In far northern Wisconsin, the Hurley School District had no cases for the first five weeks, but got its first in mid-October, leading to the quarantining of three students, but no shutdown — yet.

Attentions drifts as students stay home

When schools shuttered in March with very little notice, teachers could not keep all students focused, several educators said.

For some, that problem continues. Kevin Genisot, the superintendent of the Hurley School District, compares the distracted attitude of students learning online to students at the end of every school year.

“For some kids right now, it feels like the end of May,” he said. “We definitely struggle with that.”

Gensiot fears that the ability for students to opt into virtual schooling with no questions asked during the pandemic can lead to students making a choice that’s not in their best interest. That can lead to poor academic outcomes for some.

“We’ve lost control,” said Gensiot, who noted the district cannot overrule families’ health concerns. “And once (those students) are out of here for a year, we’re not going to get them back.”

He added: “There’s nothing that beats being in person for school. It’s much more than academics. It’s social behavior. It’s social norms. It’s learning to handle adversity. It’s the real life experiences that teach you to deal with that.”

Nobody needs to convince the Hellenbrands of that. Already balancing her day care business — now temporarily shuttered — and running a household, Amy Jo Hellenbrand must supervise her own children’s virtual education. That is especially true of her youngest, Louis, a 5-year-old kindergartener who works at the kitchen table.

Hellenbrand says when she was laid up in bed, the children had to do schoolwork on their own.

“The girls were really helpful with Louis on Thursday, because I wasn’t able to function at all,” she said.

Still coughing, Hellenbrand was back on her feet by Friday supervising Louis.

“He wants to be up and moving around and doesn’t understand why he can’t be in the combine with Dad,” said Hellenbrand, referring to her husband’s harvest of the corn crop.

The school district gave the family a hotspot, a hockey puck-shaped device that delivers Wi-Fi through a cell phone network. That has helped them balance education with their sluggish internet service, Hellenbrand said. But data caps slow the Hellenbrand’s internet at the end of a billing cycle to a crawl, like wading through waist-high snow.

She describes the monthly slowdowns as “horrible.”

Return to class — then back home

Back in Blue Mounds, Millar was relieved his children were in school again. He says his younger two — ages 5 and 7 — weren’t getting the benefits of virtual instruction. 

Millar is working with school administrators and has developed a model to help them make decisions during the pandemic.

“If I could make one plug, my plug would be to go with the cohort system,” he said, referring to the method in which schools break their students into two groups, and each attends school in the building for two days a week.

“I think you get 80% of the benefit of in-person (instruction) and 80% of the safety of virtual (instruction),” he said.

But that is not the plan for his children’s school. As of Friday, the Millar children and other Barneveld students are learning from home in what the district calls a “temporary” move. 

Millar says the short-term shutdown is smart, because it should allow the school to “neuter” any spread. And he says he can handle another few days of his children at home, as long as they go back to school soon.

“As parents, we’re used to the kids being home,” Millar said. “There’s in-service days, there’s parent-teacher conference days, there’s snow days, there’s kids-getting-sick days. It’s not like we’re incapable of dealing with kids being home from school.

“It just can’t be every single frickin’ day.”

This piece is part of a collaborative reporting project called Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID with the Institute for Nonprofit News and several member newsrooms. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin schools ‘whipsawing’ as COVID-19 hits rural districts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on government integrity and quality of life issues. Sign up for our newsletter for more stories and updates straight to your inbox.

This piece is part of a collaborative reporting project called Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID with the Institute for Nonprofit News and several member newsrooms.

The 40-acre farmette where the Hellenbrand family lives in south-central Wisconsin is an eclectic mix of people and animals.

Amy Jo Hellenbrand and her husband raise corn, soybeans, wheat, heifers, chickens, goats and bunnies on their land just outside the village of Dane, about 20 miles north of Madison.

“We do have a little petting zoo,” she said with a chuckle.

They also raise four children — ages 11, 9, 8 and 5 — and up to five more children attend her home day care at least for part of the day.

That made this spring particularly challenging, when the pandemic forced schools across the state to close. Mirroring the rest of Wisconsin, education for the Hellenbrand children relocated to their kitchen table, and Amy Jo and her husband Andy were in charge of making sure their children tended to their school work.

That task was made even more difficult by sluggish internet service that only further slows when the family nears monthly data limits. 

“It was wild, it was chaotic, stressful,” Hellenbrand said. “I broke out in hives because of the stress and anxiety. I was on steroids for a while.”

The 44-year-old mother thinks children need to be back in school — at least part-time.

But the Lodi School District, where the children attend, decided in July to provide schooling virtually through at least November. That’s going to make life tough for the Hellenbrands.

“I don’t want anybody to get sick and die,” Amy Jo Hellenbrand said. “I don’t want my children to get sick, I don’t want my friends’ children to get sick. But something needs to change.”

About 30 miles west of Madison near Blue Mounds, Matt Millar also struggled with the pandemic that sent his three children  — ages 10, 7 and 5 —  back home during the school day. Millar himself works from home as a data scientist, and he doesn’t have a lot of extra time to manage his childrens’ education.

“There were many days where I didn’t get one of the kids onto their class Zoom on time, or at all,” Millar said. “It wasn’t going to happen. There’s three of them.”

The 43-year-old dad and the children’s mother — who split custody — are now trying to decide what to do in the fall. The Barneveld School District, where the children attend, is planning to fully open to in-person instruction. 

Millar is considering sending his children to school for the first couple of days so they can meet their teachers and classmates, then pull them out. His own analysis suggests the school district’s in-person plan has a 20% chance of success.

Instead, Millar is considering “podding” — finding a few other families to pool together and hire a teacher to educate a smaller group of children, one-room schoolhouse style. But finding other interested families has been difficult. His ex-mother-in-law may homeschool them instead.

The chaos and uncertainty for working families like the Hellenbrands and Millars extend across the country. But the prospect of virtual schooling is particularly daunting for rural families in Wisconsin, a state where 43% of rural areas lack broadband coverage — far below the national average of 31%.

On Sept. 1, when many Wisconsin public schools will reopen, some will offer online-only instruction to avoid spreading COVID-19. 

State law in Wisconsin allows each school district to determine the operations of their buildings and their learning environment, State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor said in the state’s pandemic education plan. A final tally of which form of instruction each district chooses will not be available until early September.

How well these efforts will go in rural areas with slower internet or spotty cellphone access — or urban schools where students can’t afford high-speed hookups  — remains an open question. 

Not all rural areas equal

The Millars are fortunate to have excellent internet service at their rural home. That makes their choice to keep their children out of school easier.

But the Hellenbrands are more typical for Wisconsin families who live in the country. They rely on a sluggish DSL connection, essentially an ancient technology compared to what many urban areas have. 

The family also must live with data caps, another aggravation very familiar to rural areas. As they near limits towards the end of the month, the connection slows even further so they don’t exceed the cap.

Before the pandemic, the state estimated that about 15% — approximately 130,000 children — lacked broadband access, said Kurt Kiefer, an assistant state superintendent for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction who focuses on technology in schools.

Congress’ $2 trillion CARES Act stimulus in March infused U.S. schools with funds to move to all-virtual schooling in the spring. Wisconsin schools got more than $200 million of that. A top expenditure was buying a mountain of hotspots, hockey-puck shaped devices that beam wifi into the home using cellphone networks.

Kiefer said CARES Act money also funded low-cost internet subscriptions for parents. And districts moved internet routers to create public wifi zones in school and library parking lots. But, noted Kiefer, “That really isn’t a solution in November and December and January in Wisconsin.”

That school splurge on technology cut down the rural broadband have-nots significantly, Kiefer said. The state now estimates that 5% of students — about 45,000 — still lack access to broadband in part because hotspots don’t work in areas without cell coverage.

A survey of school districts released in June by the Wisconsin Educational Media & Technology Association reported that 64% said parts of their district lack broadband or cellular access, and 37% said they were unable to provide hotspots or wifi cards.

Steve Elliott, a father of three children and president of the Albany School Board, highlighted this problem when he testified before the state Assembly’s Education Committee in June.

In an interview, Elliott said that during the pandemic, members of his family sometimes had to work from his wife’s cheese shop, Landmark Creamery in Paoli, to get effective internet access. In his testimony, he asked lawmakers to continue to expand rural broadband.

“Our schools are dependent upon infrastructure that doesn’t exist,” Elliott said.

Spring instruction ‘pandemonium’

Amy Lund has seen plenty in her 20 years teaching social studies at La Farge High School. But no one was prepared for the spring shutdown — teaching in-person on Friday, then moving completely virtual by Monday.

“To be honest, we kind of floundered at first, because we didn’t really know what we were doing,” Lund said. “We went into it thinking it would only be two weeks.”

Teachers had to quickly learn, or expand upon, how to teach virtually, using digital platforms like Zoom and Google Classroom.

“It was pandemonium,” Kiefer said. “But I will say this: they (teachers) really worked incredibly hard and I say heroically to try to solve that within a matter of days.”

One strength Wisconsin schools have amongst a wave of problems is the universality of personal devices. Many already had supplied Chromebooks or  tablets for their students, at least the older ones. 

Before the previous school year, more than 80% of the state’s 421 school districts reported being able to deliver education to every student via his or her own laptop or tablet, so-called 1:1 technology. And school districts bought new devices in the spring to cover the students who didn’t have their own.

The amount of personal devices in public schools is “a huge advantage over even four years ago,” said Richard Halverson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor who researches education technology.

“One-to-one student computer initiatives would be in the newspaper four to five years ago, but now they’re pretty common,” he said.

For students without good-enough internet, or those too young to learn on screens, school districts made Herculean efforts to deliver paper homework packets, often by school bus. Many of those packets were delivered with meals. School districts delivered nearly 7 million meals — breakfast and lunch — in the spring after the pandemic started.

‘You plan, you plan … and then things change’

Most agree it’s better to have students in school than learning virtually.

Parents don’t have the skills teachers do. And many need to work from home. School districts know that if they provide education 100% virtually, working parents may ask older children to supervise the education of their younger siblings, stunting their own, Elliott said.

Some districts, including Albany, plan to start by bringing back students up to 6th grade for some in-person instruction at least the first two weeks while having older students attend school virtually.

A July survey of 70 rural school districts conducted by the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance found that nearly two-thirds planned to offer in-person education with social distancing measures in place. Another one-third of schools planned a hybrid model of virtual and in-building instruction. About 3% said they planned an every-other-day schedule, in which students are split into two groups and alternate days coming to school.

But the situation on the ground is constantly changing. The tiny school district of South Shore in Port Wing on the shore of Lake Superior is planning to welcome all of its 179 students to school because it has the space to socially distance. Its classrooms were built for 30 students, and the largest class in the district has 18, Superintendent Clendon Gustafson said. Its 2020 graduating class had seven students.

But county health officials are worried about spikes in COVID-19 cases after the Labor Day weekend, and South Shore might start the year virtually.

“You plan, you plan, you plan, and then things change,” said Kim Kaukl, the executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance.

While school districts monitor the local infection rate, the struggle to decide how much and how soon to open was always going to be a tough one.

Now schools are stepping into a political crossfire.

A recent Marquette University Law School Poll of Wisconsin residents found that 74% of Republicans were “comfortable” with kids returning to school, as were 45% of independents. Only 18% of Democrats said they were comfortable.

Republicans in the state Legislature sent at least one letter to school administrators urging them to provide in-person education this fall.

“The state is minimally obligated to provide students the opportunity for a sound, basic education, but we wish to ensure all students have access to the best education possible,” the letter reads. “To that end, we ask that you consider opening your doors this fall to provide every student with an in-class experience.”

Jon R. Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, responded in a recent letter of his own, saying a “business-as-usual” approach ignores serious risks to students, staff, families and communities.

“Remote learning does not replace in-person instruction, and parents want their children back in school,” he wrote. “They also know that the health and well-being of their children is of paramount concern to parents — they want their children safe.” 

According to the Marquette poll, parents of school-aged children are “comfortable” with in-person schooling, by a margin of 53% to 45%. But the general population is even more split, with just 45% of people saying they are comfortable and 48% saying they are not.

“This is a much different conversation with the community now than it was in March,” said Kevin Genisot, superintendent of the Hurley School District. “It’s turned vastly more political than ever, and you have strong outliers on both sides of this issue. No matter the decision we make, people are upset.”

‘Not just a plan A and plan B’

Despite the pressure from all sides, many Wisconsin school districts will be basing their decisions, now and in the future, on the prevalence of the virus. Even those districts planning to come back fully to in-person instruction say they must prepare for a spike and a return to virtual teaching. 

“If our numbers go up, we’re going to go virtual,” Genisot said. “If our numbers stabilize or go down, we’re going to be in the building.”

Some parents will keep their children home no matter what and will need instruction. Those without internet access will need paper packets delivered to them.

“We don’t just have a plan A and a plan B,” said Lund, the La Farge teacher who sits on her school district’s pandemic planning committee. “We’ve got a plan A through double D for everything that could possibly happen — hopefully.”

The disaster of the pandemic and teachers’ scramble to adapt may turn out better than expected, Halverson said. 

“I don’t want to say a catastrophe is a blessing, but there are going to be so many teachers who are now going to become aware of the power of digital tools to extend their teaching,” he said. “But it’s going to be a hard fall. That’s just a small benefit from a really tough situation.”

In the meantime, students, parents, teachers and administrators must muddle through. 

Ten-year-old Adara, Matt Millar’s oldest, said she sometimes struggles to focus while staring at her iPad for school. She and her brothers break up the screen time with recesses on their tree swing, trampoline and rock-climbing wall — some of the perks of country living. 

They miss going to school, seeing their teachers and goofing around with their friends. But Adara worries about bringing COVID-19 home to her family, especially her grandparents. 

Virtual schooling can be tough, Adara said, but it has taught her at least one big lesson.

“You don’t really know how lucky you are to have a normal life,” she said, “until you can’t have a normal life.”

This piece is part of a collaborative reporting project called Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID with the Institute for Nonprofit News and several member newsrooms. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin’s rural students face a digital divide as some return to screens instead of school is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was produced in partnership with The Badger Project — a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

The Newcomer household near Monroe is fairly typical for rural Wisconsin. It is surrounded by cornfields. The nearest neighbor is a quarter-mile down the road. And the internet is terrible.

Now the coronavirus shutdown has put serious stress on the family. The teenagers struggle with the drip of internet service to do their homework while school is closed.

Their mother, Traci Newcomer, 41, teaches nursing at the nearby Blackhawk Technical College campus in Janesville, and classes have now moved online. Because their internet service is so poor, she cannot teleconference at home. Newcomer must drive 10 minutes to the parking lot of the college’s Monroe Campus to use the Wi-Fi there.

“Today I put the computer on my passenger side seat and turned sideways and conducted my class that way,” she said, prompting chuckles from her students before she got down to business.

Back at home, Newcomer and her two children have to alternate who can connect to the Wi-Fi. And that is when they are getting any reception at all.

“Right now, three of us are very dependent on the internet and can’t get accomplished what we want to accomplish in a big chunk of our day,” she said.

School and work are just a couple of the areas in which reliable, fast internet is needed as Wisconsin hunkers down to keep the coronavirus pandemic at bay.  Increasingly, health care professionals see patients online to contain the spread of the virus. And everyone is hungry for the latest news as this worldwide emergency continues.

The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare many of the ways in which poor internet service can make rural residents less productive and more isolated than their urban counterparts.

Already, Wisconsin lags behind the national average in broadband coverage. An estimated 43% of Wisconsin’s rural residents lack access to high-speed internet, compared to about 31% of rural residents nationwide, according to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin.

“We have such a long ways to go,” said state Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat who has tried unsuccessfully to increase the state’s investment in broadband. “And now this is going to be one of the things that comes out of this (crisis) when we’re all done: ‘I guess we shouldn’t have dragged our feet for so long, and now we’d better get serious about it.’ ”

Many people in urban areas likely take for granted how much they use fast internet. Video chatting. Online banking. Amazon Prime.

Now imagine life if your internet trudged along and frequently conked out. That is what rural businesses and the communities where they operate often face in Wisconsin. And during the coronavirus pandemic, many of those country-living people, children and adults alike, now have to conduct their daily lives from home.

Smith lives about five minutes outside of Eau Claire in the town of Brunswick, where he and his wife Sue live on a farm with horses, chickens, dogs, cats and a llama. Smith said his internet speeds are so bad he can hardly stream anything, and websites take a long time to load.

“This is the new public utility,” Smith said, “and everyone has to have it.”

State investment low 

Through programs like the FCC’s Connect America Fund, the federal government has granted about $1 billion since 2015 to help service providers build and maintain voice and internet infrastructure in Wisconsin. 

Some of that service is not yet online; providers have up to six years to offer broadband. And the program only requires an outdated speed of 10 megabits per second for downloading.

Between 2013 and 2019, the state of Wisconsin provided $20 million in grants to private and public entities and cooperatives to provide high-speed internet in unserved and underserved areas. In 2020, funding greatly expanded to $24 million in broadband expansion grants.

But critics say even the new budgeted amounts are rain drops in an empty pool compared to what is needed to achieve significant coverage across the state. And the state grant rules do not set speed requirements in a rapidly accelerating digital landscape.

The speed of the federal definition of broadband is “pretty meager,” said Anita T. Gallucci, a Madison-based attorney who advises municipalities on telecommunications issues. The needed speed, not to mention what will be required in the future, is “way beyond that,” she added.

As technology and stream quality advances, internet speeds have to keep up. For example, for many new TVs with a 4K stream, Netflix requires at least an 18 mbps download speed and at least 50 mbps for multiple users, according to Consumer Reports.

Telecommunications companies have relatively little problem providing broadband to urban areas, because cities and towns are densely populated. For-profit businesses happily make the initial, and often heavy, infrastructure investment, because they have a large customer base.

But sparsely populated areas are not enticing for private companies. The cost of burying miles of fiber optic cables —  one of the fastest and most reliable ways to deliver the internet — can be prohibitive. Rural residents instead might need to rely on less dependable forms of internet delivery by satellite or wireless. And those can be affected by factors including weather, trees and topography.

Other state governments have stepped in more forcefully. About 16% of rural residents in Minnesota lack access to high-speed internet — about one-third as many as in Wisconsin. That is in large part because Wisconsin’s western neighbor has invested heavily in rural broadband.

From 2014 to 2019, Minnesota spent about $108 million to expand high-speed internet, according to Eric Lightner, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. That is more than five times what Wisconsin spent during a comparable period.

The politics of providing internet 

Kathleen Vinehout, a former state senator and Democrat who lives in the ruggedly beautiful but reception-resistant Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin, said she sometimes drives to the parking lot of the American Legion hall in Alma to get Wi-Fi.

She echoed many from her party in criticizing Republicans, who controlled state government from 2011 through 2018, for not funding rural broadband.

“The money they were putting in was only a token,” Vinehout said. “It was only a soundbite. It had nothing to do with the amount of money that needed to be invested to make a difference in people’s lives in this state.”

In 2011, the administration of then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, actually returned $23 million in federal stimulus money intended for broadband expansion to schools, libraries and government agencies. Administration officials said the grant requirements were too stringent. Walker declined to comment through a spokesman.

Last year, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, proposed adding nearly $75 million to the Broadband Expansion Grant Program in his 2019-20 budget. The powerful Joint Committee on Finance, which writes the budget and is controlled by Republicans who have majorities in the Legislature, scaled that back to $44 million.

“There’s never enough money to do what you need to do,” said state Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, a joint finance vice chairman who has worked on the rural broadband issue.

Olsen said he has good internet coverage at his home in Ripon, but his cabin in Wautoma uses less reliable satellite internet, at slower speeds.

“It’s one of those things where we’re not going to get the problem solved as fast as everybody would like, but at least we’re working towards that outcome,” Olsen said.

Gail Huycke is a community development specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Extension. Huycke, who focuses on broadband access, lives in Phillips in the northern part of the state. Her internet runs slowly, about 8 to 10 megabits per second.

Minnesota’s rural broadband coverage is better than Wisconsin’s, Huycke agreed, but noted that the state also has higher sales and income taxes.

“I think that’s a trade that you have to make,” she said.

In fact, while Wisconsin has fallen behind in areas like rural broadband, Republicans are quick to boast that the tax burden has fallen to its lowest level in at least 50 years.

The finance committee rejected Evers’ attempt to raise the minimum speeds required for providers to receive state grants for providing internet. And the committee eliminated the governor’s proposed statewide goal of achieving internet speeds that match or surpass the federal definition of broadband by 2025.

In the current legislative session, Smith introduced several bills to improve service, including investing more in broadband expansion grants. But the Republican majority ignored the Democrat’s bills and they went nowhere.

The effort to improve access did get a boost, however. Wisconsin will end a tax on telephone companies installing internet infrastructure. That is thanks to a bill introduced by state Rep. Romaine Quinn, R-Barron, that Evers signed into law on March 3. Companies that began as internet companies do not have to pay the tax.

“This bill is another important tool for our local providers,” Quinn said in a press release. “In combination with historic investments in Wisconsin’s Broadband Expansion Grant program, Wisconsin is truly creating an innovative environment for making sure that everyone in our state has the internet service they need.”

Gallucci said if the move helps rural broadband expansion, that is great, but she called the bill “small potatoes.”

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators including Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin introduced a $2 billion bill to compensate small broadband providers for offering free or discounted rates to low-income families during the pandemic.

Government steps in

If private companies will not provide the service, municipalities can build their own systems. But that can be a heavier lift than some communities want to handle.

The city of Madison released a plan in 2018 to build a citywide, high-speed fiber internet network but shelved it when they learned it could cost more than $173 million.

Reedsburg’s utility, owned by the city but operated independently, built and maintains its own fiber network. Like any other telecommunications company, the utility must provide customer support and, essentially, cable guys. The city delivers rapid 1,000 mbps download and upload speeds for between $45 and $50 a month.

“It’s a lot of work,” said Brett Schuppner, the general manager of the Reedsburg Utility Commission. “I just don’t see other utilities willing to take that on, unless their elected officials are going to push it.”

In 22 years of providing internet service, the Reedsburg utility has made enough money to pay its bills and turn enough of a profit to invest in and grow its system, Schuppner said.

“We’re not-for-profit,” he said, “but we’re also not-to-lose-money too.”

Sun Prairie’s utility company built its own fiber network in the late 1990s to connect the schools and city buildings as well as some businesses, later extending to residences. The city sold it in 2017 to TDS for about $2.9 million, allowing Sun Prairie to turn a small profit on its investment.

From 2000 to 2015, the city of Sun Prairie and the Sun Prairie School District each saved an estimated $2 million over the cost of private service, which was slower, said Rick Wicklund, the city’s utility manager.

The city of Superior announced in February that it is also considering building its own broadband infrastructure, but one on which private companies would be able to provide the service and compete against each other.

Bringing Wisconsin up to par

There are ways Wisconsin could catch up. Wisconsin could invest more heavily where private companies are reluctant to go.

Smith also argues for a speed requirement when doling out state grants. Minnesota requires grant recipients to deliver speeds of at least the federal minimum, with a goal of reaching 100 megabits per second for downloading and 20 megabits per second for uploading by 2026.

While Wisconsin does not have a speed requirement in awarding grants for private companies to build broadband, speed is a factor when the Public Service Commission considers which proposals will receive state money, said Matthew Sweeney, a spokesman for the commission.

Olsen said a cheaper alternative to buried fiber optic cable would be to deliver internet by white space, the extra capacity in TV broadcast bands. Such service is much slower than fiber networks.

On March 19, 2019, the FCC adopted a series of changes to make it easier to use TV white space to provide internet service in rural areas.

Co-op retools to provide service 

Cooperative organizations also have stepped up in rural areas to lay fiber and provide internet service where private companies have not.

Cochrane Co-op Telephone in Buffalo County along the Mississippi River started as a telephone company for farmers in 1905. It now provides the communities of Cochrane, Buffalo City and Alma with high-speed internet delivered through fiber optic cable. The co-op offers speeds as low as 25 megabits per second for $50 per month, and as high as 1,000 mbps, the same as Reedsburg, for $200 per month.

Schuppner, the Reedsburg utility chief, said government should focus its support on providing high-speed systems. “If public funds are being used,” he said, “it should be to provide a service that’s going to meet the needs for a long time.” 

UW-Extension’s Huycke agreed, citing a quote from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who said his father told him to skate where the puck is going, not where it has been. 

“We need to think about broadband,” Huycke said, “like Wayne Gretzky.”

Peter Cameron is managing editor of (The Badger Project), a nonpartisan journalism nonprofit based in Madison. He reported this story under the direction of Wisconsin Watch Managing Editor Dee J. Hall. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

‘Everyone has to have it’: Broadband gap leaves rural Wisconsin behind during coronavirus crisis is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.