School Board Discusses Next Steps After Referendum Defeat

After voters rejected a $135.6 million school facilities referendum, members of the Whitefish Bay School Board met on Sunday morning, April 26, working session to discuss what comes next. The 2-plus hour session landed on one consistent theme: the need to gather more input from the community before bringing another question to the ballot.

Board President Kristin Bencik-Boudreau, along with members Dan Tyk, Pamela Woodard, W. Brett Christiansen, Nate Christenson, and Sandy Saltzstein, weighed how to structure that input, what timing would allow for a meaningful process, and which projects from the failed referendum should remain priorities going forward.

Listening to the community

A through-line of the meeting was a stated commitment to hear directly from residents before assembling another referendum package. Board members discussed surveys, focus groups, and listening sessions as complementary tools.

Pamela Woodard emphasized that the board needs to take the April 7 result seriously and engage with the reasons voters said no.

“We were told by different people — and the survey may or may not bear this out — that the ask was too high, and just too much,” Woodard said. She recounted comments from previous listening sessions and tours where residents expressed confusion about the size and scope of the ask. “Some people just walked up and said ‘I don’t know, do they need all of this?’” she said.

Board members discussed what form community input should take.

Brett Christiansen stated the next survey should focus on narratives rather than line-item projects. “I think if we survey based on projects, we will end up similar to a spot where we are where we construct a narrative out of the projects that the community gives us, and then people go, ‘Well wait a minute, that’s not what I meant when I filled out this piece of data in the survey,’” Christiansen said. He suggested asking residents whether they preferred a single comprehensive ask or smaller, repeated requests over time.

Bencik-Boudreau countered that voters need concrete projects and dollar figures to react to. “We’re asking them to spend their money, and I think you have to be more concrete than that,” she said. “We have to come up at the end of this with a specific number if we’re going to referendum. So we have to have specific projects associated with that specific number.”

Sandy Saltzstein raised a sequencing concern in response to Bencik-Boudreau, who had noted that the district conducted listening sessions during the previous campaign. Saltzstein pointed out that the previous round of focus groups had been held too early in the process to inform decisions about specific projects or locations.

“The focus groups, while we did do them previously, they were a little bit earlier in the process, so they weren’t really directed at project ideas or even locations or siting or any of that in the feedback that we were getting,” Saltzstein said. “It was very much informing some of the prioritization pieces and looking for what our larger projects might be.”

Nate Christenson raised concerns about the compressed timeline involved in commissioning another formal survey. The board would need to be ready to send a survey within roughly three weeks, with results not arriving until early August.

“My biggest issue with the survey is that it feels time-crunched to me, because I feel like that’s an important data point for all the other work that we’re talking about doing,” Christenson said.

Tyk reflected on what the previous survey had told the board, and what the board chose to do with that information.

“We didn’t take the number that the survey gave us,” Tyk said. “And yes, economic times changed, and I’m not even convinced that 125 million would have (passed), but I think if we’re going to do a survey we cannot sway from what the community tells us in that survey this time, because we will erode trust.”

Tyk’s comments were likely in reference to the referendum question going above the $125 million threshold where a survey indicated a majority of community support.

At the January 22 meeting that set the referendum amount, Tyk and Woodward expressed reservations about the size of the ask that went above the majority on the survey. Tyk said: "I don't want this to pass at 50.1% and have 49.9%. I want this to be something that brings the village together behind the schools. And that number from the survey we have is at the time was known to be that $125 (million)."

Tyk compared the board’s decision-making to a household weighing what it can afford against what its members might want.

“The same way you would evaluate a project at your home — you’re like, ‘I would love to put an addition on and add a bathroom,’ but the bank will only give me or I only have this,” Tyk said. “Yes, my family’s telling me they want a swimming pool outside, but I don’t have the money to do it. And that’s what we did. We said, ‘community’s telling us, I have this much money potentially for a project.’ We said we have this much money, and those are important — those are needs. They’re things we need to do, but we didn’t have the support to spend the money or the money to do it. We stretched beyond. I voted for it and I supported it. We stretched beyond, and I think we have to be very cautious about doing that again this time. That’s my message.”

Tyk also raised a related question — whether voters might prefer a series of smaller asks over a single comprehensive package, even if that approach costs more over time.

“I had a conversation about this, and I equated it to people who subscribe to Netflix or Hulu,” Tyk said. “Do you want to subscribe for the year — it’s cheaper in the long run — or do you want to go month to month and know that in the end it’s going to be more expensive, but it’s more palatable to do it in those little snippets? The person unequivocally looked at me and said, ‘I do everything month to month because I don’t like the commitment.’ That got me churning. We’re planning for 20 years. We’re going to try to save the money, but do we need to do it in little bites, and does that make it more palatable — although knowing and transparently trying to explain, in the long run it’s going to be far more expensive, especially when you’re not talking $20 a month? We’re talking much bigger numbers.”

Board members generally agreed that a new or substantially renovated middle school should remain the top priority, though the location or scope may be reconsidered in light of sticker shock to the cost and opposition to the proposed location at Armory Park. They emphasized that infrastructure work is still needed across the district regardless of whether a new middle school is built, including boilers nearing the end of their service life, fire alarm and sprinkler systems required for code compliance, and HVAC needs were all cited as work that cannot be deferred indefinitely.

Next steps

Several board members raised concerns about the feasibility of placing a new question on the ballot for November 2026, given the time needed for surveys, focus groups or listening sessions.

Brett Christiansen offered a counterpoint to the case for delay, drawing on his experience working with the Yes for Whitefish Bay Schools advocacy group during the previous campaign.

“With better focus on not just providing a dump of information, but providing the information that people need so that they can feel confident that in November, that voting yes is the right choice, I think we could pass something in November very similar to what we have with a slightly reduced budget,” he said.

Nate Christenson pushed back on that approach, saying the board had been discussing a longer timeline to address why the referendum failed.

“That's not what we've been talking about,” Christenson said. “I don't disagree with you, but what we've been talking about is something different… I just think it's going to be a big push for coming up with a question by the end of August.”

The board’s facilities advisory sub-committee is scheduled to meet Thursday, May 7.

Information the board indicated it wants before the next major decision includes updated pricing on a renovation-in-place option for the middle school, analysis of phased or split renovation approaches and the cost those carry, sample survey instruments to review before committing to another community survey, and clarification of which projects are dictated by code requirements.

Board members did not formally decide whether to target a November 2026 or April 2027 referendum.