Residents Lose Battle to Join Elmbrook

About 200 residents in the City and Town of Brookfield on Tuesday lost a renewed battle to detach from the Waukesha School District and join the Elmbrook district.

The School District Boundary Appeal Board held separate hearings in Madison for the two detachment petitions.

Panel members voted 3-0 against the detachment for 129 properties in the Black Forest, Summit Lawn and southern part of the Shire subdivisions. They voted 2-1 against detachment for 71 properties in Emerald Ridge, said Keith Brightman, Elmbrook's assistant superintendent for finance and operations.

The panel cited economics and the harm to the Waukesha School District, which could lose about $61 million in equalized property tax base if the 200 properties moved from one school district to the other. The homesites average about $300,000 in equalized value.  

Brightman said the Waukesha School District faced a $14 million deficit for the 2011-12 school year, a situation noted by the panel.

Some of the residents involved have fought this battle for more than a decade, with this being their third appeal. 

Brookfield resident Peter Crow said the decision was frustrating for families who are connected to Brookfield and Elmbrook communities, not Waukesha ones, including park and recreation programs.

"I am very disappointed," Crow said. "I don't have the answers, but our neighborhood is being punished for no other reason than tax revenue and greed."

He and other parents have said they live as close as across the street from Wisconsin Hills Middle School but under the current boundaries, are required to drive much further to schools in the Waukesha School District.

"I can't imagine the reasoning as to why I have to drive 25 minutes away from home to Waukesha North (High School), across freeways and some of the state's most dangerous intersections, when Brookfield Central is five minutes away and you could safely bike there," Crow said.

"Furthermore, I do believe Elmbrook offers a superior education with less distraction for my kids," Crow added. "Nobody in the neighborhood wants to sound elitist but there is a known and clear bad element found in the Waukesha school system that honestly isn't nearly as prevalent in Brookfield."

Crow said Brookfield families in the affected neighborhoods are choosing to send their children to private and parochial schools rather than Waukesha public schools, and some try to open enroll into Elmbrook with mixed success.

"If we are not choiced in to the Elmbrook school system for high school, my wife and I will be forced to move," said Crow, whose children attend St. John Vianney School in Brookfield, which serves pre-kindergarten to 8th grade students.

Brookfield resident Len Smeltzer, who attended the hearing in Madison, said being able to attend neighborhood schools cuts driving time and expense and should play a larger role in decisions.

He said when his daughter was in band at the Waukesha schools, it took two hours a day to drive back and forth for drop-offs and pickups including after-school music practice.

"Our community children will now be held hostage for another two years until the next appeal," Smeltzer said.

"In the meantime each family with two children involved in anything outside of a bus ride back and forth to school will pay more than $2,000 a year in fuel costs above and beyond what it would cost to attend schools in their own community, to save Waukesha City and Town taxpayers a few dollars each a year," he added.

The Elmbrook School Board in February voted in support of accepting the . The same night the Waukesha School Board voted against the petitions.

Because the two communities did not agree, the residents appealed to the state boundary panel. 

At Tuesday's panel hearing, Waukesha School District officials criticized Elmbrook for backing the petitions, said Brightman, Elmbrook's assistant superintendent for finances. 

Waukesha officials also argued that Elmbrook could accept the students from those properties, if the district would loosen its open enrollment policies and take more students, Brightman said.

Elmbrook School Board member Meg Wartman said after the meeting that Elmbrook could only do that if it greatly expanded the number of open enrollment students it accepts from every community, because the district could not limit an open enrollment expansion to just city and town residents.

Petition organizers said they obtained detachment petition signatures from about 85 percent of the 71 properties in Emerald Ridge and about 70 percent of the 129 properties in the other three subdivisions. They said they didn't try for 100 percent endorsement because the state detachment rules required only 50 percent of signatures be obtained.

Crow said he understands why some people would say families shouldn't have bought homes that are part of the Waukesha School District if they didn't want to send their children there.

He said some homebuyers without children didn't realize which district was connected to their home. 

"For my wife and me, we were told back in 2004 when we bought our lot that it was very easy to be choiced into Elmbrook and eventually we would be annexed into the city," Crow said.

Elmbrook Superintendent Matt Gibson said in February that Waukesha school officials had approached Elmbrook about the possibility of negotiating a voluntary boundary agreement that would settle ongoing disputes about neighborhoods near the districts' borders.