School board and city council collaborate in joint meeting

By Sarah Nigbor

RIVER FALLS – In a display of collaboration and transparency, the River Falls School Board and River Falls City Council met together Aug. 10, sharing updates about enrollment projections, housing needs and more.

Superintendent Jamie Benson began the meeting with information on the school district’s strategic plan, which was approved by the board in June. The plan was formed from a compilation of information gathered from three public listening sessions, a community survey, a staff survey and a student survey, Benson said.

This month the district will be interviewing three firms to perform demographer du ties to determine enrollment projections.

“The last time we did an enrollment study, it’s been several years frankly, and we need to kind of recalibrate and see where we’re at with our facility needs based on capacity. What might the enrollment trend look like,” Benson said.

Recent years have seen a modest enrollment increase in the River Falls School District. But Covid caused the district, like many, to see a decrease in enrollment. Benson said the district lost about 50 students during COVID, but gained 85. “Prior to Covid, we were on a trend of growing by about 70 kids each and every year,” Benson said.

The strategic plan has identified five facility needs stemming from the surveys and listening sessions: All would involve asking for community support by way of a referendum, Benson said. They include: Replacing the “extremely antiquated, outdated, aging” bus garage. “If you had children inside the walls of a school that was the same quality as our transportation center, there would be a mutiny. You wouldn’t put up with it,” Benson said.

Taking artificial turf behind RFHS and turning it into an athletic stadium that would involve adding bleachers, a press box, a concession stand, and restrooms.

Adding a middle school gymnasium largely due to community needs.

Adding a school forest education facility Adding a field house attached to RFHS This doesn’t include ongoing general maintenance needs, such as parking lots, roofs, etc.

“All of these are very much concepts; there are no designs,” Benson emphasized. “We haven’t really been discussing them publicly other than I mentioned we put those five things in the community survey.” As for the demographer study for enrollment projects, that will take a few months. It will address questions such as: Which parts of our community are going to grow the most?

Which of the elementaries (currently four) are going to see the most growth?

Is the district going to someday have to redistrict the elementary boundary attendance areas?

“That will be a fun if we get into that, it’ll be exciting,” Benson said sarcastically. “A lot of parents will be excited to know if and when we ever have to change attendance boundaries. It can be rather controversial, so that was sarcastic humor.”

The district has to be careful when adding classrooms for a “population bubble,” because a school could lose its community feel where the principal knows every child by name, he added. School board member Alan Tuchtenhagen said Hudson is facing that type of issue. After building River Crest Elementary, even though multiple housing units have gone up in the area, elementary enrollment is now below its target, so they may be looking at combining buildings.

School finances

“The legislature in the last biennial budget, which runs from 2021-2023, did not provide a normal round of funding and said you can backfill your school budgets with all of this federal Covid relief money,” Benson said. “This was not the intent of the federal money.”

The intent, Benson explained, was to help address learning loss, to hire additional teachers, to lower class sizes, to have remedial math and reading teachers, to buy hotspots and technology, to address needs that were the result of Covid, but instead the state legislature said no, the feds are giving you all kinds of flexibility, you can use that money any way you want. Instead of addressing learning loss, districts have had to use the money for their regular budgets.

“The problem is this cliff that gets created if we’re using one-time federal money that is not recurring, we can use that but when it’s gone, it’s gone,” Benson said. “So we’ve lost our base funding which had traditionally been about $200 per pupil (times 3,500 kids), and this next year would have been another $200 (times 3,500 kids), which gets you to a $1.4 million cliff. And so if the state picks up with their normal round of funding again, there will be a gap.”

Many districts have had to use the money toward recurring expenses, like modest pay increases for staff in order to remain competitive. Districts can’t give them a raise one year and a pay cut the next, Benson said.

The state has a surplus of $3.8 billion, which is actually $2.8 billion above the projected net balance at the time that the legislature decided not to provide any funding, Benson added.

“We need to continue to advocate that they (the legislature) do something with the money,” he said. “We understand the state has other needs, but it’s going to cause a serious problem here locally.”

If funding isn’t properly addressed, what could happen next? It’s not a pretty picture: Possibly budget cuts leading to reduced pro- grams, staff and services; increased class sizes as a result of the need to reduce staffing, eliminating course offerings, deferred maintenance or a referendum for operational expenses.

City growth

The City of River Falls saw 4% net new construction growth in 2021, which is in the top quarter of the state, according to City Administrator Scot Simpson.

A citizen survey conducted by the city every two years repeatedly lists natural environment, utilities, parks and recreation, safety and education as top priorities for residents.

“It’s not a magic recipe, but hard to repeat and why people want to live here,” Simpson said.

A 2018 housing study showed a severe shortage of housing, more so than anyone thought, he added. To meet basic demand for housing, the city would have to build 1,400 units between 2018-2022, to get the city to a point where it doesn’t have 0 or 1% vacancy and severe lack of movement.

“People are afraid to sell their house because they don’t know where else they would go,” Simpson said. “Seniors are staying in 4-to-5 bedroom homes longer than they’d usually do because of lack of senior or active adult housing.”

Since 2018, the city has permitted 780 housing units.

“There seems to be a lot of discussion in the community about ‘oh, everything’s rental on all these apartment buildings and we need to get the back-to-basics of single-family housing.’ I think it’s interesting to note 320 of those units were for-sale housing, so what you would consider as kind of traditional single- family or duplex,” Simpson said.

Of the 780 permitted, 330 were rental units and 130 were senior housing units.

Simpson said a lot of distortion is occurring in the market because people aren’t moving from one type of housing to another in different stages of their lives. “Most of the housing being done is market rate, meaning whatever they can get for it, that’s what they rent it or sell it for,” he said.

As for growth, the city is generally growing in all four directions, from the inside out, although somewhat pulled to the north along the freeway. The south will be more challenging given topography and geography, Simpson explained.

“Even if we approved everything in the hopper proposed for the next couple of years, we wouldn’t meet the demand/equilibrium,” he said. “It certainly can be jarring to see 5 acres turn into 100 units or 2 acres turn into 60 units; that seems like a lot in the bigger picture, but you are in a community that has nearly 6,000 housing units, so 60 units in a big building statistically is still not that significant of an increase in your housing stock.” Simpson also spoke to the collaboration between the city and school district on many projects. For example, the Renaissance Charter Academy, which his currently housed at Hagestad Hall (262 W. Cascade Ave.) will be moving into the old River Falls police station on Elm Street in January. The city and district also have partner- ships in the form of school resource officers and have worked together on installing pedestrian crosswalks for students, school forest resources and facility use sharing.