School Board Begins Rollout of Study on Post-Employment Benefits

Thank you to all who voted this week. I am honored to have been elected to the Whitefish Bay school board and will start on April 25, 2012. Last night at the school board meeting, I had a front-row seat in the audience. It was a good vantage point for starting to blog occasionally on school board matters.

The first order of business (and the primary issue before the board) came from the Finance Committee, which presented the preliminaries on a study of post-retirement benefits for Whitefish Bay school district personnel. Many will recall that it was the unfunded liability for post-retirement benefits that led the district several years ago to the investment world. In any event, last night we heard that an unfunded liability for post-retirement benefits remains—indeed, that it grows yearly. Last year, for instance, the district paid about $1.5 million towards the yearly liability, but the cost was around $3.1 million. These are sobering numbers. No action was taken, but the bottom line shared at the meeting is that something needs to be done to reduce the increasing unfunded liability from post-employment benefits, which is posted in slides on the school district website.

During the meeting, the school board also publicly thanked Gerry Steele for her service to the school board and the Whitefish Bay community.

The substance of the meeting ended with a thoughtful suggestion by community member Mike Braun during the public forum section, based on his review of 2010/2011 Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination (WKCE) data; he asked that the school board take “a closer look at academic proficiency in Whitefish Bay.”

(Anne Berleman Kearney was elected to the Whitefish Bay School Board on April 3, and will be sworn in on April 25. The opinions expressed in this column do not represent the official position of the Whitefish Bay School Board.)