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Training Session for Petition Volunteers and Steering Committee

Saturday, November 8th, 2008, 2:00 PM, Caledonia Eastside Community Center

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For more information or to volunteer, contact: coordinator@caledoniaschooldist.org

CALEDONIA — A former Racine Unified School Board member is organizing people to get started on the process of seceding from Unified.

Brian Dey, whose school board term ended in April, began discussing the next step with village officials Monday night, immediately after the presentation on the financial feasibility of Caledonia seceding and forming its own school district.

“It’s going to be a tough sell, but I think it’s a lot more palatable than we all expected,” Dey said. “We now have the numbers, we now know that it is a possibility. It really is a very good possibility that this will move forward, and relatively quickly.”

Dey said he is getting citizens together to form a steering committee, which would likely become a political action committee. Dey began seeking people interested in joining a committee through online postings Tuesday, and he said he might set up a Web site in the next week.

For the first step of seceding, either a petition signed by about 20,000 people needs to be filed with the district, or the Racine Unified School Board adopts a resolution to consider the creation of a new district.

“The big key here is to try to get Racine Unified School Board to sit down and talk with us,” Dey said.

Tony Baumgardt, school board president, said although the board has not set any concrete plans to address the possibility of secession, board members are interested in understanding how the process would work.

“There’s a lot of questions that we have now that the report’s out,” Baumgardt said. “We need to engage, but we’re not sure how.”

He said board members are open to a conversation about Caledonia setting up its own district. Right now, he said, members need to understand how this issue fits into the board’s priorities.

The question being faced by Caledonia’s board members is what role they could play in the process, if any. The board commissioned the $30,000 financial feasability study, and the Community Development Authority had taken the lead in examining the possibility of secession. During Monday’s presentation, however, it was explained that municipal government has no official role in the process of seceding.

Village President Ron Coutts said a joint meeting of the Village Board and CDA will be held sometime during the week of July 7 to discuss the study, and whether there would be legal issues if board members got involved.

“What we’re hearing is that the citizens need to go forward to get the signatures,” Coutts said. “It seems like the process is, basically you’re at the mercy of the school board.”

Dey said he would welcome trustees remaining involved as the process moves forward.“It’s kind of been a whirlwind,” Dey said. “This is all going to be new territory for us.”

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Former school board member spearheads call for secession

BY BRIDGET THORESON

Journal Times

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 3:41 PM CDT