The Monday evening joint meeting of school and village boards included two guests from MATC.
Among the tidbits from those two presentations are these:
TIF District - If Germantown were to stay in the MATC district, it would actually receive a better break on its TIF districts due to the higher MATC tax rate being paid. Really?
Secession - If Germantown is successful in its attempt to secede from the MATC district, MATC might have to continue to levy property taxes against Germantown due to the debt load being carried by MATC. What?
MATC Performance - Graduation rates for those students completing 80% of elected courses in 2006 showed MATC at 66%, MPTC at 75% and WCTC at 82%. The MATC representatives stated that, while this looked bad at first glance, they were actually very proud of the 66% rate given that they have 52,000 students and implied they serve some of the most under-educated students in the community. (And at a cost that staggers the imagination.) Huh?
Dual credit courses - Dual credit courses are those that are taught in high schools using technical college approved texts, approved high school teachers and subject materials. These course credits are readily transferred to the technical college and advance the students' rate of completion while reducing the cost. MATC has some 475 dual credit courses, while MPTC has 1,471 and WCTC has 1,439. When asked why none of the MATC dual credit courses were available in the Germantown system, there was a noticeable silence from both the school district representatives as well as from the MATC representatives. It was finally agreed that these courses relied on both sides meeting in the middle...which tells us that we've not reached out to them, nor they to us. Our value proposition is what?
Current full time students - Seven high school graduates went straight from Germantown to MATC this school year as full time students (full time defined as carrying a load of 30 credits per year). Only Seven?
FTE Students - MATC has some 13,000 full time equivalent (FTE) students in its entire system. In 2007, 82 of those FTEs declared that they are Germantown High School graduates. That appears to be about 6/10ths of one percent. We have 6/10ths of one percent of the FTEs but we pay over 1.3% of the budget. Wow!
Very few Germantown students are attending courses at the downtown Milwaukee campus. It appears that very few Germantown students are relying upon MATC at all. Is it possible that MATC has so oriented itself to the students coming from Milwaukee (which makes sense simply based on numbers), that the vast majority of our students find nothing of interest in the curriculum that can't be had elsewhere with a more convenient commute? I suspect that both WCTC and MPTC have been more attuned to the needs of the workplace in the suburbs and beyond (which also makes sense).
As each layer of this onion is peeled away, the picture simply gets sharper and sharper. We are not doing well by our students nor our employers and citizens. Students are voting with their feet and going elsewhere for their further education. We may well be subsidizing the failures of the Milwaukee Public School system as MATC tries to prepare these young people to at least be able to find employment.
While I sympathize, that is not a burden our taxpayers should to be tasked to support beyond property taxes already levied and state support already paid. We already support an excellent system in Germantown.
Even though the deck is stacked against us and our petition, we must pursue secession. To do anything less would be to ignore the obvious and permit it to continue unchecked.
