The Forum

Several readers have questioned part of School Board Candidate Emma Poroli’s statement from January 11th relating to the amount paid for health care benefits in Shorewood.

Here is the original statement in question.

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Profile of School Board Candidate Emma Poroli
Posted 1/11/07

“I'd like to serve on the school board in Shorewood to help find innovative solutions to the many challenges we face. For example, I believe it’s important to evaluate our options for providing quality health care benefits to teachers so that we can be certain we’re using our money as wisely as possible, because more than half of our education dollars currently go to health care benefits.”

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After readers brought up their questions, I asked Ms. Poroli for a clarification. Here is her response:

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From: Emma Poroli
To: Steve Koczela

I spoke to the superintendent last night after the school board meeting for clarification. Sen Darling spoke at the last school board meeting and gave the figure that 56% of the sate education budget goes toward paying healthcare and the superintendent concurred that she did give that figure. He did say that the figure may be misleading because she adds a lot of other things in there to arrive at that figure. Twenty two percent of the projected operational budget for the Shorewood district goes to 'fringe' (healthcare) costs. I apologize if my statement was confusing but I wanted clarification for myself before I responded.

The thing is, our district spends roughly 11k to educate each student, but only receives 1k per from the state education budget. We pay more into the state than we receive. I don't have an exact figure of what percent we receive back, but there is a significant deficit. So the 56% figure really impacts this district and every other district in the state because that means that less than half of the budget goes directly into the classrooms from my understanding.

I'm glad that folks are questioning the figures. They are disturbing. It's up to us as taxpayers to question why that is. I am going to set up a meeting with Sen Darling to find out how she arrived at that figure and what it all entails.

Emma Poroli
Shorewood School Board Candidate
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