When Wauwatosa property taxpayers received their last bills in December 2025, the line items on the bills explained clearly what portion of the payments would go to support the Wauwatosa School District's $81 million tax levy for the year.
What the bills did not explain was that the school district's levy includes $2 million to fund private school vouchers, not just the city's public schools. The state's private school voucher programs, while shifting some public tax dollars to private schools, use a funding mechanism that depends on the property taxes collected by public school districts like Tosa's.
On June 23, the Wauwatosa Common Council will take up a proposal that would make that cost clearer to taxpayers. The proposal would not affect anyone's taxes. Instead, advocates say adding information about private school voucher costs to tax bills would improve transparency on an issue of high interest to taxpayers.
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"This is about transparency. It is about showing where the money is going," Christopher Bauer said June 16 in comments to the council's Government Affairs Committee.
Bauer, though speaking for himself, is also a member of the Wauwatosa School Board, which passed a resolution in December 2025 calling on the Tosa council to add information to property tax bills about any costs associated with vouchers for private schools, as well as independent charter schools, which are funded through different revenue streams that sometimes include transfers from local public school districts. Whether the charter schools receive money from districts depends on how they are categorized under state law.