Sarah Shaw is the deputy research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum, focused on education research, and she explains that this type of referenda to increase a district's funding pie has become more common.

There are two major types of referenda.

You could do a capital referenda in which a district is asking to be able to issue debt to do something related to construction.

So that could be renovation, that could be a new building, but it's something related to the facilities.

That's one category.

The other category are your operating referenda, which is for the operations of the district.

And those could be anything from wanting to invest in new programs, new things that we're offering, or being able to maintain what we currently have.

And this has pushed elected school boards in districts like Green Bay and Dodgeville to ask voters to make the choices that state legislators have not made.