Class of 2023 quarterback Cole LaCrue during his unofficial visit to Wisconsin on Sept. 10.
Class of 2023 quarterback Cole LaCrue during his unofficial visit to Wisconsin on Sept. 10.
Class of 2023 quarterback Cole LaCrue during his unofficial visit to Wisconsin on Sept. 10.
Class of 2023 quarterback Cole LaCrue during his unofficial visit to Wisconsin on Sept. 10.
Homes on the 700 block of East Gorham Street are part of the Fourth Lake Ridge National Register Historic District on Madison's Near East Side.
Underused commercial properties and businesses that rely on customers who arrive by car will be the main targets of redevelopment under new zoning changes the Madison City Council approved late Tuesday.
The council voted 14-5 to approve the changes, which are intended to encourage higher-density development closer to the city’s future revamped transit system. The council created a transit-oriented development, or TOD, overlay district within a quarter-mile of bus rapid transit routes, the latest policy aimed at making Madison more pedestrian- and transit-friendly and encouraging new housing and redevelopment.
An overlay district modifies the rules within an existing zoning district, in this case to allow for increased housing density, reduced parking requirements and greater access to public transportation.
As Madison’s grows, the city will see more development of vacant or underused properties within the new overlay district and Downtown said Heather Stouder, the city’s planning division director. “The overarching point of the TOD overlay is to make this type of redevelopment easier,” she said.
But during the council’s Tuesday night meeting, debate over the overlay district focused little on its hoped-for benefits and instead circled around its impact on historic districts and neighborhoods with single-family homes.
Apart from putting more people closer to more public transportation, the overlay district would effectively make it easier to erect duplexes in parts of neighborhoods mostly made up of single-family homes.
Because of that, the overlay district has seen pushback from some residents in neighborhoods such as University Hill Farms who claim more duplexes would remake the area’s aesthetic.
Some residents of Hill Farms told the council Tuesday night that those fears are a veiled effort to keep renters, especially the poor and people of color, out of the city’s wealthier, whiter enclaves.
“The pattern of single-family zoning that dominates many of the historic districts is also linked to a history of exclusion,” said resident Liz Jesse. “For example, residents of Hill Farms who live in high-density apartment buildings are allowed to pay dues but they are not allowed to be voting members of our association.”
Ald. Keith Furman, 19th District, joined the critics, saying the opposition from some Hill Farms residents amounted to people satisfied that “they’ve got theirs and they’re not interested in changing the character of their neighborhoods because they’re good.”
“Let’s be realistic, folks, we’re in a housing crisis,” Furman said. “Density does not change the character of a neighborhood.”
Stouder said any changes to such neighborhoods because of the overlay district would happen “very slowly” over time and that increased density there would likely be “incremental.”
Alds. Brian Benford, Barbara Harrington-McKinney, Charles Myadze, Bill Tishler and Nasra Wehelie voted against the overlay district.
The overlay district excludes Downtown and UW-Madison’s campus, which extends to the Mansion Hill and First Settlement local historic districts.
The city’s local historic districts that have land in the overlay district include University Heights, Third Lake Ridge and Marquette Bungalows.
But just because the overlay district encompasses historic areas does not mean new development can breeze through. Those areas are still subject to the city’s preservation ordinance, which allows oversight over any changes and new structures.
But nine areas in the National Register of Historic Places that are not subject to the same local protections also have land within the overlay district.
The original overlay district excluded both the local and national historic districts, but an alternative proposal was introduced by the city’s Transportation Policy and Planning Board to include them, and the alternative was recommended by the Plan Commission and approved by the council.
The core changes of the overlay district include:
In a failed bid at compromise, Ald. Tag Evers, 13th District, offered a change to the overlay district ordinance that would require any new duplexes to be owner-occupied, saying it would prevent real estate investors from flipping homes in historic districts.
Real estate and developer groups have been vocal in their support of the overlay district.
Opponents of Evers’ proposed change said it undermined the purpose of the overlay district and didn’t address the issue of absentee duplex landlords in other parts of the city.
In other business, council members signed off on rezoning St. John’s Lutheran Church for future development and accepting $1.5 million in election grants from a nonprofit controversial among many Republicans for its role in the 2020 election.
The grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL, are $500,000 this year and $1 million in 2024 for planning and operating safe and secure elections, and can be used for equipment, staff training and technology.
CTCL was criticized by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who conducted a partisan review of the 2020 election, for grants it doled out to more than 200 cities. The grants have been unsuccessfully challenged in court and Republicans in the state Legislature are trying to get a constitutional amendment on the April 4 ballot that would ban such grants.
The nearly $36 million redevelopment plan for St. John’s, 322 E. Washington Ave., will replace the church with a 10-story structure with a sanctuary, community space and 130 mostly low-cost apartments with below-ground parking.
While certain to see major turnover after April’s election, the council also signed off Tuesday on the appointment of Barbara Vedder to serve out the term of Syed Abbas, who resigned from his post representing the 12th District last year.
Vedder was a City Council member from 1995 to 2001 and a member of the Dane County Board from 2006 to 2010.
It’s been a year of change possibilities in Madison with major advances in aid to the homeless, funding for the Public Market, passage of swee…
Instructor Eamon Montgomery reads to students at Acton Academy, a new microschool that opened in Madison just two weeks ago. It's among the growing number of alternative schooling options for families since the start of the pandemic.
Enrollment in Wisconsin’s traditional public schools has continued to decline since the start of the pandemic.
There isn’t a single answer as to where students are going and why. A nationwide declining birth rate and changing trends in where families live are big contributors.
But there’s clearly a growing appetite in Wisconsin for more alternative schooling, including charter schools and home-schooling.
Ten new independent charter schools have opened across the state since 2019, with 35 options now available. Other options that break the traditional mold have also sprouted, from a new forest school in La Farge to an expanding campus at Madison’s private Hickory Hill Academy.
“From what I’ve seen, the pandemic has had an impact where parents kind of got a firsthand look into their children’s experience in the classroom and probably got a better sense for what they’re learning and really digging into that,” said Marisa Palmer, a lecturer in UW-Madison’s School of Business and a mom who just launched an Acton Academy microschool in Madison.
The pandemic “jolted” parents out of normalcy, said Johanna Schmidt, director of enrollment and marketing at Wingra School, a longtime progressive private school in Madison. Schmidt also is a mom of two Wingra students.
“Everyone was just going ahead and doing their things, your kids went to public school, and then all of a sudden they’re at home,” she said. “And they’re at home doing virtual learning and perhaps you’re hearing more or seeing more or more involved, just because you have to be as a parent because you’re sitting right there with them.”
Enrollment in Wisconsin public schools dropped again this year, in keeping with a pandemic-era historic decline from which public schools have yet to recover.
More families have been opting for alternative schooling for years, but interest has recently increased.
From fall 2021 to fall 2022, headcounts in public schools declined 0.85%, while the headcount in independent charter schools increased 4.5%, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Enrollment in the state’s four private school parental choice programs, which allow students to attend a private school using state aid, rose by 6.7%.
The second headcount for this school year was done on Friday, but the numbers have yet to be released.
The number of students who are being home-schooled has also increased. In 2020-21, 31,878 students were being home-schooled, or just over 3% of the state’s students. That was a 47% increase from the previous year. Those numbers dropped slightly to 29,402 students in 2021-22, but still remained much higher than before the pandemic.
Just four students are currently enrolled in a new Madison microschool called Acton Academy, but the independent elementary school hopes to eventually grow to up to 100 students and expand to offer middle and high school.
Similarly, there were 13,395 students enrolled in virtual charter schools in 2021-22 and 16,020 in 2020-21, compared to the 8,696 in 2019-20.
Applications at Wingra have doubled from last year, Schmidt said. The school expects to have about 20% more students next year than it had last year. This increase would likely bring Wingra to its pre-pandemic enrollment levels or even surpass them, she said.
Madison School District enrollment is specifically expected to drop by 10% in the next five years.
It’s common for students to come to Wingra after trying public schools, but there’s been an uptick in applications for its kindergarten and first-grade programs.
“I think it tells me that people are looking at these options earlier on,” said Ebony Rose, head of Wingra School. “I also think it means that parents might not want to even experiment with public schools or other schools.”
Schmidt said parents are interested in Wingra’s focus on the outdoors, the mixed-age classrooms and the lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This was true for Schmidt herself, who moved her family to Madison almost two years ago from Austin, Texas, where her oldest child was briefly in public school before switching to a charter. She noted that most kindergartens her family looked at only had about 15 minutes of outside time for recess.
“And that didn’t feel like enough time,” she said.
Students at Wingra School spend between an hour and 90 minutes outside every day. “Rain, sleet or snow, our students are outside every day,” Rose said.
Acton Academy, a new microschool that opened in Madison earlier this month, follows an education model similar to that found in Montessori schools — student-driven and hands-on.
Palmer decided to launch a branch of Acton Academy because she wasn’t happy with what she discovered about early education through research and in her own experience as a mom. When her son jumped from play-based preschool to traditional kindergarten, he was given homework.
The Acton microschool follows principles similar to that of Montessori schools, which strive to be hands-on, child-centered and driven by students’ interests rather than formal lesson plans. The school has mixed-age classes, children learn at their own pace, and there is a heavy focus on science and projects.
Classes at Madison’s Acton Academy just started about two weeks ago, and four children are enrolled so far with “lots of interest” for enrollment in the fall, Palmer said. The school hopes to grow to 75-100 elementary students and then hopefully expand to a small middle and high school.
Acton Academy student Corrine Hannaman, 8, explores a book during an independent reading period Wednesday.
Palmer hears from a lot of parents interested in Acton and other alternative schools that their child is bored. She said parents don’t want their children to have to learn in lockstep with the rest of their class, and they don’t want them to have to sit still at a desk all day.
But it’s also about adapting to a changing world, Palmer said.
Jobs today are much different than the careers for which traditional schooling is preparing children, she said. Acton appeals to parents who are in technology, entrepreneurship, medicine and science.
Different funding formulas and a quirk in the timing of the closure mean it's not as easy as moving funding from one school to the next.
“The way I think about Acton is, when you think about public schools, there’s a long legacy of curriculum and the system, and it has a lot of inertia, and I think it works well for a lot of learners,” Palmer said. “But Acton and some of these microschools is what a school would be today if you designed it from scratch. If you just had a clean slate today, how would you design school?”
Schmidt believes the pandemic helped parents see other schooling options.
“The pandemic changed a lot of what people consider to be normal,” she said. “And as their kids are going back to school or as they’re having maybe been back in school for a year and a half, they’re perhaps a little more willing to consider alternatives to what they perceived to be just what everybody did.”
As staffing continues to be an issue for most schools, parents may be drawn to smaller, alternative schools that offer a better student-to-teacher ratio.
“We have had parents tell us that their child was invisible in public schools,” Rose said. “And at Wingra, those students are seen, and that means a lot to parents to have their students not feel alienated or estranged from not only the academic part of school, but also the social-emotional part of school.”
A sign at Acton Academy echoes a motto from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Marisa Palmer started the Madison branch of the microschool earlier this month after being unsatisfied with other early education options.
But that doesn’t mean they want to compete with public schools, Rose emphasized, especially because Wingra doesn’t have a high school and most of its students go to public high school later on.
He said, instead, Wingra just wants to be an additional option for students.
“Our justice, equity, diversity and inclusion focus also includes supporting public schools,” Rose said. “We don’t believe that we should have an adversarial relationship with public high schools. That’s like a zero-sum game.
Acton Academy, a new microschool in Madison, hears from parents that their students are bored with traditional learning, having to stay in lockstep with fellow students and being expected to sit still for long periods at a desk.
“Our philosophy is that there are students for each of the school options in Dane County,” Rose said. “We have our niche, and we don’t have to expand our niche or drive into other people’s lanes, because the students and the families that we want here exist.”
The charter school in the La Farge School School District in its first year and house at the nearly 9,000 acre Kickapoo Valley Reserve.
BROVARY, Ukraine — A helicopter carrying Ukraine’s interior minister crashed into a kindergarten in a foggy residential suburb of Kyiv on Wednesday, killing him and about a dozen other people, including a child on the ground, authorities said.
Workers pass the scene where a helicopter crashed on civil infrastructure Wednesday in Brovary, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.
Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, who oversaw the country’s police and emergency services, is the most senior official killed since Russia invaded nearly 11 months ago. His death, along with the rest of his ministry’s leadership and the entire helicopter crew, was the second major calamity in four days to befall Ukraine, after a Russian missile struck an apartment building in the southeastern city of Dnipro, killing dozens of civilians.
There was no immediate word on whether the helicopter crash, which occurred on a foggy morning in the capital’s eastern suburb of Brovary, was an accident or related to the war. Ukrainian authorities immediately opened an investigation. No fighting has been reported recently in the capital region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by video link — said the crash had a broad connection to the war.
“This is not an accident because it has been due to war and the war has many dimensions, not just on the battlefields,” he said. “There are no accidents at wartime. These are all war results.”
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, which operated the French-manufactured Super Puma helicopter, said at least 14 people were killed, including nine on the helicopter, and a child on the ground. It said 25 people were injured, including 11 children. Early official reports gave differing numbers of casualties.
A view of the scene where a helicopter crashed on civil infrastructure Wednesday in Brovary, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.
At the scene of the crash and ensuing fire, plastic sheets covered at least four bodies. Workers cleared charred and mangled wreckage lying against an apartment building and in the kindergarten’s playground. Some walls were partly demolished and blackened. The helicopter’s blackened rotors protruded from a destroyed car and rested on the roof of a building’s entrance.
Kyiv regional Gov. Oleksii Kuleba told Ukrainian television that emergency services were still identifying remains and that the death toll could rise.
People look at remains of a helicopter that crashed outside of a kindergarten on Wednesday in Brovary, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.
The crash killed five Interior Ministry officials, one national police official and all three helicopter crew members, the Ukraine National Police said. Monastyrskyi’s deputy Yevhen Yenin and State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yurii Lubkovych were among the dead, the police said.
Monastyrskyi, 42, was in charge of police and emergency services that dealt with the consequences of Russian strikes and de-mining, political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told The Associated Press.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said National Police Chief Ihor Klymenko has been appointed acting interior minister.
Senior Ukrainian officials routinely travel by helicopter at low altitudes and high speed during the conflict, increasing the inherent dangers associated with the flights. The tragedy may prompt Kyiv to institute a rule many countries and companies follow stating that top officials shouldn’t fly on the same aircraft, Fesenko said.
The officials on the helicopter were due to visit Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, local police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko said, adding on Facebook that they were “not just leaders,” but “friends who I respected.”
The helicopter was sold to Ukraine before the war in 2019, a French defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, according to ministry policy.
The Security Service of Ukraine is investigating “all possible versions” of the crash, prosecutor general Andriy Kostin said on Telegram.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is finalizing a massive package of military aid for Ukraine that U.S. officials say is likely to total as much as $2.6 billion. It’s expected to include for the first time nearly 100 Stryker combat vehicles and at least 50 Bradley armored vehicles to allow Ukrainian forces to move more quickly and securely on the front lines.
The officials said the numbers could change as the Biden administration goes through final deliberations on the package. An announcement is expected this week when defense leaders from the U.S., Europe and other regions gather in Germany to discuss military support for Ukraine. The aid is also expected to include thousands of rounds of ammunition, including rockets for air defense systems.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been made public.
Wednesday’s helicopter crash came at a particularly dark period in the war for Ukraine, just days after the Russian strike on the apartment building in southeastern Ukraine killed 45 people, including six children — the deadliest attack on civilians since the spring.
“The pain is unspeakable,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram.
“Another very sad day today — new losses,” said his wife, Olena Zelenska, dabbing teary eyes as she responded to the news at the economic conference in Davos, where she was mustering support for Ukraine.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the crash “heartbreaking.”
British Home Secretary Suella Braverman called Monastyrskyi “a leading light in supporting the Ukrainian people during (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s illegal invasion.” She said she was “struck by his determination, optimism and patriotism.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is facing pressure to send tanks to Ukraine, tweeted that the crash “shows once again the huge price that Ukraine is having to pay in this war.”
A helicopter crash in a Kyiv suburb Wednesday killed 18 people, including Ukraine’s interior minister and three children, Ukrainian authorities said.
In her early 20s, Karisa Hunt learned the hard lesson of what happens when someone rations life-preserving medication.
Hunt was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a 4-year-old and has been on insulin since then to help control her blood sugar levels. But while in college and feeling guilty for saddling her parents with high copays for the insulin, she started lowering her prescribed dosage. “It was a little less here, a little less there,” she recalled recently.
Insulin is displayed July 8 at Pucci's Pharmacy in Sacramento, Calif.
It proved a life-altering decision, one that resulted in two surgeries in each eye and, ultimately, the complete loss of vision in her left one.
Once she was out of college and on her own health insurance plan, Hunt couldn’t afford the $400 monthly copay. With rationing a no-go, she found another, still less-than-desirable solution: a low-cost, older version of insulin sold at Walmart.
It didn’t control her diabetes nearly as well, and it left her sicker more often. She worried about long-term damage to her kidneys and the nerves in her limbs. Still, it cost her a doable $75 a month. She told herself she had no choice.
“It felt like I was trading away years at the end of my life to stay alive now,” said Hunt, 36, who works in marketing and lives in Commerce City, Colorado, just northeast of Denver.
But 2019 brought a welcome change: Colorado became the first state to pass a law that set a $100 limit on the monthly out-of-pocket expenses some diabetes patients would be required to pay for their insulin. All at once, she could afford the optimal insulin for her.
“It felt like it was giving myself years of my life back,” Hunt said.
In response to the steep rise in out-of-pocket costs for insulin over the past two decades, nearly two dozen states have passed measures in the past few years capping the out-of-pocket costs for some patients.
Last year, Louisiana and Maryland became the latest, bringing the total to 22 plus Washington, D.C. Other states are poised to consider similar measures this year, including Nebraska and New Jersey.
In his 2021-23 budget, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers proposed capping insulin copays at $50 a month, but the measure was stripped out by the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Although the cap was among the recommendations of a special Task Force on Reducing Prescription Drug Prices, opponents said at the time that it unfairly singled out insulin when out-of-pocket costs for some other drugs were higher. Opponents also said insurers would make up for the reduced payments by increasing premiums.
Evers plans to reintroduce an insulin cap in his 2023-25 budget, to come out next month.
“These proposed solutions are definitely a step in the right direction and address a big harm, which is when people ration because of affordability,” said Dr. Jing Luo, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and its Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing.
But the state caps leave out many residents. They cover patients enrolled in state-regulated health insurance plans, which generally are individual health insurance policies sold on Affordable Care Act marketplaces as well as state employee health plans.
However, the state laws can’t include most large employer and union health plans; those fall under federal government regulation.
Congress last summer imposed a $35 cap on copayments for insulin for Medicare beneficiaries, who are 65 and older. But Senate Republicans in August stripped out of a budget bill a measure that would have set a $35 cap for patients with private insurance. Some argued that it did not solve the underlying reasons for increasing insulin prices and that insurance companies would raise premiums to offset the cost, The Washington Post reported.
The financial burden of the caps falls on some combination of the players involved in the distribution of medicines — the manufacturers, the health plans and the pharmacy benefit managers, known as PBMs, which administer pharmacy benefits for health plans.
Those entities generally have opaque and somewhat contentious relationships that ultimately determine both drug prices and profit distribution among them. Critics have long complained that the lack of transparency makes it hard to tell whether patients pay reasonable amounts for their medicines.
Seven of the states with caps set a limit of $100 on copays for a 30-day supply of insulin, the highest amount among states, while others are significantly lower, according to a tally by the American Diabetes Association.
According to the diabetes association, 6 million U.S. patients take insulin.
Since the early 2000s, as manufacturers raised the price of insulin, the cost to patients rose.
One 2022 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that for Medicare beneficiaries, out-of-pocket spending on insulin jumped from $236 million in 2007 to $1.01 billion in 2018, more than a 300% increase in that time. That’s in line with other analyses showing a near tripling of the price of insulin in the 2000s.
Inevitably, the costs to patients caused many to ration their insulin.
In a 2020 survey conducted by the Colorado attorney general’s office, 40% of state residents using insulin reported that they resorted to rationing at least once a year. The report said that in some cases, diabetic patients said they took to fasting to try to control their blood sugar levels.
Colorado Democratic state Sen. Dylan Roberts became aware of the high out-of-pocket costs of insulin at a young age. When he was a boy in the early 2000s, his younger brother was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
“I remember at the time this being such a burden,” he recalled. “Even at the time, it was immensely challenging for families, especially if you had no insurance.”
Having taken office in 2017, Roberts became increasingly eager to pass a measure to help ensure diabetes patients can afford insulin.
“It doesn’t make any capitalistic or market sense that it costs so much,” he said. “And you have to take it, or you will die, so you are really being held hostage.”
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