Wood voucher support funds campaign

Republican Jeff Wood of Chippewa Falls must be having a hard time raising money in his district. His latest campaign finance report has him raising only about $7500 (with an $11,000 outstanding loan to himself) and about $4700 of that came from conduits or out-of-state special interests concerned about the school voucher program.

They must be worried that one of their biggest allies in the legislature is in trouble.

The conduit money is a 'whose who' of private school choice supporters... Dick Devos, the Waltons, Edison school employees. His individual donation list reads like a 4th grade geography test - San Fransico, CA - Grand Rapids, MI - Bentonville, AR - Milwaukee, WI - Jackson, WY. And that's just the first ten donations.

These folks show up on the campaign finance reports of many of the Republicans running for office in our state. They think they should be telling Wood how to run the schools in his district rather than the people of Chippewa Falls.

When Wood announced he was running for reelection, he said one of his goals for the next legislative session was "introducing a bill to consolidate some of the over 400 school districts in Wisconsin. The goal would be to save money by eliminating redundancies in administration and sharing resources."

Given the amount of money Wood has pouring in from voucher supporters across the country, it seems more likely that he wants to gut the funding of the local schools to try to strengthen the argument for private schools getting tax dollars.

Wood's opponent, Roberta Rasmus, has almost as much money on hand ($25,678) as Wood has ($27,641) without a personal loan so this race should be interesting to watch.