The city of Marinette is refusing to sell a local Catholic school a public building, arguing it would harm the school district.
For nearly 150 years, what is now St. Thomas Aquinas Academy has been providing a Catholic education to the residents of Marinette, a small northern Wisconsin city on the shore of Lake Michigan.
About 160 students now attend what board chairwoman Cheryl Sporie describes as a “very small, family-oriented parochial school.”
But for a couple of decades the academy has been bifurcated: While the main school building that houses the high school and middle school is in the heart of Marinette, near the mouth of the Menominee River, the smaller elementary school is in Peshtigo, a small town eight miles to the west — a roughly 15- to 20-minute drive.
The school uses shuttle buses to move kids from one facility to the other. The divide is an inconvenience for parents and for staff, who must travel between the two campuses.
That’s why St. Thomas Aquinas leaders were excited when, a couple of years ago, the Marinette School District, as part of a renovation and consolidation plan, put two of its six school buildings up for sale. The district’s now empty Garfield Elementary building is six blocks from the St. Thomas’s high-school building and three blocks from its church — close enough for students to walk to attend a weekly Mass.
St. Thomas’s leaders made several bids, including a full-price offer earlier this year, with the intent of buying the building and bringing their elementary students into town.
But the public-school district’s leaders refuse to sell.
From their perspective, St. Thomas Aquinas Academy is a competitor that could poach students and the state-education dollars that follow them. Not selling the building to St. Thomas Aquinas, and in effect hampering its potential growth, is a “fiscally responsible” decision aimed at protecting local taxpayers, superintendent Corry Lambie has said.
In late June, St. Thomas Aquinas Academy and its lawyers with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, or WILL, filed legal notice that they intend to sue the district.
WILL contends that the Marinette School District is violating state statute by continuing to hold onto and maintain the building, at taxpayer expense, even after receiving a full-price offer from a potential buyer who wants to use it for its zoned purpose.
But the dispute in this small city near the Michigan border also raises broader questions about the proper role of government: Should a government entity — in this case a school district — engage in turf wars, compete with private-sector players for market share, and essentially hinder a private school’s ability to better serve its families?
“I don’t understand why they view us as a threat,” Sporie told National Review. “Yeah, they could get a few more students if we didn’t exist. But we have always existed, and we will still exist even if they don’t sell us the building.”
When reached on his cellphone, Lambie, the superintendent, told a reporter he was stepping into a meeting and couldn’t talk. He asked for a call back the next morning but then didn’t answer his phone or respond to a text message from National Review.
Speaking to local reporters in recent months, Lambie has been clear that district leaders don’t intend to sell to a competitor. The district is requiring any potential buyer to sign off on a deed restriction to ensure the school building isn’t used as a school.
“We’re a district right now that has a declining enrollment,” he told the local Fox 11 News in February. “If it was owned by another entity that provides these similar services, more dollars could go to that entity, which then has an adverse impact on our taxpayers.”
Lauren Greuel, a WILL lawyer, argues that what the district is doing is illegal.
She acknowledges that the district has the authority to set an asking price for the building and to have an adequate amount of time to find a buyer. But it has a buyer offering to pay the full price, $299,900, according to the Fox 11 report.
Greuel points to a ’80s-era Wisconsin supreme court decision which held that a school district does not have statutory authority to spend taxpayer money to buy and hold land for purposes other than constructing and running a school. She contends that with a full-price offer on the table, the district is now misusing taxpayer money “because they don’t need to be at this point maintaining this empty building.”
In addition to continuing to pay for utility costs and upkeep on the empty school, police have reported more than a dozen incidents at the building recently, WILL said. The district, Greuel said, appears to be maintaining a “public nuisance to the community basically to spite a choice school.”
Greuel also said that Lambie has provided “inaccurate” information about how Wisconsin’s complicated open-enrollment funding works and how the district is financially affected when its students choose to attend a private school or a school in another district.
Sporie said she wasn’t expecting the district to respond negatively to their offers to buy the empty school. “I did not see that coming at all,” she said.
The intent of the St. Thomas Aquinas Academy leaders isn’t to hurt the public-school district, which they’ve historically had a good relationship with, Sporie said. But she also doesn’t deny that they would like to see their academy grow.
“I would be lying if I said, ‘Oh, we don’t want to grow,’” she said.
But their biggest motivation involves unifying their academy in Marinette and setting themselves up for the future. Their high-school and middle-school building is itself about 100 years old, and if their student body gets smaller, it might work best down the road to consolidate into the Garfield building, if they can acquire it.
Sporie said that when the district first placed its Garfield Elementary building on the market, it was priced at close to a half a million dollars, more than St. Thomas could afford.
“We just kind of sat and waited to see if somebody was going to buy it,” she said.
No one did. The city explored buying it to convert it into a city hall and police department but decided it wasn’t a good fit, according to media reports.
After about a year, when the building hadn’t sold, the asking price came down, and the academy’s leaders started making offers. Greuel said the district rejected an offer last fall for $225,000. When Sporie came forward with the full-price offer in early 2024, the district tried to get her to agree to a deed restriction that would prevent the academy from using the building as a school.
The debate over when a Wisconsin public-school system should or must sell its unused property to another education provider is not unique to Marinette. In recent years, Milwaukee Public Schools has similarly refused to sell its vacant buildings to private or charter schools, and its leaders have faced charges that they’ve played shell games to prevent vacant buildings from being listed for sale.
In Marinette, many residents appear to support keeping the building as a school.
“It’s a school building. It’s set up for that function. Do you not understand how absurd it sounds that we restricted a school from buying a school building?” resident Martin Shaw told the school board during a February meeting, according to a report in the local Eagle Herald newspaper. Another resident said that “competition gives us better schools for everyone — private and public,” according to the paper.
A Change.org petition urging the district to sell the building to St. Thomas Aquinas without a deed restriction has 895 signatures.
Greuel called the district’s refusal to sell its unused building “a slap in the face to both parents and community members.”
So far, Lambie appears unpersuaded. When asked by Fox 11 what the district will do if the building still hasn’t sold in a year, he said, “We’re just going to continue until we find that right solution for our district, for the community, and for our taxpayers and see where it takes us.”