Fox Valley school district pulls plan to buy closing 2-year UW campus for child care

A plan to sell a two-year Universities of Wisconsin campus to a Fox Valley school district has fallen through, just months before the campus is set to close.

Earlier this month, the Menasha Joint School District revealed it was in talks with Winnebago and Outagamie counties about purchasing the UW-Oshkosh Fox Cities campus. The final semester of classes on the campus will end in June.

The school district hoped to open child care centers on the 40-acre campus, while preserving the facility’s planetarium, communication arts center and earth sciences museum. The plan needed approval from both counties, which co-own the campus, as well as the Menasha School Board.

Last week, the school district announced that it was no longer interested in purchasing the campus but said it is open to finding another way to use space for child care. The announcement came after an Outagamie County committee voted to delay a possible sale to allow time for the campus to be appraised. 

Menasha Superintendent Matt Zimmerman said the district’s plan was aimed at bringing more families to the Fox Valley and reversing declining enrollment by addressing a community need for more child care. Since coming to Menasha in 2023, he said, a lack of child care options has been a consistent concern he’s heard from parents and employees.

Winnebago County Executive Jon Doemel said the school district had a five-year plan to ramp up to operating five different child care centers under one roof that could serve up to 500 children. He said the counties had been in talks to sell the campus to the Menasha school district for $1 to “give them the best shot to make it successful.”

“It’s crucial, not only for the affordability of child care, to put people back in the workforce,” Doemel said. “Two-income households are hard enough. If you’re a single parent, I don’t know how you survive right now.”

Because the district’s negotiations with the counties had been done in closed session, district leaders were not able to share specific information about the potential sale with residents, Zimmerman said. At a March 10 school board meeting, some community members shared concerns about the potential tax impact of buying the campus. 

Zimmerman said the district wasn’t certain whether the school board would ultimately approve buying the campus. That’s at least part of why the district decided to pull its interest from purchasing the property.

“We’ll continue to be a part of the conversation,” Zimmerman said. “We’ll continue to be interested parties and try to partner where it makes sense, but it does not make sense for the school district at this time to own that property.”

Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson said he broadly supported the school district’s proposal and felt it addressed a community need.

But Nelson said he and other Outagamie County leaders wanted to get appraisals on the campus to make sure they were taking the best possible action for local taxpayers. He said the counties are still working to determine whether selling the campus is the right way to proceed.

“We need to have all options on the table, and we need to do our due diligence that includes getting an appraisal,” he said. “Appraisals take some time. They’re not cheap, but we believe that this is a prudent step forward.”

After appraisals are completed, Nelson said he will work with the Outagamie County Board to figure out next steps for the property.

“We need to have a plan going forward,” he said. “If it takes some time for us to find the right plan and the right partnership, we will.”

But Doemel, an alumnus of UW-Oshkosh Fox Cities, said that if the counties wanted to do appraisals on the property, they should have done it “way earlier on.”

“For me, it’s more about the best use,” he said. “Sometimes the government needs to step up and do the right thing, no matter the cost.”

Doemel said one of the challenges with coming up with a plan for the campus’ future is getting two separate 36-member county boards to come to an agreement. He suggested that Outagamie County sell the campus to Winnebago.

“When you both have a 36 member board of supervisors, it gets a little bit harder to get most of them all on the same page,”  he said.

Both county executives also said their goals were to preserve many of the campus’ unique assets in some way for future generations, including the Barlow Planetarium and the Weis Earth Science Museum.

The History Museum at the Castle in Appleton, owned by the Outagamie County Historical Society, has expressed interest in taking over the earth science museum. 

“Our proposal would be that we take the existing exhibits from the Weis and we retrofit them to fit our space, and we relocate the collection here as well,” said Dustin Mack, executive director of the History Museum at the Castle. “That’s what we’ve been working towards, and trying to build support behind.”

If both counties sign off on the idea, Mack said the history museum could move earth science exhibits as soon as this summer. But it’s not clear that both counties would agree to the move.