GRATIOT - A meeting this week intended for Gratiot's village board to vote on the sale of the Black Hawk Middle School building ended on a deflated note after hours of tense discussion, no vote and more questions than answers.

At the top of the meeting Wednesday, Jan. 4, village attorney Duane Jorgenson informed the board it did not have the needed quorum to vote. Member Paul Mau was away on vacation and president Karlan Johnson can't vote due to a conflict of interest as head custodian at the school.

With only one board member eligible to vote, trustee Tim Burke, the meeting simply turned into a public discussion moderated by the village with the Black Hawk Board of Education and citizens.

Tempers flared in the group of about 25 residents who turned out.

"Is saving the school still an option?" Gratiot resident Chuck Herbst demanded repeatedly. "If it isn't, why are we still here?" He left in disgust about two-thirds of the way into the meeting.

The school board voted in October to move middle school students at the beginning of the 2012-13 academic year to the district's other campus in South Wayne to help pull the district out of a budget hole almost $436,000 deep. Superintendent Willy Chambers pins the deficit mostly on Gov. Scott Walker's $800 million cut to public education, but also on a decades-long decline in enrollment.

The closure, which includes cuts to staff, is predicted to save the district $333,638, or about 77 percent of this school year's deficit.

The district hit a logistical snag when the village discovered decades-old paperwork proving the land belongs to the village but the building belongs to the district.

The boards were to begin negotiations this week on the future of the property. Chambers presented five options Wednesday:

- The district deeds the building to the village.

- The village deeds the land to the district.

- The village and district work mutually to find a buyer for both land and building.

- The district has eight months after students leave to physically remove the building from the site.

- The district keeps the building as a storage facility.

After the meeting, members of the school board vowed to go ahead with the closure of the Gratiot school as planned, despite an outcry from residents present.

Board member Dusty Williams defended the decision as strictly financial.

"We have to run our school as a business," he said. "Even with the closing at Gratiot, we're still going to be out money. We need to do something, and this is the first step."

Most of the residents, who surrounded the two boards on folding chairs, were not satisfied with this answer and suggested the district should hold another referendum and look into other options, such as cutting teacher salaries, shuffling grades between Gratiot and South Wayne, or demolishing the Gratiot building to save upkeep costs.

Since 2007, voters in the Black Hawk district have voted against three of four school referendums asking for more money.

"I think a lot of people thought we were bluffin'," said school board member Donielle Wellnitz. The district's budget is cut to the bone, she added.

But several residents in the room contended the former superintendent, Charles McNulty, had skirted the severity of the district's financial situation.

"Everybody was lied to," one woman said, as others in the room nodded.

Burke has written the school board to voice his vehement opposition to the closure.

"They're not going to save all the money they think they're going to save," he said at the meeting.

Residents in the room peppered the school board with questions for more data, more numbers, other solutions.

Chambers denied accusations that the district would eventually build another facility at the South Wayne campus and defended keeping teacher salaries where they are: "If you chop too much, those people are gonna start looking. We want to keep those quality people here."

His predecessor, McNulty, didn't stay long at Black Hawk, several in the room pointed out. McNulty is now an assistant professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Northern Iowa.

Underlying the tension between village, board and citizens is a common fear: that the district will be forced to shut down completely in a few years as population in rural counties like Lafayette dwindles.

According to the Wisconsin Taxpapers Alliance, 17 counties in the state, nearly all rural, saw population declines in the past decade and a median age that tops 45, or about seven years higher than the state average. In a study released last summer, the nonpartisan nonprofit also found that job opportunities and wages in rural counties lag behind more urban counties.

Gratiot and South Wayne were at one time separate districts, then merged in the mid-1960s. Several Gratiotians, particularly older ones who remember a Gratiot vs. South Wayne strain when they were in school, said they felt the closure was an "attack" on their town.

"If we're gonna go down," Herbst said before he left the meeting, "let's go down together."

Jon Satterlee, a 1999 graduate of Black Hawk High School, said there's more at stake than money and budgets. He stood up and spoke passionately in favor of keeping the Gratiot school open to allow student athletes more time and space to practice.

Sports "give us a sense of community pride," he said. "I'm damn proud to be a Black Hawk Warrior."