Just as school districts had feared, Gov. Scott Walker's biennial budget proposal would slash local school funding by hundreds of millions of dollars and prevent them from making it up with higher property taxes.

Walker's budget cuts state school aid by $834 million over the next biennium, a 7.9 percent decrease. That accounts for about one fifth of proposed cuts in the budget.

But the bigger impact on local school budgets is Walker's proposal to reduce by 5.5 percent next year the amount that districts can increase revenues, which combines state aid and property taxes. It would be the first time that revenue limits would decrease since they were imposed nearly 20 years ago.

"It's the largest cut to education in modern state history," said Dan Rossmiller, government affairs director for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. "I can't imagine that anybody is looking forward to having to cope with this."

For all districts around the state, a 5.5 percent reduction in revenue translates to about a $470 million cut next year, according to an estimate by Andrew Reschovsky, UW-Madison professor of public affairs and applied economics. For Madison that comes out to $15.7 million less than what the district was able to take in this year.