North Side parents and educators say the scoring tool Milwaukee Public Schools is using to flag schools for possible closure penalizes schools for the conditions created by long-term North Side disinvestment.
MPS’ Great Schools Committee, a newly formed advisory group tasked with setting criteria for school closures, met the evening of Sept. 28 at Starms Discovery Learning Center.
Community advocates, parents and Hopkins Lloyd Community School staff in attendance critiqued the process the district hopes to use to determine which schools to close.
Factors that could put a school on the chopping block tied to a building’s enrollment and location include: whether the school is using less than half its capacity; has not grown enrollment in five years; and sits within a mile of another underutilized MPS school.
With these criteria, 26 of the 134 schools being examined are sorted into the closure-or-merger category. But if the cutoff is lowered to less than 30% of capacity, that number goes down to three.
The potential closures are part of a broader plan to invest in some buildings, including building new schools, and close others.
The district’s staff framed the process around efficient use of buildings and resources. Angela Harris, an MPS educator, parent and chair of the Black Educators Caucus MKE, said the definition of “efficiency” is subjective, and for many in the community, it means more than the cleanliness of a building and necessary repairs.
“How does the staff function as a community? How do the parents engage themselves in the school as a community? Are the students returning to that school? Are people sending their siblings?” Harris said. “Those are all things that make me think that’s probably an efficient space, because people are willing to choose that school despite where it’s located.”
MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said she wants the criteria to reflect community values and is open to adding criteria based on feedback.
She said the district has not yet decided which schools could close.
Schools ‘deserve some form of reparations’
Perkins Eastman, a planning firm the district hired to aid in the school closure process, proposed closing five District 4 schools and merging them with nearby schools. The schools recommended for closure were Auer Avenue School, Clarke Street School, Hopkins Lloyd Community School, Keefe Avenue School and Siefert School.
Each school is on the North Side, which has garnered complaints from residents who have already lost their grocery stores, pharmacies and now fear losing their neighborhood schools.
Beverly Williams, director of Community Together Voices of Milwaukee’s Children and a former MPS educator, said previous administrations diverted money from District 4 schools, left teacher vacancies unfilled and relied on substitutes, making the schools undesirable to neighborhood parents.
“So yes, you’re going to have low test scores and you’re going to have low enrollment,” Williams said. “It’s almost to the point where those five schools you’re talking about closing, they deserve some form of reparations.”
Harris has spent much of her teaching career in District 4 schools, and said the district will keep coming back to this conversation if disparities among the schools continue to exist.
“There’s always going to be schools that are going to be underutilized because they don’t have the same programmatic offerings,” Harris said. “They don’t have the same veteran teachers, they don’t have the same school support.”
Cassellius said it’s difficult to spread equal resources to all schools when some have significant under-enrollment.
“When you have 65 kids in a school and you have a building that holds 500, that makes it really difficult to give them the social worker, the counselor, the co-curriculars, the nurse, the librarian,” Cassellius said.
During the meeting, several attendees remarked on how some of the buildings that needed many repairs were also those that had smaller enrollment.
Brittney Stevenson, a social worker at Hopkins Lloyd, said it’s hard to see that the district could consider closing a school because it has a low composite building score as the result of deferred maintenance.
“It feels like you’re getting penalized for something that was already hurting you before,” Stevenson said.
Tool should consider nearby options
Stevenson wants the tool to factor nearby charter, private and voucher schools. At Hopkins Lloyd, Stevenson said Cross Trainers Academy, a Christian school, constructed a brand-new building next door to the early 20th-century community school building.
Cassellius said her team will include data about how many neighborhood students go to an MPS school outside their neighborhood. For example, they could look at how many children live closest to Auer Avenue but attend another MPS school.
Cassellius said they also want to add data about how many children total are living near the school.
District 4 Board Director James Ferguson said his district is a hotbed of choice and charter schools where many neighborhood families would prefer to send their children.
He told Cassellius it would be a mistake to assume families of closed District 4 schools will choose other MPS schools.
“They’re already showing you … ‘Hey, (Milwaukee College Prep) is right across the street from this school, and I’d rather send my kid there,’” Ferguson said. “We need to be talking more about building new schools because they deserve that.”
Cassellius said the district would consider rebuilding some schools where the maintenance costs outweigh the building’s value. She said they would keep a school open during rebuilding and move children to the new school on the same lot or nearby once the school is built.
What’s next
If you want to share your thoughts about how the district should determine school closures, you can do so at these upcoming meetings.
Gwen T. Jackson Elementary School: Monday, Oct. 12
6 to 8 p.m. at 2121 W. Hadley St.
Starms Discovery Learning Center: Monday, Oct. 26
6 to 8 p.m. at 2035 N. 25th St.
Alex Klaus is the education solutions reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
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