Elizabeth Brown, president of Amani United, said it often feels like the community is called in at the last minute when decisions are made, instead of being involved from the beginning. Even decisions as crucial as deciding whether to close North Side MPS schools.
Brown said she didn’t know the Great Schools Committee, an advisory group tasked with setting criteria for school closures, was meeting Monday at Gwen T. Jackson Elementary School until she came to pick her son up from the school. The school is located in the Amani neighborhood.
“You’re going to get responses from people who don’t live in the community and they can’t prioritize the schools that are in our community,” Brown said.
She said her community has been discussing school closures from the start, but that no one from the district has reached out to Amani United.
“If you guys are serious about transparency … we have neighborhood organizations, grassroots organizations that need to be included,” Brown said.
The Great Schools Committee met on Monday night, where residents continued conversations on how the district will decide which schools to close.
Angela Harris, an MPS educator and chair of the Black Educators Caucus, wants to see MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius go door to door and ask the families what they want to see in their schools and what it would take to send their children back to MPS.
The committee has not finalized its criteria on identifying schools for potential closure and the last scheduled meeting is Oct. 26.
Cassellius says she’d rather host more meetings than rush a decision on which schools to close, even as the clock runs on a December deadline.
She said if the district were to close schools at the end of this school year, policy requires board action by December.
“If I need to add more meetings and we don’t get there, then we’ll add more meetings,” she said. “We will take as long as we have to take to get to a result that we can all be proud of.”
She said the district will commit to continuing community meetings and find ways to increase family and community turnout at the remaining meetings.
“We’re going to work on our communications to see how we can get more families out involved in this process,” Cassellius said.
No schools chosen yet
Cassellius said no schools are officially on the chopping block, though planning firm Perkins Eastman has recommended closing five North Side schools. The schools recommended for closure are Auer Avenue School, Clarke Street School, Hopkins Lloyd Community School, Keefe Avenue School and Siefert School.
The district’s sorting tool has flagged 26 schools for possible closure or merger.
The sorting tool the district is using to flag schools for possible closure is still not public. But factors that are measured using the tool 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.
A Great Schools Committee board member said they first asked for access to the tool at its Sept. 14 meeting.
Michelle Lenski, MPS manager of design and construction, said the district is working to host the tool publicly while protecting the data behind it. She gave no timeline on when it would become public.
‘I would not be able to navigate this’
Brown said the tool is overwhelming and not approachable as a parent and community member.
“The community I’m in? We’re not going to use that tool,” she said.
Hannah Freeman, executive director and lead organizer with Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), said the tool makes more sense when district staff gives context, but that an ordinary community member logging on to learn what is happening would struggle to understand using the tool.
“I have a master’s in education and if you just sent me this link, I would not be able to navigate this,” Freeman said. “Its purpose is meant for this particular exercise, but it doesn’t apply outside of this and that’s the problem.”
Additional factors to consider
Colleston Morgan, executive director of City Forward Collective, an education advocacy group that works across public, charter and private sectors, said he wants to see the district also factor academic performance into the equation.
Bria Tillman, an instructional facilitator teacher with MPS, said the tool doesn’t account for the history behind the data, including why some schools are under-enrolled, staffing and how many children live in the neighborhood versus those being bused in.
She also wants the tool to account for schools that already have been through a merger, like Hopkins Lloyd Community School, and what a second merger would do to those students. Hopkins Lloyd is one of five schools on the original proposed closure list from Perkins Eastman.
Deborah Way-Salinas, Great Schools Committee member and chair of the MICAH Education Task Force, said the tool is still a product of Perkins Eastman, and that’s a perception she believes the district can’t get away from.
“I like that you’re so open to bringing in new data and new ways to filter the information that are equity based. Can we do that before next week?” Way-Salinas asked. “If you can’t do that by next week, do we even need to use this tool? Can we just go deeper into these conversations in a different way?”
Cassellius said what she heard from the room was that the tool “either needs to be made better or thrown out.”
She said district staff will review the criteria the groups proposed and bring additional data they requested, like staff retention and share of students with disabilities at each school, to the Oct. 26 meeting.
Are school closures inevitable or can more be done?
Joshua Taylor, MPS paraprofessional and an organizer with the Milwaukee Party for Socialism and Liberation, doesn’t believe that closing schools will solve the problem of disinvestment and poor schools on the North Side. Instead, he said he wants to see more investment in these schools.
“Expanding the Community School Program, strengthening our community support, sustaining school cultures,” Taylor said. “Closing schools, especially in District 4, doesn’t do any of those things.”
Morgan, who grew up in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, said he also wants to see greater investment into education for Milwaukee’s Black students. He said consolidating under-enrolled schools could help the district concentrate its resources and free up revenue to finance investment in new schools without having to go to a referendum.
“The communities that are being asked to take on the pain of closure and consolidation need to also be the ones at the front of the line for the gains that come on the other side of this,” Morgan said. “District 4 tends to be an afterthought and I understand why: You’re a member of that community and you’re seeing this conversation yet again; you have a lot of reticence and skepticism.”
Harris said it’s important that, if closing schools is a necessary step, it has to be done the right way.
“We know that schools are going to have to close,” Harris said. “If we do this in a way that is student and community centered, and with equity at the center of this work, we can eliminate some of the harm that folks have talked about in this building.”
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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