Milwaukee Public Schools wants to suggest a list of new buildings and schools targeted for investment or renovation before it closes any schools, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said at the Great Schools Committee meeting Monday night.
“We do not want to come with a list of closing,” Cassellius said. “We want a list of building or renovating or doing additions.”
Cassellius said new buildings could make the district a competitive choice for the 60,000 students in the city who don’t attend MPS.
Closures could still follow.
Cassellius told reporters after the meeting that she believes there will be closures and mergers over the long-range facilities plan’s 10 years.
The long-range facilities plan was created by MPS to support student success by ensuring the district’s spaces meet student needs.
New approach address earlier criticism
The approach answers concerns raised at earlier meetings of the Great Schools Committee, an advisory group formed in September and tasked with setting criteria for school closures and investments. At a Sept. 28 meeting, District 4 Board Director James Ferguson warned that families at North Side schools that could be selected to close may leave MPS for nearby charter and voucher schools, and building new schools is what the community deserves.
In January, planning firm Perkins Eastman suggested closing five North Side schools: Auer Avenue School, Clarke Street School, Hopkins Lloyd Community School, Keefe Avenue School and Siefert School.
The list was never official, but Brittney Stevenson, a social worker at Hopkins Lloyd, said during the meeting Monday that it hurt schools trying to increase enrollment. Even students have the potential closure on their minds, she said.
“We’ve heard them be like, ‘Well, we’re not going to be around next year anyways,'” Stevenson said.
How the district used data to categorize schools
Through the course of the Great Schools Committee meetings, the district has shown a tool that uses district data to filter different schools into categories. Categories include closure or merger and building or program investments.
Michelle Lenski, MPS manager of design and construction, said on Monday that the data helps inform the district’s decisions but isn’t the only factor.
Factors the data uses to categorize each school include its enrollment versus building capacity (known as a utilization rate), the cost of deferred maintenance ( repairs that have been postponed for budget reasons), a school’s proximity to others and how much or little a school’s enrollment has grown in recent years.
Ingrid Walker-Henry, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, said union members at Siefert, Clarke, Keefe, Auer and Hopkins Lloyd asked for investment last year and “the district completely blew them off.”
“What I hear right now is a blaming of deferred maintenance and trying to lead people to the conclusion of ‘Well, I guess we should get rid of them,'” Walker-Henry said.
Deirdre Lafford, principal at Siefert School, where the utilization rate is at 33.33%, said despite the low percentage, the school has space to expand special education units.
“We also have two STEM labs,” Lafford said. “We have space for a sensory room, we have space for small group rooms.”
Rebuild Siefert?
Lafford suggested a new building on Siefert’s site at 1547 N. 14th St. could serve both Siefert and Brown Street students. Perkins Eastman had proposed merging Siefert into Brown Street.
Siefert currently has no deferred maintenance costs, but it was built in 1903, doesn’t have air conditioning and isn’t up to date with accessibility standards despite identifying over a quarter of students for special education, according to district data.
“You could shift this in a way where a brand new building would be built in a better position, neighborhood safety traffic-wise … and draw those children that left Brown Street, left Siefert and went to the shiny new [Milwaukee Academy of Science],” Lafford said.
The school is more residential than some others in the area, without busy streets on either side of the building.
Lafford said the school has room for the district to build a new school without disrupting students’ education at the old Siefert building during construction.
Staff call for transportation investments
Staff at Hopkins Lloyd Community School and Siefert said transportation is a tangible investment the district could make to increase enrollment at both schools. That request runs against the district’s current direction.
The district is spending the school year deciding how to cut $3.5 million in transportation costs, which could include consolidating stops where kids might have to walk farther to catch the bus.
Transportation director David Fifarek told NNS in July that consolidating stops could save up to $11 million, but the district is weighing how to implement this solution without creating safety issues and risks in the process.
At Siefert, Lafford said families don’t want their students crossing busy streets like Walnut Street, 27th Street or Fond du Lac Avenue to get to school.
“We lose kids because they just opt for a school that they can get a bus and go to,” Lafford said. “We can’t get kids from Hillside because the walk across that Sixth Street and the bridge.”
Stevenson suggested that when families choose a farther school with a bus assignment, it may cost MPS more money in the long run because the district ends up transporting them further than if they went to the school closest to them.
Cassellius said two things can be true: The district has an $87 million transportation budget, but that doesn’t mean it can’t prioritize local transportation for some schools.
“If we’re going to do that for equity purposes and because we think it’s better for the … family and for the child, we just have to know it’s going to cost more,” Cassellius said.
Cassellius floated the idea of using the district’s vans to help transport students who would otherwise need to cross busy streets.
As a social worker, Stevenson sees how walking to school is a barrier for kids and parents at Hopkins Lloyd.
“They need boots because it’s not plowed, it’s not shoveled. They need coats,” she said. “They’ve got a baby at home they don’t want to take out in the cold for a 20-minute walk there and a 20-minute walk back.”
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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