Does a crisis exist among North Side schools?
Most agree they face serious challenges, but there’s some debate on why and how to handle it.
In late February, a City Forward Collective report examined achievement and growth scores on the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction state report card and found that Milwaukee’s North Side is the epicenter for Wisconsin’s Black-white education gap.
The organization, which advocates against educational inequality and for increased access to school choice, suggested solutions like consolidating under-enrolled schools, enacting stronger accountability measures for all schools and equally funding each school type – public, charter and private schools.
Superintendent Brenda Cassellius welcomes the critiques from the report but wants to make sure the community is aware of the work Milwaukee Public Schools is doing to make improvements on the North Side.
“Our students in the center city and on the North Side are not forgotten under this administration,” Cassellius said. “We want to take our kids who have less and give them more.”
Cassellius and others shared their ideas for how to improve North Side schools.
Recognize historical divestment
To Angela Harris, chair of the Black Educators Caucus MKE and a teacher who has worked in Milwaukee North Side schools for almost her whole career, the discussion should not be about whether schools are failing Black students but whether systems are failing to be equitably resourced for Black students.
Harris said it’s essential that conversations about North Side schools acknowledge the decades-long systematic disinvestment that has occurred.
Milwaukee Public Schools has underserved North Side students for many years, Cassellius said.
“They have the oldest building stock; they have a hard time securing permanently licensed teachers,” Cassellius said. “Oftentimes they have part-time teachers because the buildings are underutilized.”
Cassellius said part-time teachers go from school to school, straining school culture and making it hard to create a sense of family and community within the school.
Harris said solutions should address the continued divestment on the North Side, including the closing of grocery stores, health care centers and pharmacies.
Harris suggests that schools invest in wrap-around services to address issues relating to disinvestment, following a model like Bay View High School and South Division High School, which have a Sixteenth Street Community Health Center clinic in the school.
“Imagine if you take an underutilized building in a community that’s suffering from this type of disinvestment and you put a dental office, you put an eye doctor … you put a medical clinic in there, or you put a grocery store,” Harris said. “Now, you’re figuring out a way to utilize space in the community that could otherwise just end up being another abandoned building.”
Invest in facilities
Senior Elijah Smalls said his school, Milwaukee Marshall High School, has a really nice community on the city’s Northwest Side.
He feels that Marshall has several programs to help him succeed, including the college and career center.
Still, he said, the school doesn’t have enough extracurriculars. Smalls wants to see more activities and sports for students.
For example, Smalls said, the school has baseball jerseys but no baseball team.
“They need to put funding in that for the way people be at Marshall,” Smalls said. “They need something to do.”
Smalls also wants to see money spent to update building facilities like bathrooms before pouring more money into increased security.
“They chose to get security scanners instead of fixing up the place,” Smalls said, referring to 78 new security scanners the district purchased for $2 million for high schools in 2025. “You clearly see cracks on the floor.”
Cassellius said the district had plans to invest in North Side schools before she became superintendent, like the 53206 Initiative, which was undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, she said, the district again plans to invest millions of dollars into several schools on Milwaukee’s North Side.
The MPS board of directors is considering investing $12.9 million in four North Side elementary schools – Brown Street Academy, Douglas Middle School, Gwen T. Jackson School and Starms Discovery Learning Center – to improve building facilities, update playgrounds and outdoor areas, and add specialized sensory spaces.
At North Division High School, which is 92.4% Black, according to the latest state enrollment data, the district is discussing a plan to invest $2.4 million to revitalize career and technical education labs to strengthen career pathways.
The district has discussed investing $3.3 million to strengthen the agricultural programs at River Trail School of Agricultural Science, another predominately Black school on the city’s far Northwest Side. The school serves as a feeder to Harold S. Vincent High School of Agricultural Science.
Holding schools accountable for student success
Harris said accountability should be measured through more than standardized test scores.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction state report card measures metrics like growth and achievement using standardized test scores.
Not all students test the same, she said, and while test scores should be a component of accountability, the district and state should also consider factors like how students feel about their school community.
Harris said this plays a huge role in how students perform academically.
“If you ask the majority of the students at our school … They love the school community, they love the teachers there,” Harris said. “That makes them want to try hard and want to do well.”
Harris also emphasized the high concentration of Black educators on the North Side, who help promote success among Black students.
Harris said quality Black educators teaching Black students directly contributes to higher achievement outcomes and graduation rates, which is supported by research from the University of Maryland.
“There are tons of gems on the North Side of Milwaukee,” Harris said. “Educators who are doing great work, schools that are doing great work, that are building great relationships with their students, but they just happen to be in neighborhoods that are being constantly disinvested and having resources pulled out from underneath them.”
Cassellius said she plans to hold low-performing schools accountable by making adjustments throughout the year to get an ongoing gauge on how students are doing.
She said this involves looking at instruction. She points to the district’s new literacy plan — since so many students in the district read below their grade level, the district is training all educators on the science of reading.
Then, Cassellius said, the district wants to inspect how the strategy is working by looking at test scores and doing walk-throughs at schools.
Mixed on closing buildings
One suggestion from the report garnered mixed opinions – closing and consolidating under-enrolled and low-performing schools.
Harris questions whether closing schools would help if there isn’t intentionality behind the closures.
She thinks the district is using its long-range facilities plan to be intentional with equitable distribution of resources.
Cassellius said consolidation might not bring immediate savings, but it would bring savings over the years. Consolidation would help eliminate deferred maintenance costs like replacing roofs or boilers.
In January, the district’s long-range facilities plan proposed closing and consolidating five North Side schools due to factors including under-enrollment and outdated buildings.
Colleston Morgan, executive director of City Forward Collective, said the proposed plan to consolidate the schools is insufficient to the scale of the challenge the city is facing.
Cassellius said the district did not feel ready to make a decision by the end of this school year. If closures happen during the 2027-28 school year, she would need to bring the recommendation to the MPS board by the end of this year.
But one thing that isn’t calculated is the cost to the community, Cassellius said. If the district closes schools, she said MPS must be intentional about repurposing buildings to become assets to the community.
“Either through housing opportunities, public services that can be brought into the community, redeploying for rec services of some sort or partnerships with other nonprofits,” Cassellius said.
From a student perspective, Smalls said that closures would spur a lot of anger in the community and inconvenience students. If his school, Milwaukee Marshall High School, ever closed, he would have to walk an extra 15 minutes to another high school.
“It really wouldn’t be fair to the people,” Smalls said. “People don’t really have the privilege to move around like that.”
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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