Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service invites community members to submit opinion pieces of 500-800 words on topics of interest to central city Milwaukee. To send a submission for consideration, please email info@milwaukeenns.org. The views expressed are solely those of the authors.
After more than a decade of delay, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Casselius has finally said what we’ve all known: “I don’t think [MPS] gets to any other solutions…without closing schools.”
She’s right: this is a conversation that’s long overdue, and it’s a harder one now because of the accumulated consequences of more than a decade of denials and deferrals of necessary choices, both from the current school board, and from its predecessors.
At City Forward Collective, we start from a belief that every Milwaukee student – including every MPS student – deserves an excellent education at a high-quality school. Children First is at the top of our guiding principles, and it’s there for a reason: it holds us accountable to putting children at the center of how decisions are made. For every budget or facilities decision that comes up, we approach it through the lens of whether it would result in more Milwaukee students getting the quality education they deserve.
That’s the same lens we bring to this conversation about rightsizing MPS: will the choices made lead to better educational opportunities for MPS students?
Through that lens, the case for action is clear. MPS has far more building space than it needs even as thousands of students sit in overcrowded classrooms. Maintaining that excess space requires resources that instead could go directly to supporting students. And after years of declining enrollment and deferred decisions, a handful of school closures will not solve the problem. MPS needs a comprehensive plan that matches the scale of the problem – and puts more students in stronger schools.
A thriving MPS requires investing in full minds, not half-empty buildings
By the district’s own numbers, the challenges are stark:
- In its most recent report to the Legislature, MPS reported 36 of its school campuses are each less than half-full. Across these campuses, more than 9,000 seats are empty
- Across the district, 30% of MPS’ building capacity goes unused — meaning the district is paying for space for nearly 25,000 students that it doesn’t have. As a comparison: That’s nearly enough space to fit the entire enrollment of Madison Metropolitan School District, the state’s second-largest district.
- And MPS’ challenge isn’t just about half-empty buildings – it’s about inefficient allocation of its resources. MPS also reports 54 buildings at or above 90% utilization; that’s about 8,000 students in overcrowded classrooms, even in a district with too much unused space.
And, all of this sits against the backdrop of a 30% plus decline in the district’s enrollment, and the spectre of two looming fiscal cliffs: a projected $420M five-year cumulative deficit in the district’s operating budget, and a separate $430M plus backlog of critical deferred maintenance.
Here’s the reality: each of these choices has a real cost, borne by students and families – it’s just one we’ve chosen to ignore. The hundreds of millions of dollars MPS has spent on half-empty and unneeded space, are dollars not going into serving students sitting in MPS classrooms today. An under-enrolled school still needs a principal, office staff, heat, cleaning and a roof that costs the same to replace – whether 200 children are underneath it or 600. That money comes out of the same budget that pays for art, music, advanced courses, and librarians.
None of that makes school closure easy. It’s hard on students, its hard on families, it’s hard on staff and its hard on impacted communities. Its disruptive, and even when done with the best of care, the effects on student outcomes are real. Each and every school building holds someone’s memory of a favorite teacher, of a cherished friendship, of a lifelong lesson or a crowning achievement. Closing a school disrupts all of that, and we shouldn’t talk about closing or consolidating schools without acknowledging the real human toll of these decisions; it’s far more than moving students from one building to another.
MPS must make tough decisions
I know this first-hand: for years, making and communicating the hard decision to close a school was a part of my role as a district official in New Orleans. Superintendent Cassellius and the MPS administration deserve credit for committing to public engagement before tough decisions are made – even if the process is missing representation from some key stakeholders.
But how hard these decisions are cannot be an excuse for avoiding them. And that’s exactly what one MPS School Board after another has done. The last two Long-Range Facilities Master Plans MPS has produced each warned of tens of millions of dollars per year being wasted to heat and maintain underutilized and unneeded building space, and of a looming billion-dollar-plus backlog. Each was set aside – caught dust on the shelf, as I put it in 2024.
When this school board asked voters for a referendum and a 30% property tax increase in 2024, it promised a new comprehensive facilities plan by the end of the year. Over two years later, that promise remains unfulfilled – with recommendations from the district’s consultants at Perkins Eastman having been whittled down to a list of just five schools – a “plan” that would not begin to address MPS’s financial, enrollment, or building use problems.
Superintendent Casselius was right to set this plan aside; as I pointed out in this space in January, it was a flawed and inadequate one. Other cities show what a serious response looks like. Cleveland faced a comparable enrollment collapse and voted last December to close or merge 29 schools this year. St. Louis Public Schools has proposed closing 14 by next year, and Minneapolis, which serves about 30,000 students, will potentially close as many as 16.
Our own analysis puts the number MPS ultimately needs to confront in this same range. And, as we always do, we’ll lay out the math behind our analysis here in the coming weeks, as more data becomes available from the district.
The point isn’t that MPS should close schools simply for the sake of closing schools. The measure of a serious plan is whether it leaves more students in stronger schools, directs more resources toward classrooms instead of excess space, addresses overcrowding as well as underenrollment, and puts the district on more sustainable financial footing.
At the end of the day, this comes down to accountability. The Milwaukee Board of School Directors promised residents a comprehensive facilities plan – and the city’s families and taxpayers have done their part. After years of dithering and delay, the school board has an obligation to produce a plan that actually matches the scale of the problem.
For now, the question is what the school board intends to do about the issues sitting in front of it. After years of study and a decade-plus of delay, will it actually make the bold, and yes uncomfortable, decisions necessary to rightsize MPS, and to deliver students and families the educational experiences they deserve? Or will it continue to kick the can down the road, maybe close a few schools, declare progress, and leave another board to have this same conversation a few years from now?
Born and raised in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood and an alum of Milwaukee’s public and private schools, Colleston Morgan Jr was appointed as executive director of City Forward Collective in 2023. Previously, he served as the organization’s vice president, strategy & policy. In his career, Colleston has served as a high school social studies teacher and district administrator in New Orleans as well as an executive with Teach for America. Colleston earned an A.B. in Government from Harvard University and a master’s in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. He is the proud father of two school-aged daughters.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
