Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said she would rather miss a December deadline than rush decisions on school closures in Milwaukee Public Schools.
No school is officially slated for closure, Cassellius said.
In January, planning firm Perkins Eastman recommended the district close five North Side schools as part of its long-range facilities plan review: Auer Avenue School, Clarke Street School, Hopkins Lloyd Community School, Keefe Avenue School and Siefert School.
Under district policy, Cassellius said the Board of School Directors must act by December for a school to close at the end of this school year. Enrollment for next fall opens in February, so a January vote would push any closures back another year.
Cassellius told residents at the Oct. 12 Great Schools Committee meeting that she’d like to meet that deadline so the district can plan its budget, but she won’t let it drive the process.
“We will take as long as we have to take to get to a result that we can all be proud of,” Cassellius said. “If we are not able to get there (by December), then we just have to deal with the consequences.”
The Great Schools Committee is an advisory group tasked with setting criteria for school closures.
The district moved the committee’s Oct. 26 meeting, which was to be the last, to Wednesday, Nov. 4, at Starms Discovery Learning Center, 2035 N. 25th St. It also added two new meetings: one on Monday, Nov. 9, at Brown Street Academy, 2029 N. 20th St., and a final meeting on Monday, Nov. 16, at North Division High School, 1011 W. Center St.
The final three meetings welcome community participation and input.
What’s happened so far
At two previous meetings, the district used a Perkins Eastman tool that looks at factors related to enrollment and location to filter schools into categories including closure or merger, investment or a building addition.
A school is flagged for closure or merger if it uses less than half its capacity, hasn’t grown enrollment in five years and sits within a mile of another underutilized MPS school.
Using those criteria, 26 of the 134 schools measured with the tool were sorted into the closure-or-merger category. But when the measure was changed to include only schools at less than 30% of capacity, that number went down to three.
Pushback
Each school Perkins Eastman originally proposed to close is in board District 4 on Milwaukee’s North Side. The tool has garnered complaints from residents who say it penalizes schools for the conditions created by long-term North Side disinvestment.
At the Sept. 28 meeting, Angela Harris, an MPS educator and chair of the Black Educators Caucus MKE, said the district also should look at other factors that may show whether a school is running efficiently.
“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 asked. “Because people are willing to choose that school despite where it’s located.”
Harris has spent much of her teaching career in North Side District 4 schools and said the district will keep coming back to this conversation if disparities among the schools continue.
“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 at the Sept. 28 meeting.
At the same meeting, 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.”
Why more meetings
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.
Brown said she didn’t know about the Great Schools Committee on Oct. 12 at Gwen T. Jackson Elementary School until she came to pick her son up from the school, which is located in the Amani neighborhood.
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 at the meeting.
In a statement, the district said it rescheduled the Oct. 26 meeting “to make sure as many people as possible can attend meetings” without conflicting with that night’s Brewers’ World Series game.
Cassellius said the district is committed to the community meetings and will look for ways to get more families to the remaining ones.
“We’re going to work on our communications to see how we can get more families out involved in this process,” Cassellius said.
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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