For Such A Time As This: Milwaukee's School Board Has to Move from Apathy to Activism

Five schools. $355 million. A consultant's report telling Milwaukee what everybody in this city already knows. This is not a moment for another committee meeting where the board nods along to a slide deck and waits for permission to act. It is also not a time to use the Great Schools Committee as a facade for public input while secretly planning for the inevitable (we’ve been there; done that).

This is a moment for the Milwaukee Public Schools Board to actually lead — because right now, the state legislature, the funding formula, and a decade-old real estate law have done more to shape MPS's future than the board itself has.

That has to change. Not with another study. With decisions.

As the district has announced the makeup of and intentions for the Great Schools Committee, I posit the following for consideration by the MPS School Board:

Stop waiting on permission. Start fighting for the buildings.

For a decade, Wisconsin's Surplus Property Law has forced the City of Milwaukee — the only entity in the state that owns its own school district's buildings — to hand vacant schools over to charter and private operators before MPS gets a real shot at repurposing them itself. No other district in Wisconsin operates under this leash. That's not an accident, and it's not going to fix itself.

The board doesn't get to treat this as background noise while it debates which five buildings to close. It needs to be in Madison, loudly, lobbying now for movement in the next legislative session. Demanding repeal — not asking nicely, demanding. Because every month this board stays quiet is another month the state gets to decide what happens to buildings Milwaukee families already paid for. Help us help ourselves. That's not a talking point. That's the board's job description.

Absolutely, positively, Do NOT defer to referendum. Full stop.

Milwaukee taxpayers (and Wisconsinites in general) are not the backstop for the state's failure to fund its own constitutional obligation. The board needs to say that plainly, publicly, and often; not float another referendum as the path of least resistance. Milwaukee has already paid. Repeatedly. It's the state's turn to fund schools at two-thirds of instructional cost and reimburse special education at least 90 percent, and the board should be making that case in press conferences and legislative hearings, not burying it in a budget memo.

If the board goes back to voters before it has exhausted every ounce of pressure on Madison, it isn't protecting Milwaukee residents. It's letting the state off the hook…again.

This should be a “full court press”—the mayor, common council, county executive and county board need to work in tandem and use Milwaukee’s tax revenue as leverage at the negotiation table.

Use every tool already sitting on the table.

The State Treasurer's office runs the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands program specifically to help municipalities finance capital projects at below-market rates. It exists. It's available right now. Pair a BCPL loan with the proceeds from closing five schools, and the board can fund sprinklers, HVAC, and roofing without touching a single taxpayer's property tax bill. There is no excuse for this not to already be in motion.

Closures are a planning tool, not a retreat.

Closing five schools should not just trim a budget it should fix the map. MPS has South Side programs bursting past capacity with nowhere to expand, sitting a few miles from larger North Side buildings running half-empty. The board should be moving high-demand, over-capacity programs into that space immediately, not treating closures and capacity planning as two separate conversations that happen to overlap. That disconnect is exactly the kind of reactive drift the board needs to stop tolerating from itself.

Put teachers where the need is — not where they'd prefer to be.

The board's own internal transfer policy lets teachers choose their schools, and predictably, the highest-need buildings lose out every time. That's a policy the board wrote, and a policy the board can rewrite. Assignment by seniority and demonstrated need isn't punitive, it's the board finally taking responsibility for equity inside its own walls instead of hoping it sorts itself out.

This board was elected to make decisions, not absorb them.

Every one of these fixes is within reach. None of them requires a miracle; they require a board and superintendent willing to stop being passengers in its own district's future. Milwaukee doesn't need another advisory committee meeting. It needs a board that picks a fight in Madison, closes the buildings it has to close on its own terms, and rebuilds its footprint like it actually intends to run this district for the next fifty years, not just survive the next five.