The first bell of the new school year rang this week across the Milwaukee-area. More than 60,000 students went back to school across Milwaukee Public Schools.
It was also the start of the first full school year in Milwaukee for MPS Superintendent Dr. Brenda Cassellius. She took the district's top job in March and immediately jumped into addressing the toxic lead paint in the district's aging buildings.
Following that was a state audit of the district's finances and academics, historic flooding and major staffing and teaching position change ups in the district.
Cassellius sat down with WUWM education reporter to discuss the start of the school year, the status of the lead paint and flooding cleanup projects and her focus on literacy and gun violence prevention.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So it's kind of unusual to start a conversation like this with a question not directly about kids, but I think that the condition of our school buildings will directly impact students. So what's the latest on the flooding damage in MPS campuses?
Yes, so as you know, we were already stabilizing lead paint within our schools. And so our crews have been in there working around the clock to stabilize lead painting. And then all of a sudden, we had this historic flood in Milwaukee. And that became quite a challenge in around 24 of our schools. We were immediately going in and assessing the damage. We had about four schools that were damaged a little bit more than the others. The rest were just a little bit here or there that we could mop up and get fixed. But we have two schools that were significantly damaged. That's Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education and Riverside University High School. And so our crews were in there drying it out and doing all of the corrections that needed to happen.
However, at those two schools, they may need to relocate some classrooms. There's plenty of space in the building for that to happen. New technology is going to have to be purchased for Riverside. You know, they lost a whole tech lab, for instance. That is going to be a challenge and quite expensive to replace.
Nothing like a last-minute curveball at the end of the summer, right before school. You mentioned this, but you ended the school year last year promising that by (the first day of school), teams would have addressed and cleaned up the toxic lead paint in all MPS schools built before 1950. I think that's around 50 schools. Did that happen?
That did happen, and we are so proud of our team that really rallied our partner, JCP, that came in and helped us get enough painters. We had so many crews working around the clock to get the painting done, stabilize the painting. Now, I'll have to say, some of our walls might look a little spotted, but we'll go back and do all those cosmetic improvements throughout the year. But we wanted to first put safety as our top priority and make sure that we were able to get all of the lead stabilized prior to school start.
OK, and the plan now is to address the schools built between 1950 and 1978, right?
That's correct. So we'll have all of our schools done by the end of this calendar year and hopefully be able to put this behind us. And then we put in $16 million, investing into additional custodial workers, painters, plasterers, electricians, plumbers, to make sure that we have the crew ready to go and to maintain our facilities and keep them clean. And then we'll have a monitoring program with the Milwaukee Department of Health who will come in and regularly test our school sites so that we're making sure that we are keeping them safe and clean for our students and all of our staff.
Last week the state announced that it had released another $17 million that it had previously withheld from our public schools due to failures in financial reporting, which really rocked a lot of people's trust in our public schools. I know this happened before you got here, but there's still about $8 million floating out there from the state. Can you talk about where that money will go and what the process is for getting that last bit of money?
The hold back was in our special education funding. And so, that's just going to go right back into our special ed general fund for servicing students who have disabilities. And so it wasn't as though they weren't getting those funds and services. They absolutely got those services. However, in this year's budget, we just accounted for that. So it's nice to have it in the bank actually so we can really count on it and not be in deficit.
But it is a true testament of the team and our partnership with the Department of Public Instruction. And we have been working with MGT, an external project management firm, to really begin to look at the control environment within our finances so that we can win back the trust of the public and make sure that we're meeting deadlines, that the state is getting the information accurately, that both systems are speaking seamlessly to one another. And that's the system that we are building right now.
We got $16 million a week or so ago, another $17 million this week, and we're just really excited about this progress that we're making and that it was recognized by the department such that we will no longer be in corrective action and we have a plan in order to move forward that they have approved, which was why they released the $17 million and the $8 million will be released shortly after this broadcast because we have provided all of the documents that we needed to our auditor and the auditor then will issue their final audit sometime mid-September.
As students go back to school, some will see changes regarding who's in front of the classroom, right? You moved 181 people out of jobs that were previously assigned to the central office, although people didn't necessarily work in the central office. You called that move "excessing” their jobs last school year.
But the teachers union has reported that this move resulted in a few positions where fully licensed teachers were actually replaced by employees whose licenses had stipulations. These types of licenses used to be called emergency licenses. How do you respond to that?
Yeah, so there are a handful of teachers that we're looking into to make sure that, you know, out of the 100 and nearly 150 teachers who were excessed, about 30 went into the classroom. And so we're really proud of that, that we were able to get that number of teachers to go back into the classroom. And then there are just a handful, I think it's three teachers who have had some licensing issues that we need to get to the bottom of and resolve. And so we're doing that work now in collaboration with the union.
Some of those jobs that were excessed, though, were literacy coaches. I mean, this is a core tenet of one of your goals as the superintendent is to increase literacy rates. So how does moving those jobs into teaching positions still accomplish that goal?
So our focus this year is to ensure that there's a permanent licensed teacher in every single classroom. When you have 30 students in a classroom with a substitute teacher or a permitted teacher, no amount of coaching is going to help that situation without having a permanent licensed teacher. So we're taking a focus with our literacy on tier one instruction, that means the child's first teacher and teacher of record is the teacher who has to have the skill set in order to deliver.
The literacy coaches who were at the district office are experts in their area, and we felt as though they would be better placed within the classroom, serving those students in a permanent manner. We also do still have coaches and folks who are at central office, who are licensed teachers, who are supporting our teachers out in the field, new teacher mentors, literacy coaches. So we didn't get rid of the whole entire unit. We just made reductions in the area.
You were pretty incensed last spring, I would say, at a school board meeting when you shared with the community that more than 41 students died last year. I'm sure that number has ticked up because we had this conversation in May. About 20 of those student deaths were gun-related. That was the data that we had at the time. That is an unfathomable number, right? For anyone who works in and around children, losing almost 50 students in a school year is unbelievable to imagine.
So you've kind of taken some steps on this. How do you plan to make students safer in the community, because these deaths obviously occurred outside of school? How do you address student safety when this violence and these problems are happening outside of the school doors?
It is devastating and it's needless tragedies that are happening to our children as young as four years old. I was really shocked by the frequency that I was seeing each week of the number of deaths were coming across my desk for children to gun violence. We've seen some of that stave off this summer, but there have been deaths this summer, which is unfortunate, and those families, I can only imagine how tragic it is for them.
So the thing that I'm doing is working with (The Milwaukee Police Department), working with the mayor's office, working with partners across violence interrupters, our own parent coordinators, making sure that our social workers have the information to be able to help families understand that they should lock up their weapons and guns. (We’re) giving out gun locks to our families and making sure that they have that, making sure our students understand the dangers of handling weapons that may or may not be loaded and all that that risk brings and that risky behavior.
So doing that prevention work and just making sure that whatever we can leverage in terms of my call to action, my advocacy, lifting and using the microphone to be able to share this really important message that our children are precious and we need to make sure that they're not put in harm's way in any circumstance. Certainly, none of the students had, you know, died of gun violence in our schools. But I feel responsible for the entire community and to do my part as best that I possibly can to elevate this issue and make sure that we're all working in a coordinated way to ensure that we have fewer deaths, if not no deaths, this school year to gun violence.
Listeners might remember that you started in March. So this is the start of your first full school year as superintendent. You kind of picked up in the middle of a lot last spring. What are your top two or three goals going into the school year?
More sleep. But really, we have three big rocks that we want to push this year. And the first one is to create safe and welcoming schools. You know, we just talked about that. So it's how do we reach our families and really ensure that they feel welcomed, make sure that our students feel welcomed, make sure that our schools are safe. So that's the first one.
The second one is making sure that students are reading at grade level. We'll have a huge push this year where already this summer we've been doing a lot of professional development for our teachers to make sure that they have the materials and know how to use the materials and are trained for foundational literacy, not just for emerging readers, but also for our students who are non-readers right now to make sure that they have the skills to catch up.
And then thirdly, we are looking at operational excellence. Obviously, the governor's audit came through showing that we had significant work to do within the central office, not only with building trust outside of the department, but also, you know, within the district and how we have, how we work with one another, how we respect one another, and the control environment of the standard ways that we do our work and the processes and how we do our work, and the service and customer service that we provide to our community and to our families, to our students, to our educators and our school leaders. And so I did some restructuring early on in the year so that we could be better positioned to focus on all three of these things, academic excellence, operational excellence, and safety and security.
Katherine Kokal is the education reporter at 89.7 WUWM - Milwaukee's NPR. Have a question about schools or an education story idea? You can reach her at kokal@uwm.edu
