An overnight fire destroyed Lincoln Avenue Elementary School on Milwaukee's south side Monday night.
There were no injuries or deaths related to the fire. Milwaukee Public Schools has announced it will collect parent feedback on where to relocate the school's 427 students in the fall.
But in the hours after the blaze began, the Milwaukee Fire Department reported that the 109-year-old school does not have a sprinkler system. Milwaukee Public Schools confirmed to media outlets that only 20 of the district's roughly 140 campuses have sprinklers.
That's been a shocking realization for families. But it's fairly common among school districts with older buildings.
Wisconsin state law requires automatic sprinkler systems in buildings over 60 feet tall, but it provides exemptions for buildings constructed before 1974.
Carlos Velasquez Sanchez, the fire education director for the Milwaukee Fire Department, said the cause of the fire at Lincoln Avenue is under investigation.
"Milwaukee Fire Department Chief Aaron Lipski has been very adamant about the importance of revisiting and changing this law," Velasquez Sanchez told WUWM. "The city has a high number of older buildings which are grandfathered not to have sprinkler systems. We have had many fires, including fatal ones, that may have had a different outcome if a sprinkler system was in place."
How common is it for old buildings, especially schools, not to have sprinklers?
Mark Lieberman is a reporter covering school finance at EdWeek, a national publication that focuses on education reporting. In 2023, he asked EdWeek's research team to look into how many schools actually had the lifesaving sprinkler systems.
He told WUWM Education Reporter Katherine Kokal what the team found.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Lieberman says the lack of school sprinkler systems is a nationwide issue.
Mark Lieberman: Our research center at EdWeek talked to a nationally representative sample of school district leaders across the country, asking them how many of the school buildings in their district have sprinkler systems installed. And the results showed that one in five of the superintendents who responded said that none of the buildings in their school district had sprinklers, and about slightly less than half of the respondents said all of their buildings do. So that's a pretty big gap where the remainder have at least some buildings in their school district that do not have sprinklers. And this is a nationwide survey, so it's a pretty widespread phenomenon.
Katherine Kokal: We know that this is really persistent in older buildings. Why don't school districts have these sprinkler systems in their buildings?
So I learned in the course of doing this reporting that fire codes and regulations that require sprinkler systems in newly-constructed buildings really started to emerge in the middle of the 20th century. There were a handful of incidents in the 1950s and 1960s that kicked off this nationwide trend of mandating sprinkler systems in new schools, [and] newly-constructed buildings in general.
Those regulations and rules didn't really exist before that. There is a large portion of the nation's school buildings that were built prior to the period when sprinkler systems became required. So the challenge basically is it's very difficult to install a new modern sprinkler system in an old building. And so even in cases where there's an interest in retrofitting an old building with a new system to kind of meet the requirements of these mandates, it's very difficult to do that and also very costly.
The school where the fire occurred here had functioning smoke detectors. What does this mean for students? Does that mean that we just need to hope that everybody follows fire drills to stay safe in old buildings?
There's no easy answer to the question of what is sufficient to protect against the possibility of an anticipated disaster. But I would say in general that, there is a pretty substantial gap nationwide within your state, within any particular school district, between the agreed upon standards for safety, modern technological capacity, and just kind of general building propriety. You know, there's a pretty big gap between what those standards are and what school districts across the board and school buildings across the board have.
On a nationwide scale, there's billions and billions of dollars of deferred maintenance that school districts are still working through in terms of getting their buildings up to speed on basic things like having air conditioning, having some of these safety precautionary systems in place. I think without a really substantial across the board investment from, state governments, the federal government, and a kind of broader national conversation about what a school building that has adequate facilities looks like... I think there is always going to be more risk than any of us would want.
You can read Lieberman's full report here.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
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