Some Milwaukee Public Schools teachers and staff came straight from school to rail against the district’s plans to cut more than 200 jobs to deal with its budget deficit. More than 100 people gathered to protest the moves at Washington Park Senior Center on Tuesday night.
“We have spoken out since January that the superintendent’s budgeting process and standard of care are destabilizing our schools," Ingrid Walker-Henry, president of the Milwaukee Area Teachers Association, said Tuesday. "What the superintendent says and what she is actually doing at the school level don’t match up.”
Students, parents and teachers lined up at the microphone to speak their minds.
“You have not taken students into consideration. We demand no cuts to classrooms," Reagan High School student Mario Lechuga said.
Tatiana Joseph, a former school board director and parent of a child at Wedgewood Park International School, also stepped up to share her story.
“My child at Wedgewood is losing every single AP position, and the IB coordinator," she said, referring to assistant principals and a coordinator for the International Baccalaureate program, which offers rigorous classes in six subjects and rewards students with advanced diplomas.
Present at the town hall were MPS board directors Kate Vannoy, James Ferguson and Mimi Reza along with Board Vice President Marva Herndon.
MPS families and staff criticize cuts to school leadership teams
Earlier this spring, MPS sent out notices to 263 staff, including 59 assistant principals, that their jobs would not exist next school year. Unions called this move “layoffs," while the school district has used the term “excessing.”
The letters encouraged staff to apply for classroom teaching roles in order to stay in MPS’s orbit. But Amanda Seppanen, an MPS parent, says staff from her child’s school are now forced to leave the district.
She shared a conversation she had with an assistant principal at her son’s school, which she did not name. That assistant principal received an excess letter.
“She is likely being forced out of the profession. She has applied for a job outside of the district, and that district informed her that they have 115 applicants for that administrative job. So do you think it’s just the people being excessed?" she asked of the applicants for jobs in other districts. "Or also the principals who realize they’re going to be asked to run schools without assistant principals?”
The cuts were done in the name of dealing with the district's $46 million budget deficit from last school year.
Reached by phone on Wednesday afternoon, MPS Superintendent Dr. Brenda Cassellius said that the district had to prioritize the teacher at the front of the classroom when looking for places to make cuts.
“Every single employee we have is valued, dedicated and contributing to student success in our schools," she said. "But we had to make really tough decisions, just like families have to make every single day in their household budgets in this really tough economy that we have before us.”
Cassellius has repeated the need for the district to make hard choices to become more financially stable.
The cuts will save the district around $30 million, and Cassellius has highlighted that more than 115 of the jobs were cut from the district’s central office. The other 147 were school-based roles like assistant principals and deans of students.
MPS plans to add 150 teachers to classrooms
While the existing job cuts are moving forward, Cassellius announced earlier this month that she plans to add 150 teachers and paraprofessionals to classrooms next school year.
Employees say those jobs are crucial. But parent Kristen Payne says the district is unlikely to deliver on the promise to add new teachers because changes are driving away employees and scaring off potential new ones.
"So when we hear that positions are being added, we have to ask a very basic question: Who on Earth is going to fill them?” she asked.
In the background of the developments is the fact that MPS is considering closing up to six schools on the city’s northwest side starting in the fall of 2027. Those plans aren’t finalized, but they have created deep concerns among staff about equity and how MPS is serving students while closing schools that serve as crucial centers of community connection.
All of these factors contribute to what union leaders call their push for “cutting contracts, not classrooms.”
The union is planning a picket outside of the school board office on Vliet Street Thursday afternoon ahead of the regularly scheduled board meeting.
There, they’ll urge board members to slow down and reverse the previously approved job cuts.
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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