For years, art teacher Paige Bauske kept a small linocut print in her desk drawer inside her classroom at Riverside University High School.
It was created by her former student, who carved a design into a sheet of linoleum and then used it as a stamp to press onto paper.
Bauske kept the piece because the student later died in a car accident. It felt like a way to honor her and remember her love for art. It was a tangible memory of a favorite student.
But last summer, when 3 feet of floodwater overtook Bauske's classroom on the ground floor of Riverside, she lost the student's piece and nearly all of her classroom's supplies.
"It was really shocking. It was really emotional," she remembers of stepping foot in her classroom for the first time after the storms in August 2025. "I cried when I saw it and it was pretty devastating. I lost so much stuff, including student work that was really important to me.”
Milwaukee Public Schools has spent upwards of $4 million restoring Riverside and reordering furniture, instruments, books and art materials.
But no amount of money can get back that linocut.
Whirlwind cleanup from August 2025 floods in Milwaukee schools
After the floods, Bauske describes the action to clean her classroom like something of a whirlwind.
Crews ripped out destroyed flooring, removed the damaged kilns previously used to fire pottery and demolished half the cabinets that had been inundated by flood water.
"It was kind of hard to tell at first how much was lost, or what was lost," she remembers.
Crews piled the items to throw away in the corner of her room.
"I was able to kind of look through there," she says. "Teachers put a lot of money and time and things into their room. So seeing all the stuff that I bought with my own money to make my room look nice, like decorations, down to just basic supplies like lotion and tissue that students use every day...it was hard."
Also on the ground floor of Riverside were band and orchestra classrooms, refrigerated science storage areas and hydroponic garden supplies, and the school's robotics program. All of it was lost.
Teachers were asked to carefully catalog what they'd lost and suggest materials for the central office to reorder for their classrooms. It took over a year for some of those items to arrive, and some of the orders didn't match what the teachers asked for or needed.
"Towards the end of the school year, we (got) a surprise e-mail that said, 'here is what's being ordered,'" Bauske remembers. "And it was from a website with kindergarten through sixth grade furniture. We teach high school. It was not anything that we put on our spreadsheet and nothing that we wanted."
Bauske and other teachers whose classrooms were destroyed by floods say that Milwaukee Public Schools officials failed to communicate directly with them about how the schools would recover and how long the process would take.
"I think people from the district should have come here to talk to us in person, because communication was nearly impossible. I don't think they understood the situation because they weren't here or had to deal with teaching in those conditions," she says.
Even as the new school year begins, Bauske's classroom still has temporary folding tables for students to sit at during class. The table surfaces are bumpy and not ideal for drawing projects. Luckily, new stools arrived earlier this month and replaced the folding chairs students used last year.
Bauske added that the strongest support she received after the flood came from members and leaders of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, the union representing MPS teachers. She said she's proud of how the union stepped up.
'Make something new and move on': Lessons in art after 2025 flooding
After the floods last year, school started on time at MPS. Bauske and another art teacher were moved into the school's lower gymnasium for several weeks while their classrooms were cleaned.
It wasn't an ideal place to teach art to up to 80 kids in two classes at a time; the gymnasium had few windows and poor lighting. Most of the school's art supplies had been destroyed. The teachers hung string lights to make the space feel cozier.
Instead of a traditional ceramics class where students use pottery wheels to throw clay projects, Bauske had her advanced students work with polymer clay to create small pieces. Polymer clay only needs to be baked instead of being fired in a kiln.
"So I made it work, and I took the pieces home to bake them in my oven," Bauske remembers. "I was dedicated to giving those students the second-level clay experience. But it was not the same."
After she could come back into her classroom, Bauske tried to tie in the lessons she and the entire school community had learned during the flood. She and her students painted a bright pink mural on her classroom wall to bring life back to the space.
"I really like to teach with art that you have to be flexible, you have to accept things and you can't be perfect all the time," she says.
That's especially true in one of her favorite lessons in her ceramics unit. She asks students to make a project out of clay and then destroy it on purpose.
"I teach them you can't keep everything," she says. "So kind of like the flood. Things are going to get destroyed and that's okay. You can make something new and we can move on."
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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