Like many parents of Lincoln Avenue School students, Naomi Kroneck woke up on June 30 to a digital deluge.
“My phone had blown up with all the messages because I’m on the neighborhood Facebook group and all the neighbors had posted about it — then Milwaukee Public Schools (did)," she remembers. "So that’s how we woke up to it at like seven o'clock in the morning," Kroneck says.
She learned that the elementary school her two children attended had been destroyed by fire the night before. The fire is still under investigation.
There were no injuries in the fire, but by morning, Kroneck and the entire school community knew they wouldn’t return to that building ever again.
The school advisory committee, made up of teachers, parents and school staff, ultimately chose to move the entire Lincoln Avenue student body of more than 400 to Casimir Pulaski High School in the fall.
The new campus is just 1.5 miles from Lincoln.
'You have to be very honest:' Lincoln elementary parent shares how she spoke to her young kids about the fire
While Lincoln Avenue staff and the district now rush to finalize the details for the upcoming school year, parents are trying to talk to their young children about what happened to their beloved school.
Kroneck attended a recent community meeting about Lincoln. She explained to the crowd how she approached telling her nine-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son about the fire.
“You need to be very honest with them. If you’re trying to hide things and this and that, they’re going to find out eventually. Kids are nosy like that. So just be honest with them and communicate what’s going on," she said.
Kroneck's kids reacted very differently from one another when they learned about the fire. She remembers her son Avery's reaction.
“With my son it wasn’t too hard, because he’s very to-the-point, so I’m like ‘this happened’ and I showed him everything. And he was like ‘oh, okay. So where are we going now?’" she recalls.
But Alyssa, who's about to turn 10, took the news really hard.
“She got very emotional, she cried about it, we had a whole conversation with her," Kroneck remembers. "She still sometimes is like ‘well Mommy, but that was my school. What are we going to do about my school?’”
Since the fire, Kroneck says Alyssa has had a nightmare about the school burning. It’s been a scary time for the whole family.
MPS will shuttle kids who walk to Lincoln Avenue to Pulaski in the fall
Kroneck is among parents who are happy with the plan to keep all the students, teachers and programs together when they move to Pulaski.
Damaris Ayala, Lincoln’s principal, says the committee tasked with picking a new site axed four other options because there wouldn’t have been enough space for all the students to transfer to the same campus.
MPS says it plans to offer a shuttle from the Lincoln campus to Pulaski so that students who were used to walking to school don’t have to change their routine.
Ayala says that many of Lincoln’s students live in the surrounding, tightly knit neighborhoods.
One of those students is Andrea Castillo’s son Matias. He’ll start 5K in the fall and Castillo says he’s been excited all summer about going to school. She’s pleased with the plans to maintain the Lincoln community in a new place.
"I think everything is going to be the same," she says in Spanish. "The same teachers, the same protocols, and the school is going to accommodate the kids nicely."
Castillo says Matias been shaken up by the whole experience of losing his school, but that she feels confident in the plan.
Pulaski High School is a huge campus, but district officials say it’s uniquely suited to host students from two schools. Until just this spring, both Pulaski students and students from the charter Carmen Schools of Science and Technology co-existed in the building. In the fall, Carmen students are moving to a new campus of their own.
Lincoln Avenue's elementary students will have their own entrance, their own stairwells and their own classrooms.
One of the big decisions still pending? How to get a playground onto the high school campus.
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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