Milwaukee Public Schools picked an interesting day to tell the public it lost $450,000 to fraud. On Tuesday, November 3, 2026, as voters across Wisconsin headed to the polls and every newsroom in the state focused on the race for governor and legislative races, MPS disclosed it had fallen victim to “bank impersonation fraud.”
The news arrived in an afternoon email to the district’s finance team that the district forwarded to “media partners.” The district says it learned of the fraud on Monday. U.S. Bank has clawed back $255,000 so far, and MPS is still chasing the remaining $195,000. The FBI, the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center and the Milwaukee Police Department have been notified. As of Tuesday evening, the district’s own online newsroom had nothing about it.
Milwaukee reporter A.J. Bayatpour summed it up best:
The timing is not the only thing that smells. Tucked into the same email was a leadership change. Deputy Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Buros will serve as chief financial officer “in an acting capacity” while the district investigates. MPS would not explain what happened to Aycha Sawa, the former city comptroller hired in September 2024 to clean up the district’s books. The district declined to comment on personnel matters and only confirmed that Sawa is still employed there.
MPS also will not say how the fraud happened, when the money left its accounts, or how anyone discovered it. It promised “short-term and long-term controls” but would not specify what those controls are. Superintendent Brenda Cassellius offered a statement calling the theft “a sobering reminder of the sophisticated financial scams that occur every day across the country.”
Sophisticated or not, this kind of scam is no mystery in Milwaukee. In 2025, scammers posing as a contractor got the City of Milwaukee to send a $460,866 library payment to a fake account by using an email address that swapped “.com” for “.us.” Nobody has said whether MPS fell for the same trick. But the city’s close call was public, and those running a $1.6 billion school district should have been paying attention.
This is the same district whose last superintendent, Keith Posley, resigned in June 2024 after the state threatened to withhold funding because MPS was months behind on required financial reports. It is the same district that saw the state withhold about $42 million in aid after falling behind on those reports for a second year in a row. It is the same district whose auditors found it overspent its 2024-25 budget by $46 million, a problem Cassellius admitted had been going on for “many, many years.”
And it is the same district that let lead paint crumble in its classrooms until children got hurt. In 2025, city officials connected childhood lead poisoning cases to MPS schools for the first time. Nine schools were temporarily shut down, and the cleanup bill ballooned from about $25 million to $43 million.
Every time, the pattern is the same. Something goes badly wrong, the public finds out late, and those in charge promise new controls are on the way. Now Cassellius is already floating another referendum, two years after Milwaukee voters approved $252 million more for MPS.
A district that cannot file reports on time, keep lead paint off its walls, or spot a fake bank has no business asking taxpayers for another dime. It is one more reason this bloated system needs to be broken up and rebuilt.
If MPS had nothing to hide, Cassellius would stand in front of cameras explaining exactly how $450,000 walked out the door and what became of her chief financial officer. Instead, the district slipped the news out on the one afternoon it could count on everyone looking elsewhere. The school board should demand a full public accounting, and so should lawmakers in Madison. Milwaukee families and taxpayers deserve answers, not an Election Day email.
