Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) held its first of four “Great Schools” Committee meetings Monday.
The Great Schools Committee, along with the Budget Advisory Committee, is tasked with deciding factors that will guide MPS on which schools it will close to save the district money so that it can further reach its goal of raising over $355 million dollars.
MPS plans to raise “needed” funds to expand academic programming, build three new schools, update 20 other schools and address needed improvements throughout the district.
The Great Schools Committee is made up of 15 community members that represent parents, students, administrators, educators, community representatives, and school board members.
The committee will review a variety of factors to recommend to the full school board. MPS will gather the public’s input on committee findings in late September through October. The full school board will make final decisions in late November, alongside the 2027–28 MPS spending plan.
Monday’s meeting gave MPS the opportunity to lay out the district’s detailed finances. CBS 58 reported, “They (MPS) shared their guiding principles, among them: rightsizing classrooms, expanding programming, focusing on equity, and modernizing buildings.”
Equity? What does that even mean to focus on equity?
Perkins Eastman Consulting firm’s report and MPS discussions identified 13 schools that could be closed or merged due to low enrollment and underuse.
A major policy brief from City Forward Collective, an education nonprofit, found that MPS is running at least 25 more buildings than it needs, based on enrollment decline and building utilization. MPS currently operates around 149 buildings in total.
MPS enrollment dropped from 78,000 students in 2008 to 55,000 in 2025.Yet the district still maintains nearly the same number of buildings. MPS is also notorious for refusing to sell buildings to School Choice schools so there are buildings that could be sold but stay empty while MPS plays politics. Every dollar spent on an underused or closed building is a dollar not spent on classrooms, teachers, or building upkeep and maintenance.
MPS Superintendent Dr. Brenda Cassellius said, “There are just a number of things that we need. Air conditioning, obviously, also needs to be addressed. Sprinklers in our schools for fire safety. Just a number of things that we’re going to discuss here.”
These are things MPS should have addressed years ago. Instead, they ignored maintenance, let buildings decay, and now want hundreds of millions of dollars to fix problems they allowed to grow. And Cassellius has already hinted at another referendum. Milwaukee taxpayers are being asked to pay more while Central Office remains bloated with bureaucracy, nepotism, and decades of mismanagement.
Milwaukee deserves a school system that puts students first, not politics. A system that invests in learning, not empty buildings. A system that stops asking taxpayers for more money while refusing to fix its own structural problems.
The Great Schools Committee may help guide the process, but unless MPS finally tightens its belt nothing will change.
