Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning (WCLL) is tucked away on the far south side in a neighborhood surround by the Greenfield suburb on three sides. The school has an innovative kindergarten through twelfth grade, year-round program with good academic achievement. But a high percentage of its students come from the Milwaukee’s north side. In order to save transportation costs, the administration is recommending that we move the program closer to where most the students live. The building of choice is the empty Sarah Scott Middle School, just north of Marquette University.
However, when parents packed into small gym of WCLL for the community meeting last week, they let school board members and administration officials know that they would have no such move. Parents from the present neighborhood were not about to put their children on busses to a school outside of their neighborhood. Black parents stated that they specifically picked WCLL BECAUSE it was outside of their neighborhood. They liked a safe neighborhood next to a suburb. They believed that the Sarah Scott neighborhood is not safe, and they do not want their children out on the playground when gunshots are fired from the street.
One teacher at the meeting said she taught at Sarah Scott, and she believes that the neighborhood is unsafe. Yet only a few blocks away is MacDowell Montessori which draws students from all over the city. So just how safe is this neighborhood? Superintendent Thornton believes that lack of safety is only a perception. He would recommend no school go into that building if safety was an issue.
In the end, it matters not how safe this neighborhood is. As long as parents believe what they believe, they will not send their children to WCLL’s new location. They will pick other schools, many outside the district. The school system will lose tens of thousands of dollars, the Scott building will sit mostly empty, and we will be forced to close WCLL; perhaps the school will not even open next year.
Milwaukee is a city of choice and charters, of open enrollment and 220 transfers, and a fairly liberal public school selection process. Parents have gotten use to putting their children into any school they wish.
A decade ago, the administration tried to obtain many of the same objectives through massive school transfers and closings through the neighborhood school initiative of Superintendent Korte. The school system ignored input from the public. Instead deals were made between elected officials from the city, state, and school board. The initiative failed miserably. Millions of dollars were spent to create facilities that now sit empty.
I pointed out its failure in an op-ed piece I wrote for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. Shortly thereafter, the paper followed up with their own analysis in a three part series that confirmed the initiative’s shortcomings.
The superintendent can move school programs around like pieces on a chessboard, but that does not mean parents and their children will follow. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past. We can move some programs and close some schools but only through a robust community engagement process. And when parents say no, we will have to find other alternatives.
(Note: Unfortunately I can no longer find a posting of the Journal Sentinel’s three-part series, “Addition by Subtraction,” on the web.)
