The match of Brenda Cassellius and Milwaukee Public Schools has been seven years in the making.
In 2018, the Minneapolis native was serving as Minnesota’s education commissioner for outgoing Gov. Mark Dayton when the Milwaukee superintendent job came open with Darienne Driver’s departure. It felt like a particularly good fit with a former state superintendent, Tony Evers, newly in the governor’s office. But MPS hired internally, without opening the job to outside applicants, and promoted Keith Posley from interim superintendent to the permanent position.
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By the time Posley resigned in 2024, Cassellius had three years as the head of Boston Public Schools under her belt and was back in Minnesota leading Fresh Energy, a climate policy nonprofit. MPS called her this time, but she wasn’t ready to quit her post at the nonprofit for the interim position. After a monthslong search and hiring process, she was offered the permanent role last February.
“Milwaukee offered children who were about 90% experiencing poverty, and the achievement was really poor,” Cassellius says when asked what drew her to MPS. “This was something that I wanted to do – to come and make a difference for all of those kiddos.”
When she started in March, she stepped into a district riddled with urgent challenges. Hazardous levels of lead contamination had been discovered in multiple schools in February, and the district missed deadlines to report its financial data to the state, resulting in a withholding of state aid. This all came after narrow approval of a $252 million operational referendum, leaving many constituents questioning the district’s accountability.
“We had to really think about the moment that Milwaukee Public Schools was in,” says former board director Jilly Gokalgandhi, who served as board vice president throughout the hiring process. “We had lost a lot of trust with the community. We had some outstanding, really big items about our finances and our ability to operate.”
The daughter of a single mother, Cassellius attended both public and parochial schools in Minneapolis before pursuing a degree in psychology. She later specialized in education, obtaining her master’s degree and doctorate, and spent more than 20 years working in public schools throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul. A self-proclaimed “policy wonk,” Cassellius then took her expertise to the state level as education commissioner, where she focused on equity, early learning and school safety, before relocating to Boston for the superintendency.
When considering who to hire, Gokal-gandhi says she focused on leadership experience at the local and state levels, as well as competency in being able to lead instructionally and operationally. “Dr. Cassellius really fits all of those characteristics,” Gokalgandhi adds.
The board believes her time in Boston – which included the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic – prepared her for the challenges here. “We had to shift very quickly in Boston to respond to the pandemic, and I think that that was a very similar response that I’ve experienced here, with having to manage a large, operational facility issue. That feels very familiar,” Cassellius notes, referring to the district’s lead-paint crisis. “BPS also was a district that had lost trust with the community and needed to be rebuilt.”
To restore said trust, Cassellius visited every BPS school in 100 days, and she says she hopes to visit the majority of MPS’ 156 schools by the end of the 2025-26 academic year. That tour is not just a goodwill campaign. “I get a really good sense of the inequities from school to school to school in terms of the facility, the classroom materials that are available, the number of co-curriculars at every school, the teachers and their capacity within the school,” Cassellius says. “I get a really different sense of the school when I do these visits.”
The challenges facing all Wisconsin public schools loom overhead. “There is going to be a lot of pain next year, I anticipate,” Cassellius says. MPS faces a $100 million structural budget deficit, she notes, and at press time in late July, additional state funding seemed unlikely.
“Time doesn’t stop for politics,” she continues. “Time doesn’t stop for us to cinch our belt when we have a $4.2 billion surplus [in Wisconsin’s budget]. And the current administration, on the federal side, is threatening to withhold $6 billion right now, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are all other types of cuts regarding education. Those will also have a very real impact on services we’re able to provide.” Such services, Cassellius says, include mental health support, professional development and English as a Second Language programming, among others.
And yet, Cassellius remains hopeful. “I’m really excited about this opportunity, and I think Milwaukee is ready,” she asserts. “I sense a readiness in the community – to do the really hard work that needs to be done within the district to make it a top-tier district across the state, and really across the nation. I’m excited to work across many sectors to get that done.”
Tackling the Lead Crisis
Cassellius and the district, with guidance from the city health department, developed a comprehensive Lead Action Plan that calls for visual assessments of lead hazards in all MPS elementary schools built before 1978 to be completed by Sept. 1.
Meeting Financial Deadlines
Cassellius allocated funds in the fiscal 2025-26 budget to hire a consultant to assist with financial reporting and project management, as well as centralizing processes.
Renewing Focus on Healthy Foods
All MPS high schools will have salad bars beginning this fall, and Cassellius assembled a food advisory committee to guide related work. She refers to Minnesota’s public school food programs as the “gold standard” and hopes to eventually replicate their practices (such as local sourcing and cultural diversity) in Milwaukee.
Creating a Family and Community Engagement Office
The new agency aims to ensure families and community members know that shared decision-making and equity are important to the district.
Two New Parent Advisory Councils
One is for parents of students with disabilities, and the other is for parents of students who speak languages other than English.
