In 1995, Milele Coggs and Nik Kovac graduated from Riverside University High School. Thirteen years later, the two were together again, being sworn onto the Milwaukee Common Council.
The two met as high school freshmen. Kovac was into sports and chess, and Coggs was into student government. Both were on the debate team and were friendly, but didn’t hang out socially. “Milele was voted the most popular and the most likely to succeed,” Kovac says. “I wasn’t anything.”
“You were valedictorian,” Coggs counters. “There were so many different groups of students, you could get, like, 12 votes and win one of those categories.”
“They should have had a primary,” Kovac jokes.
“Riverside reminds me of the East Side,” Coggs says. “It’s a cornucopia of people, but they all get along.”
Coggs comes from a political family – her uncle is state Sen. Spencer Coggs (6th District) and her cousins are state Rep. Leon Young (16th District) and County Supervisor Elizabeth Coggs (10th District) – but she didn’t envision a future in it for herself. As a child, she says, “I was sick of it.” Only in law school did she decide that making the laws would be better than arguing over them later.
Kovac says his classmates might be surprised he’s in politics. “Of the two, he was less outgoing,” says Riverside alum Nick De Palma, owner of the Y-Not III tavern, which hosted fundraisers for both candidates. “I might have expected him to go into some kind of financial field.” Whereas Coggs, De Palma says, “was just a natural vocal presence and wanted to be in the mix with everything.”
After high school, the two would hear about each other through mutual friends. Their paths crossed while trying to get elected in 2008; each endorsed the other.
“I wouldn’t have won if I hadn’t gone to Riverside,” says Kovac, whose East Side district includes the school. “I’m one mile east of Riverside, she’s one mile west. The city changes a lot in there, and I wish that wasn’t true. But the majority of my constituents realize we’re all in this together.”
