After a decade teaching third grade in Milwaukee Public Schools, Kulbir Sra quit.
Why? “Teaching, honestly, wasn’t affordable,” she recalls now, six years later.
Sra is far from the only teacher to leave the profession in search of more lucrative opportunities. Metro Milwaukee preschool teachers have a median hourly wage of about $17 or $34,920 annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For elementary teachers, who are required to have college degrees, the figure is $70,610. Private school teachers in Milwaukee average $44,000, according to ZipRecruiter data.
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For a job with the stresses of education, that’s often not enough to retain teachers. A Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis found a record 19.5% of teachers left MPS in 2023. After pay increases in 2024 and 2025 (8.0% and 4.1%, respectively), that alarming turnover dropped to 10.5% in 2025 – a trend seen across districts statewide. Last year, some 9% of teachers – both statewide and within MPS – left the profession entirely.
“Teachers, especially here in Milwaukee, aren’t just wearing the hat of teacher,” says Michael Nguyen, executive director of Teach for America’s Milwaukee branch and a former teacher himself. “For eight hours a day, nine or 10 months a year, teachers are the main adults in a child’s life. Sometimes that teacher is a nurse, sometimes that teacher is a psychologist, sometimes they’re a conflict mediator, sometimes they’re providing food for that kid. … All those hats become one – and it’s a heavy one to wear every day.”
Today, Sra, Nguyen and many more Milwaukeeans are working to alleviate that burden and recruit and retain more teachers in the city. Sra, now a real estate agent, is one part of an extensive program helping teachers access affordable homes, while Nguyen is helping build a pathway to train local kids to become local teachers.
“If we want this city to grow, if we want to bring in more young people, we need to have an education system they can have confidence in,” says Nguyen. “When we work to improve education in Milwaukee, it helps that entire ecosystem.”
Building Homes for Teachers
When Kenya Ward, 39, first toured a new house near her job at Milwaukee Public Schools’ Bethune Academy, she had one thought: “There’s no way this is $105,000. No way.”
Ward is a special education teacher for kindergarten through fourth grade at the school in the Washington Park neighborhood where she grew up. Ward, who had been living with her mother, began house-hunting last year but was quickly discouraged. “Housing in Milwaukee, being a teacher, because of the income – you don’t have much on the market,” she says.
After disheartening months of searching, Ward wasn’t sure a home was within reach. Then her mother, also an educator, told her about an opportunity that seemed too good to be true. The city was selling new houses, already outfitted with appliances, to early childhood educators far below market value.
The houses are part of a program spearheaded by the Community Development Alliance. Ward still couldn’t quite believe the price tag of the one she toured – especially when she learned the house cost around $300,000 to build – and she jumped at the chance to buy it. She filled out an application attesting that she taught third grade or below and earned under the required $62,000 income limit for a one-person household.
Then she crossed her fingers and hoped.
CDA formed in 2021 to draft an affordable housing plan for the city of Milwaukee. One major point of that plan was finding uses for the city’s more than 3,000 vacant lots. When a group of early childhood education centers reached out to CDA with concerns about housing security for its teachers, the organization saw the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
With a $5 million grant from the state Department of Workforce Development and private support from nine companies and foundations, CDA has, so far, constructed 30 homes on former vacant lots, with 12 more being built as of February. About half have been sold at $105,000 to elementary and pre-K teachers. The price was chosen to be affordable – the mortgage is less than one-third the income of an average early childhood educator. The homes are sold under a deed restriction mandating that if the new owners sell, it must be to someone meeting the same income restrictions, although they don’t need to be a teacher.
Sra and Don Bond, also a Milwaukee Realtor, partnered with CDA in August to reach more teachers and support them in the homebuying process. They provide free credit training and advocacy for these first-time buyers.
The approach, they say, is a win-win-win. “Residents have been demanding affordable housing in their neighborhoods, and they’ve been demanding quality education,” says Teig Whaley-Smith, CDA’s chief alliance executive. “We expect this to not only stabilize the educators that are in these new homes, but also the neighborhoods that they live in and the kids that they serve.”
Ward was in the gym, pedaling on a stationary bike, when her real estate agent called. Over the noise of clanging weights and whirring machines, Ward heard that she got the house. “I made the loudest screeching noise,” she recalls. She moved into her new home at the end of November. “You know that feeling when you really wanted something for Christmas, and you asked Santa, and you told your mom and dad, and you put it at the top of your list? That’s what it felt like.”
Carving Pathways for Future Educators
At first, Princethan Yang just wanted to save some money. As a junior at Hmong Peace Academy in Milwaukee’s Lindsay Park neighborhood, he heard about Teach for America’s Pathway Program. It offered four classes in education – good for 12 college credits at UW-Milwaukee – taught by Peace Academy teachers at no cost to students.
He wasn’t planning to become a teacher, but the free college credits just seemed smart. When he started taking those courses over the following year, though, Yang surprised himself by taking interest in the profession.
During one course, he shadowed a kindergarten teacher. A special needs student in the class had an outburst, and Yang watched as the teacher talked him through his distress and calmed him down.
“It was a really meaningful experience for me,” Yang says. “It was awesome to see that.”
Now, Yang wants to be a teacher. He’s heading to UWM this fall to work toward a bachelor’s in education – with 12 credits already in the bag. His goal is to teach high school for students who speak English as a second language. He is a prime example of what Teach for America’s Nguyen hoped would happen when he helped launch the Pathway Program in 2023. “I believe the best future teachers for Milwaukee kids are already sitting in those classrooms,” Nguyen says.
The Pathway Program began at five Milwaukee charter and private schools, with about 70 students its first year, then over 100 the next, and 125 this school year. With its first students entering college this fall, TFA will track which ones declare education majors and go on to become teachers. “Teachers build the kind of community everybody wants to be a part of,” says Franz Meyer, TFA Milwaukee’s director of community programming. “The more we support teachers, the closer we are to creating that community.”
Five years ago, MPS launched its own similar program aimed at molding future teachers. Instead of college credit, students in MPS’ Youth Apprenticeship program earn an actual paycheck (along with high school class credit). Over both the school and summer break, high school juniors and seniors head to elementary schools to work alongside professional teachers. If they hit 450 total hours, they earn a certificate from the state.
Brett Fuller, an MPS curriculum specialist who leads the apprenticeships, as well as MPS’ unpaid education internships, doesn’t pretend programs like these are a certain pipeline for future teachers. He laughs when he recalls one student who, after working in a classroom, said, “I cannot do this for a living.”
But for other students, the experience sparks the kind of inspiration that, hopefully, creates a future Milwaukee teacher. “One student was working with a reading group,” says Fuller. “He was working with a couple students, and he was so excited when he started to see their test scores going up in reading. He felt like, ‘I did that.’”
Now, Nguyen hopes to expand TFA’s program to more schools, including public ones, while Fuller aims to recruit more students to MPS’ education apprenticeship. “We’re hooking students with the college credits. But once they get into the course, they realize that teaching is more than they thought it was,” says Hollie Bandt, a teacher at Hmong Peace Academy. “It shifts their focus to consider this as a career. I’m thrilled that right now so many students want to sign up for this class that there’s not enough spots for them all.”
Students to teachers?
For almost half a year now, Kenya Ward has woken up in a home that once felt out of reach, only a few minutes from her school. She plans to continue teaching at Bethune, where she believes she’s making a difference in the lives of kids who are growing up in the same neighborhood she did. And some of those same kids, she hopes, might one day become teachers like her.
“I was once where these children are,” Ward says. “Education is just the beginning. It’s where you discover who you are. When kids are excited about exploring and discovering, it brightens my day. They see that change is possible.”
