Taxpayers and Parents are left without options if Carmen Charter is evicted
Recently, a Milwaukee School Board Committee held a hearing on the issue of whether to evict the Carmen Charter school from a pair of locations it shares with traditional public schools. Currently, Carmen currently shares space with the Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes (ALBA) and Pulaski High School, both of which complain that demand for enrollment is exceeding their ability to provide seats. WILL has previously covered about how evicting the high performing Carmen schools could end up negatively impacting MPS’s bottom line, but new issues arose during the hearing that warrant further discussion.
MPS Director Zambor, the author of the resolution, claimed at the meeting that the intention is “work with them to find an alternative lease space if Carmen wants one in the district.” The key question here is whether the Zambor is being disingenuous—or is perhaps misinformed on available space—when they claim that they will help Carmen find a new location?
Available Capacity
To explore this question, we looked at existing data on school capacity in the city. There are 43 schools located in what we’re defining as Milwaukee’s southside—using 794 and then further west 94 as the defining northern boundary. The enrollment story of these schools is quite different from the story of the northside, or MPS as a whole. Overall, these schools are at 104.52% capacity according to the most recent report submitted by the district to the state’s Joint Finance Committee. That Pulaski and ALBA are indeed facing some spacing challenges is confirmed by the data. ALBA’s shared space with Carmen is listed at 123.88% capacity and Pulaski is listed at 114.82% capacity.
There are some exceptions. Bay View High School located on the southeast side of the city is at 68% capacity, while South Division is at 69% capacity. But these schools are not all that close together, making it difficult to see that any plan to combine them would be feasible.
The map below shows the percentage capacity for all MPS owned schools in Milwaukee. Green points indicate schools that are not utilizing their capacity, while red indicates schools at or over capacity, as defined by MPS. What is clear from the image is that northside schools have much lower occupancy rates in general than southside schools. MPS only lists three building as “vacant” in their latest report—Carelton, Seventy Sixth Street, and Philipp. A fourth school—Green Bay—is listed as having no students or capacity but is described as “housing professional development.”
However, all of these schools are located on the north side of Milwaukee and are not likely to serve as a good relocation opportunity for Carmen students that primarily reside on Milwaukee’s southside. No single southside school has the space for the 1,138 students who would be displaced by both evictions. Furthermore, all of these schools are former K-5 buildings and would be unlikely able to house Carmen’s High School students.
The table below shows the distance between each Carmen school and each vacant school plus two MPS buildings with under 30% capacity by road according to Google Maps. These distances are simply not feasible for most families.
MPS officials have also said that they would like to move away from the co-location model, so simply finding space within an existing MPS school would not be enough. Instead, it would entail uprooting additional public-school students to provide Carmen with buildings, or potentially purchasing a new building. Given the current environment surrounding charter schools among those on the left, color us skeptical that this is something the district would be willing to undertake.
A Test for MPS
During the meeting, MPS Director Leonard even expressed concern about the effect losing schools like Carmen could have on the district’s report card scores—meaning they know that these actions could potentially harm some of the best performing schools in the district. As we discussed in our previous writing the national environment on the left has become far more negative towards charter schools in the years since the Obama administration. While the capacity problems at ALBA and Pulaski appear to be legitimate, we are naturally skeptical of the intentions of MPS on this topic. Our analysis of the geography of school capacity only serves to increase those concerns. Those interested in the continued success of Carmen schools in Milwaukee should ask the school board to create a plan for exactly where Carmen will be placed before the eviction takes place.
