Wednesday, September 17, 2025
The Milwaukee Public Schools Long-Range Facilities Master Plan will help the district provide the high-quality facilities our students need and our community deserves.
Developing the master plan has been and will continue to be a community-driven process. Members of the Facilities Master Plan steering committee helped advance the work.
Now, the district will be bringing the results of this work back to the broader community across all of Milwaukee. MPS will ensure that the plan continues to be centered on students, with equitable opportunities for all.
Please watch for specific opportunities to learn more and get involved.
The impact of the district's next steps will be substantial, and Superintendent Brenda Cassellius wants the full community and individual school communities to have the time to be authentically engaged. This comes alongside the district’s need to develop a new strategic plan and the significant impact of lead stabilization work on MPS’s facilities and its Facilities and Maintenance Services team in recent months.
In light of that, MPS expects major decisions to take effect in the 2027-28 school year, with a more limited set of actions in effect for 2026-27.
This first set of actions for 2026-27 could include steps such as adding 6th grade to the district's K-5 schools. This provides options to create a unified grade configuration, which the plan rightly calls on the district to address. Any school closures, mergers and investments would be limited to those cases where the need is most dire. All of these decisions will still go through a full community-led feedback process.
Difficult decisions remain ahead, and MPS is ready to make them. Having the district's next strategic plan mapped out; enough time for genuine, communitywide feedback; the full energy and support of the facilities team; and the continued support of the community will position us to tackle these challenges head on.
The plan and the district's work ahead create the potential of investing in our facilities — not simply retiring old ones — and this will remain MPS's goal. Thank you to everyone who continues to participate in helping create a blueprint for investment for the next generation of Milwaukee's children.