Inside merging schools, uncertainty, division, and worry

This time last year, the big news was the Bay View Neighborhood Schools Task Force, and its plans for changing the school I was about to start teaching in: They proposed a three-year plan to merge Bay View High School, my new home, with Fritsche Middle School.

Not to get too cliché here, but as with anything, the devil is in the details. When the Milwaukee Board of School Directors approved the merger last fall, it didn’t provide any details, and that has bedeviled many of us in the affected schools over the past year.

Which is not to say we didn’t start out optimistic. As soon as the merger was approved, the schools’ staff sprang into action. Teachers from both schools established committees to plan for the merger, focusing on everything from recruiting to curriculum. The schools’ Governance Councils started meeting jointly. The two schools even shared a single holiday party in December. 

Despite concern over how the merger had been imposed and whether the community would embrace a school where sixth-graders shared the halls with high school seniors, everybody seemed willing to give it a go.

By the end of the school year, however, almost all of that had changed.

“The day-to-day got in the way,” said Amy Johnson, a BVHS teacher involved in merger planning. Everyday demands of teaching proved difficult to work around. However, she added, the initial willingness to work on the merger turned into “fear and trepidation” as big questions from staff went unanswered.

That was the theme of every conversation I had with teachers at BVHS and Fritsche about the merger. Michelle Wade, from Fritsche, put it bluntly: “Nobody seems to know what we’re doing,” she said. “It’s a lot of vagueness.”

Brian Debelak, of BVHS, said, “It’s hard to create a product if you don’t know what that product is supposed to be.”

As someone who watched the board’s deliberation on the merger, I know that they fully expected the details of the merger to be worked out by the teachers and administrators involved. Neither the board nor central office handed down any edicts beyond “Go forth and merge.” Concrete details, like curriculum focus or a school name were left to be sorted out later.

The concrete information that is available is not encouraging.

Both staffs have been told that if they can’t make enrollment numbers in the fall, which are already far below this year’s levels, more teachers will be “excessed”-the district’s euphemism for cutting extra teachers in low-enrollment schools.

Bleak Enrollments Still a Problem

Bay View is losing students due to cuts in busing, competition from other schools and districts, and a lack of students in the neighborhood who attend. Fritsche lacks feeder elementary schools, with many K-8 schools nearby that hold onto students who might otherwise move to Fritsche. The school’s sixth-grade enrollment is only about 100 students for next fall-so low they can barely form one team of teachers.

This reality-and concerns about the economy and job security in general-has set in, on top of the lack of communication between administrators and staff. More than one teacher told me that, at both schools, questions about what was happening get consistently answered with variations on “We don’t know,” “We’re working on it,” and “We can’t say right now.”

So over the course of this past school year, the spirit of cooperation waned. All but one of the committees disbanded. Some Fritsche staff bristled at the idea of BVHS teachers working in their building next year, teaching ninth grade students, even as five of their own colleagues were excessed. Bay View teachers fought the implementation of a new, 90-minute block-teaching schedule that matches Fritsche’s.

Both staffs have been told that if they can’t make enrollment numbers in the fall, which are already far below this year’s levels, more teachers will be “excessed”-the district’s euphemism for cutting extra teachers in low-enrollment schools.

And at the last joint meeting of the schools’ Governance Councils in June, when people discussed possible new names for the new school, emotions ran high, with teachers from both schools feeling attacked and ending up in tears.

Johnson offered a possible explanation. “Teachers are becoming more enlightened about what the future looks like,” she said, referring to the bleak enrollment picture. In fact, Johnson said, “There was some hope that a new name will draw neighborhood students back.”

The pressure was compounded by fear and frustration. “Each school is struggling to maintain its individual identity,” Johnson said.

No one I spoke to blamed school leaders, but rather the district itself. It is not merely true that the board left planning the precise way in which the schools would be dissolved up to the dissolving schools themselves, according to the teachers involved in planning. No, they say, the board isn’t giving clear guidance on the merger because they didn’t think it through.

Wade was succinct: “If they had the answers, why keep them a secret?”

Some teachers I spoke to did not want to be identified or to comment at all for this column, concerned about what speaking up might mean for them as they continue to teach at Fritsche, BVHS, or in the combined school.

But one expressed a very cynical view of the whole process. Not that long ago, the teacher noted, Bay View had one of the highest enrollment numbers in the district. The last six years have seen a decline (the same is true for Fritsche), and the district itself is to blame. The teacher said, “This is a textbook case of how to kill a school from above.”

This is not to suggest that the merger is definitely doomed to fail. The tension between schools needs to be replaced with cooperation, but that’s not impossible. In addition, some of the joint planning has proved promising, including the creation of a Building, Architecture, and Technology “academy” that combines two successful programs. One is Fritsche’s Project Lead The Way program, which is part of a nationwide effort to prepare students for challenging courses in science and engineering. The other is Bay View’s hands-on construction and building program, which every year gets students real-world experience building houses.

Johnson said, “I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful we can restore something back to the community.” Let us all keep our fingers crossed.

Jay Bullock is an English teacher at Bay View High School who blogs at folkbum.com. Contact him at mpshallmonitor@gmail.com.

Copyright 2010 by Bay View Compass. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.