MPS and the Case of the Missing Neighborhood Student

If I told you that the Neighborhood Student was in Area 51 with Elvis and Bigfoot, would you believe me?

It’s about as plausible a location as any other. In fact, it is much, much easier to say where the Neighborhood Student is not: Milwaukee’s high schools. Its middle schools-the few remaining, anyway-don’t house the Neighborhood Student either.

The Neighborhood Student must be the most important student in the Milwaukee Public Schools, as it has driven district policy for more than a decade. It’s easy to see why; the Neighborhood Student is cheaper to educate, supposedly comes with greater parent involvement, and can more easily engage in the kinds of things that make school a good life experience-sports, clubs, walking in snow uphill both ways. 

Ten years ago, an entire initiative was planned, funded with borrowed money, and slowly executed in order to trap the Neighborhood Student in expensive new buildings-the better mousetrap, apparently.

The Neighborhood Student didn’t fall for it. The mousetraps stand unsprung or repurposed to great embarrassment.

The district then threatened, considered, delayed, approved, and then delayed, and then started to implement, and then delayed again a plan to decimate the Neighborhood Student’s prime habitat-school buses. The thinking was that this would flush the Neighborhood Student into the open where it could be corralled into schools.

Instead, as any casual observer could tell you, this school year has seen a dramatic increase in the habitat. There are school buses everywhere, and the silhouettes behind the windows tantalize. Is that the Neighborhood Student? What about that one?

Michael Bonds, now president of the school board, designed that plan, knowing that middle and high schools on the north side of town don’t draw well from the surrounding areas. Parents and students in public meeting after public meeting explained why. We’ve seen our neighborhood school, they said, and we’d like something better, please.

In Bay View, we formed a task force with explicit instructions to lure and capture the Neighborhood Student. One stratagem: Create a single school with grades 6-12, combining the two area schools that offer those grades into a single irresistible program full of the things the Neighborhood Student is reputed to love-arts, music, engineering, the latest technology. It would be the something better parents and students wanted.

Results so far suggest the elusive Neighborhood Student remains unconvinced. In the first year of the “blend,” as it’s being called, neither Fritsche Middle School nor Bay View High School is seeing any more of the Neighborhood Student.

Last year at this time, I noted, using MPS data, that Fritsche’s neighborhood enrollment fell from 13.3 to 10.5 percent between 2007 and 2008. In 2009, that’s down again, to 8.9 percent. (In real numbers, neighborhood enrollment nearly halved, from 112 students to 58.)

Bay View’s neighborhood enrollment ratio has remained steadier. In 2007, 6.8 percent of Bay View’s students were from the area, and it’s 6.5 percent now. But real numbers have dropped, from 100 in 2007 to 77 now.

At last month’s meetings about changing the timeline of the “blend” to move Fritsche’s grades into Bay View a year ahead of schedule, the new school was again touted as great for the Neighborhood Student. Everyone already knew the enrollment numbers, and that the Neighborhood Student was giving the new school a pass.

And yet board member Terry Falk, who represents the area, said he still expects a single 6-12 school to attract the Neighborhood Student in addition to or instead of some of the bused-in students. “It’s now beginning to feel like there’s a connection with the neighborhood that had been lost,” he said.

What’s really lost, though, is the Neighborhood Student. It may be time to stop chasing it.

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

Copyright 2011 by Bay View Compass. All rights reserved.
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