Bay View’s big red school house

Dover Bay is not a real city, but every day the mail gets delivered, the recycling gets collected, and the mayor and common council go about doing the people’s business.

One thing: The “people” are the students of Dover Street School, 619 E. Dover St., and “Dover Bay” is the city-within-a-school they inhabit. As a First Amendment School, one of 20 schools nationwide to receive help and private grant funding from the First Amendment Center and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, a key part of Dover’s curriculum is civic education.

Though Dover didn’t become a First Amendment School until 2004, Dover Bay dates back to 1996, when the staff wanted to use School-to-Work funding on a project that could be long-lasting and incorporated into every class every day.

The First Amendment School grant brought an additional focus on the “Five Freedoms”-freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition-contained in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The additional focus on those freedoms is designed to teach students not just responsibility but to take initiative and speak out.

“It doesn’t affect everybody all the time,” principal Jackie Laber said in an interview, “but it teaches them, ‘I have a voice.’” 

Two Aborted Mergers

It was in that spirit that the Dover community approached 2008’s Bay View Community Schools Task Force, the group that represented 11 schools in and around Bay View. The task force was convened by Terry Falk, Bay View’s representative on the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, to recommend changes to Bay View’s schools that addressed issues of enrollment, funding, and academics.

At the end of what was an often-contentious process, the task force voted in August 2008 to recommend that the district merge Dover with Tippecanoe School for the Arts and Humanities. Dover decided to support the democratic process that led to the recommendation-a recommendation ultimately rejected by the district.

Principal Laber had supported a previous plan to merge Dover with another school, Trowbridge Street School, in 2007. That merger, as this paper reported at the time, was eventually abandoned because of cost and bad timing.

Why is Dover such a target for mergers? Laber’s answer is straightforward: “Because we’re the biggest frickin’ building in the area.” But it is also true that Dover’s enrollment is under capacity, falling from nearly 600 students when Laber became principal in 1993, to 313 in September of this school year, and more students would mean a more stable future for the school.

Two changes in MPS policy contributed to the enrollment decline, according to Laber. One was the elimination of busing for students on the north side who wanted to attend Dover, and the other was that transportation regions changed earlier in the decade.

Fragility & Compatibility

In a system where every additional student means an infusion of funds, declining enrollments are no joke. Every Bay View school fights for all the students it can get. Merging programs and closing schools is one way to ease the struggle, something that spurred much of the task force’s work last year.

However, school communities can be very protective of what they have, and the challenge of convincing schools to give up something-their unique programs-in exchange for something else-more student enrollment-is often too great to overcome. This is particularly true for Dover and its potential partners, because Dover’s program of Direct Instruction is perceived as incompatible with other educational approaches.

As Director Falk put it, “While a merger into Dover would be seen as a way to save Dover, the other schools see the same merger as a loss of their school.”

Direct Instruction is a highly scripted teaching method using small learning increments and fast-paced interactions between teachers and students. Laber is a believer in the instructional method, because she has seen the results.

Laber said that in 1994, Dover held back more than a quarter of its students because they did not meet the standards to move to the next grade. In 2008, according to district data, only 4 percent of Dover students were held back. (In 2007, the number was zero.) Dover’s test scores tend to be at or above the district average, even though the school has a higher concentration of students in poverty-measured by eligibility for free and reduced lunch-than most schools.

“I would be very opposed to pulling Direct Instruction,” Laber said. Which, not coincidentally, is what the Tippecanoe community testified before the school board about their arts-integrated curriculum-they did not wish to see it compromised.

Opportunity & Attitude

For their part, the Dover staff saw the proposed merger as a great opportunity. Molli Latin-Kasper, Dover’s parent coordinator, said, “Our community thought [Tippecanoe's] arts program would be good. We would bring two good schools together to be the best school.”

But Laber took a message from Tippecanoe’s attitude: “Tippe thought they would come in and show us what to do.”

The friction erupted at a board committee meeting in October, when nearly three-dozen parents, teachers, students, and other supporters of Tippecanoe offered impassioned and emotional testimony against the merger. Laber said, “The more Tippe talked and the uglier it got-and it did get ugly-the more our teachers wanted to get up and blast them.” In their testimony, Laber said, the Tippe community demonstrated elitism, a bias that she says was clear throughout the task force process.

For this reason, Laber initially opposed the merger. It was not that she was opposed to merging in general, Laber said, “I was just not in favor of a merger with Tippe.”

However, Laber was one of only two people to speak in favor of the merger at the contentious committee meeting last October. Before Laber spoke, she told the staff and parents there with her, “We’ve tried to take the high road; let them hang themselves.”

Her reservations were clear in her remarks. “I am seriously concerned about the success of any merger with Tippecanoe,” she told the board, “given the negative attitude in which their children have been steeped. We, at Dover, work very hard to teach our children about civic character, respecting all people, regardless of ethnic background, socioeconomic status, or religious or lifestyle choices.”

She elaborated in a later interview: “I had no interest in the attitude Tippe parents were preaching to their children. I could not imagine a merger with people who would tell their kids that they [Dover students] can’t afford a field trip.”

Struggles for Survival

It is true that Dover and Tippe could not be more different in the socioeconomic background of their students. In 2007-08, the last year data are available, 84 percent of Dover’s students qualify for free and reduced lunch, compared to Tippe’s 31 percent.

So why speak in favor of the merger? It all comes back to the First Amendment School idea and the five freedoms, Laber said. In the end, she felt a commitment to the community-based, civic process was more important than any personal conflicts between the school communities. She told the board, “Please support the process by approving the merger as it was written by the task force. Show our students what democracy really looks like and how it works. It is about the will of the committee and not the wishes of a few.”

In the end, the board nixed the merger. This will likely have an eventual impact on Bay View schools. “It will cause big-time problems,” Laber said. “We don’t have enough kids in the area” to sustain so many separate schools and programs. “We fight with each other to pull kids from one school to another.”

Or, as Falk said, “It’s all about people trying to save their schools even if it means feeding off of other schools to do it.”

Dover’s Future

There are still many positive aspects to promote at Dover. One, of course, is the Dover Bay program that engages so many staff and students in activities to promote civic awareness and personal responsibility. Another is that Dover is one of the few schools in Milwaukee to have a true 15-1 ratio in their SAGE (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) classrooms, as opposed to 30-2 that most schools use.

There’s also Dover’s work with challenging special education students. Dover has one of the largest populations of special education students in the district, as nearly one in every four students there is identified with special needs. One of the key services they provide is a unit for autistic students, with three full classes of early childhood, primary, and intermediate students.

In many cases, Dover’s test scores for special education students are higher than the state average for that population.

For the future, Dover is pursuing an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program, which would be the first in MPS and the second in the state. Laber also wishes she could add a multi-purpose room on the school’s ground level, in part to replace the third-floor gymnasium and two small lunchrooms, but also to make the school more accessible and useful to the community.

Laber also wishes she had the north-side students back. Despite the district’s attempts to cut costs by keeping children in neighborhood schools, many parents want to send their children to a school in neighborhood that they see as safe, that may be away from poverty and other distractions. Laber said, “I want a desegregated building, and to give an opportunity for parents to get [their children] out of poverty.”