The Center for Black Excellence continues to raise funds to help pay for staff, operations,
and programs.
It's expected to open by the end of next year.
In other news, outside auditors have until Monday to submit proposals, taking a fine-tooth
comb to Milwaukee Public Schools Financial Management, a separate audit ordered by Governor
Tony Evers with exam in the district's instructional practices.
And the audits are on a fast track after financial scandal rocked MPS earlier this month, resulting
in the resignation of its superintendent, the loss of millions of dollars in withheld aid
over missing financial data, and a chorus of naysayers even calling to dissolve the
district.
Milwaukee Democrat Chris Larson serves on the State Senate Education Committee and is an
MPS parent.
He's here with his thoughts on this mess.
And Senator, thanks very much for being here.
Thank you for having me, Frederica.
So you support MPS and send your children there, but how shocking was all of this for
you?
Yeah, I mean, it was a surprise when we got our first call right before the Memorial
Day weekend that there was reports that had not been adjusted for audits going back months,
and that there had been a problem in communicating between DPI and the administrators at Milwaukee
Public Schools, and that that was going to result in the delayed aid payments for special
education reimbursement and possibly larger.
So yeah, I was surprised as everybody about this, especially given the implications.
So your message to constituents this week offered a lesson and kind of how this went
down.
First, you dipped back into history explaining how in the 1990s the business office at MPS
was consolidated into the superintendent's office.
How in your mind did that pave the way for what's happening now?
Yeah, so back originally, as it had been functioning, it was divided.
So you had the superintendent who was in charge of instructional management, and then you
had the financial side that was governed by the board, Howard Fuller, who was the superintendent
of MPS at the time, asked for the power to shift from the board over to have it completely
under the superintendent.
There needed to be a state law change.
They went to the state legislature and the governor who made that change in the budget,
and then shortly thereafter the school board consolidated those powers under the superintendent.
What they did is they eliminated a financial check of making sure that what was happening
over there was going to be checked not just by the superintendent, but by the school board.
So since then, they've only been able to trust whatever the superintendent's office is saying
because the financial manager is over on that side.
Just by comparison, this is done differently at the state.
The governor has somebody who does the finances on his side, but then we have the legislative
fiscal bureau to be able to verify that and give us our own independent numbers to make
sure that we're moving in a parallel track and nothing is moving way out of skew and
having problems like we saw that we're 30 years in the making at MPS.
So you also point out that the district's finance office has been critically understaffed
resulting in these failures.
Whose fault is that?
Yeah, I mean, look, they are down 12 positions, two key ones by their own definition.
That is something that the school board actually asked about in a meeting back in December
about staffing issues because trying to make sure that they were staffed up was a priority
for them.
The superintendent's office said point blank that they were staffed up and that they were
only short too.
So they tried to, to the best of their ability, the school board tried to make sure that these
positions were filled and that things were being done in a proper way.
But again, if you don't have a proper check, you don't actually know what's going on.
And I would add, I think it's worth noting that I think, you know, for viewers, a lot
of times they view all elected officials as being on the same plane.
But for school board members in Milwaukee, much less across the state, these are part
time, mostly volunteer positions where they are each paid less than $20,000, which to
put it in perspective, people working minimum wage job make just about that for the number
of hours that they're putting in.
All of them have full time jobs beyond this.
And so their ability to be able to do their own financial research is fairly limited.
They do not have staff as legislators do as other people in other offices do.
So they can ask the questions, but they're really at the mercy of the superintendent,
his office, and what they're going to present to them.
And so you're suggesting that their surprise in this information is kind of not their own
fault?
Well, I would say, look, if you want to have a professional board of people who are governing
the largest school district in the state, and this is a budget that is larger than any
municipality in the state of Wisconsin, including Milwaukee, you might want to have them be
in full time positions to do that work.
And there's been a reluctance to elevate them that to that level.
But you would avoid a lot of these problems, right?
If this were, you know, I hate to make the comparison between government and business
because there's different functions and there's different goals.
But if you had a professional board running a business, you would not expect that to be
part-time to be able to run that business successfully to the tune of over a billion
dollars.
So I think with the schools, if you wanted to function well and you want to make sure
that all of these things are being addressed, and I think given the need of what's happening
in Milwaukee, you may want to look at professionalizing this or at the very least, making sure
that all of these things are taken care of.
Otherwise, we're in a position now where the press is trying to chase down these questions.
And frankly, we don't know what we don't know because for 30-plus years, that power
of information was consolidated within one office.
So you take issue, though, with people who malign the district or call for its dissolution.
But is this not an outrage that hurts the students, some of our most vulnerable students
the most?
Yeah, I mean, indeed, and I am frustrated as well.
I am a public school advocate, and I send my kids to public school.
I coach track for them, and it is frustrating to see the limited resources that they have.
But it's one thing to be able to be frustrated.
It's another to have blind rage at what's right in front of you.
So people can get upset the same way people get upset with a road rage situation that
the person is driving too slow in front of them.
But I think it's better to put the frustration right where it belongs.
And I would put that at the state, not at the school board level.
There has been a malicious and deliberate underfunding of public education in our state for decades.
You can mark on a chart that 15 years ago, on a per pupil basis, students were worth
more than they are today.
They are not even keeping pace with inflation.
And so to expect better outcomes, especially for kids in public school, many of whom are
homeless, many of whom are malnourished and have other needs, and if we're not funding
those underlying problems, funding solutions to those, we're going to get these exact
same results.
So it's a little disingenuous to try and go to the same people who have been carving
up MPS and attacking it for years and asking them what they think we should be doing.
It's kind of like a cow asking the butcher how to be able to live a long life.
Senator Chris Larson, we leave it there.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Have a good weekend.
Thank you.
You too.
Oh.
Sorry, Marissa.