In first news conference, new MPS superintendent pledges more outreach, transparency
MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) will work harder to connect with families and implement a more transparent hiring process, new superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in her introductory news conference Friday.
The MPS board selected Cassellius as the district's next leader in a special meeting Tuesday night. Cassellius, who previously served as the superintendent of Boston Public Schols and the commissioner of education in Minnesota, pledged conduct a thorough review of MPS' current organization structure and whether those currently in high-level positions are best suited to continue in those roles.
"Everybody deserves the opportunity to be able to show that they are high performing," Cassellius said in a virtual press briefing. "But if they're not -- in key critical positions -- then they either need to move to where there's a better fit or they need to find something else."
Cassellius said she was aware of a scathing outside audit of MPS' operations that was made public Thursday. The audit, ordered by Gov. Tony Evers, stated MPS was plagued by a "culture of fear" and organizational chaos, with overlapping jobs and responsibilities that bounced around from one department to another.
"One big, heavy lift is going to be going through all of the job descriptions and the roles of the district," Cassellius said. "So that there's not this duplication, so that people are clear on what their expectations are."
Cassellius told reporters she planned already had people in mind for some of the district's vacant high-level jobs, including chief operations and chief communications officers. In an attempt to be transparent, she said she'd form a hiring panel that would include Board Clerk Tina Owen Moore, interim Superintendent Eduardo Galvan, a principal and a community member.
The hiring panel will then share with the board a list of three finalists. Cassellius said she hoped such a process would remove any concerns about the superintendent favoring friends for top cabinet duties, which was a claim whistleblowers made against former Superintendent, Keith Posley, who resigned last June amid a fiscal crisis that saw the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) publicly slam MPS for submitting late and inaccurate financial reports to the state.
"I know that there has been some criticism of the district in hiring from within or hiring not the best person, or maybe someone's getting favored over someone else," Cassellius said. "And I wanna have an appearance and make sure that people know and build trust in the process of the people that we hire."
Alan Borsuk, a research fellow at Marquette University, has seen several past superintendents try and fail to reform MPS.
A longtime education reporter, Borsuk said he believed a silver lining for Cassellius was that by encountering a situation where MPS has some of America's worst reading scores among large districts and is digging out of a financial mess, there's nowhere to go but up.
You don't want to be the coach who succeeds Vince Lombardi, so there is some advantage to being the coach who succeeds in a situation where the team's gone 0-17 in the prior season," Borsuk said. "Well, [MPS] went 0-17 pretty much this year, so showing we're gonna win at least a few games would really help."
Cassellius mentioned the idea of "quick wins" during her news conference that could help restore some public confidence. When asked for some examples, she mentioned outreach and building out a quality leadership team.
"Launching a listening session is a quick win," she said. "Hiring those key cabinet positions is a quick win."
Cassellius also mentioned helping to resolve the district's ongoing dispute with Mayor Cavalier Johnson's office over who should pay to place school resource officers in schools. The mandate of returning 25 officers was insisted upon by Republican lawmakers in a deal that allowed Milwaukee to introduce a city sales tax.
MPS is now more than 13 months late to bringing back the officers, and a Milwaukee County judge has set a deadline of Monday, Feb. 17, for the district to reach a deal on SRO's. It appears highly unlikely that will happen.
Cassellius also mentioned beefing up the district's summer school programming as another idea of a quick win. To improve the district's reading scores in the long-run, she pledged to place an emphasis on better early age literacy initiatives.
"We just have to have strong, high-quality early childhood programming," she said. "Kids need to be coming to kindergarten knowing their letters and being able to manage within a kindergarten classroom."
Borsuk said his advice to Cassellius would be to tackle the district's more recent problems first. Poor math and reading scores, a wide racial achievement gap, declining enrollment and poor attendance how been issues for decades.
Other issues, like the district losing federal Head Start funding over incidents of child abuse and kids not being properly monitored, as well as a gutted office of finance, were more recent, and Borsuk reasoned those could be addressed more quickly.
"The bad news has gotten worse," he said. "And she can at least reverse that trend and keep the bad news focused on what we all know has been there for a long time."