Lead, safety, academics and a financial crisis: Cassellius discusses challenges after first month as MPS superintendent

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Taken on their own, struggling academics, concerns about school safety, the discovery of high lead levels in several schools and an academic crisis would each pose a massive challenge for a superintendent. Brenda Cassellius is dealing with all of it, and she's only been in charge of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) for nearly a month.

Cassellius sat down with CBS 58 Wednesday for about 20 minutes. In that time, she took questions about each of those topics and more. Below are some of her responses on various subjects, along with extended video clips from our conversation. 

Lead in schools

City health inspectors have found elevated lead levels in seven MPS schools. Three of those schools remain closed. Cassellius said she was initially very concerned the problem was widespread and many more schools could be affected. She said after spending more time with officials from the Milwaukee Health Department, she now believes the problems has largely been isolated.

"Now I feel like we've been able to stabilize a bit. We're finishing up our plan with the health department right now," Cassellius said. "As you know, [Mayor Cavalier Johnson] answered our call and has been a great partner with the health department."

Cassellius added another important item to her to-do list last week: hire a new facilities director. Sean Kane was removed from the role after the state fined him for falsely stating in previous years he was a registered architect. Cassellius confirmed it was her decision to have Kane leave MPS.

"It just came to a head with having to be able to make sure that I was confident with the direction we were taking around our schools with lead," she said.

Safety in schools -- more SROs?

Another unexpected issue emerged for MPS leadership last week when police arrested a 13-year-old girl for bringing a loaded gun to Milwaukee School of Languages. Students and families were upset there was no pause or announcement during the school day to address what happened.

There was also frustration over the initial note sent home to parents only mentioning "an inappropriate item" had been found in the school that day. Cassellius said she's working with school leaders to establish a consistent protocol for how to respond -- and communicate -- should such incidents happen again.

"We did a debrief," she said. "I was at that meeting with our principal, with our safety officers and with our top leadership within the district to ensure that we're able to know exactly how we should respond to any certain incidents within the school system, and then how we're communicating that."

Cassellius took over right around the same time MPS finally got into compliance with a 2023 state law requiring the district to bring police officers back into schools. Facing the threat of being held in contempt of court, the district and city hammered out a plan to place 25 school resource officers across 11 MPS schools. 

Cassellius said she believes the implementation has been a success so far, and she even floated the possibility of expanding the presence of SROs across the district.

"I think the program has been working successfully so far, but we will look at the evaluation and tweak where is necessary," she said. "Whether that means additional SROs in different locations or additional SROs to the program."

Academics for all ages

MPS' longest running crisis is academic results that include the nation's worst achievement gap between Black and White students. That's bad enough, but in recent years, the district has seen national testing results slip to the point where Milwaukee's 4th grade math and reading scores are now some of the nation's worst among big city districts.

Cassellius said improving academic outcomes is her top priority. Before making any substantive changes in classrooms, she said she's waiting to see the results of an audit digging into MPS' academics Gov. Tony Evers ordered last summer. 

Cassellius said she's expecting the results of that audit to be released in May. The findings will shape her approach, which Cassellius said will start with the youngest learners, mentioning MPS losing federal Head Start funding last year amid repeated findings of child abuse and neglect.

"One thing I do know that we need is early childhood, and we need to make sure that's high-quality early childhood," she said. "We lost the Head Start program, which is an indication that we also need to pay attention to quality."

Cassellius said her academic vision also includes an emphasis on improving reading between grades Pre-K and 3. She praised the state's new reading law, Act 20, while calling on the Legislature to release $50 million earmarked for schools that's been held up amid a legal fight between Republican lawmakers and Evers over the governor's use of his line-item veto when signing the bill.

Cassellius said she also wants to implement "rigorous programming that's equitable across all schools" for middle school students, while high school will revolve around "workforce readiness," whether that's a path toward college or a technical career. 

Close schools? Academics will decide

Cassellius will also oversee how MPS eventually implements a long-term strategy for managing its buildings. Right now, the district's enrollment patterns are all over place; more than a dozen schools are operating at less than half of their building capacity while others are overenrolled. 

An outside consultant labeled 14 schools as prime candidates for closures or mergers.

Complicating matters is the city's history of segregation, which is reflected in the fact all of the severely underenrolled schools are on the majority-Black north side, and the most crowded schools are on the south side, which is predominately White and Hispanic. 

Cassellius said the district will finalize its academic strategy before making any decisions on how it uses its buildings. The academic approach will largely dictate how MPS utilizes its schools.

"Once we have that academic focus, we look at grade configurations, we look at where we're going to focus our efforts on early childhood, middle school and high school," Cassellius said. "That will drive where we are making our other decisions around which buildings will need to either merge, close or be repurposed."

Cassellius said she wants to "marry" the governor's operational and academic audits with the long-range facilities study. Once all of that is digested, she plans to hold community input sessions about the future of MPS' buildings.

In the short-term, Cassellius said she's still committed to holding public listening sessions about what parents, staff and students want from the district's new leadership.

"I'm already out in the community, out and about," she said. "And you'll see more fleshed out dates and plans [for listening sessions] probably toward the end of April, beginning of May."

Cassellius said those dates will include both virtual and in-person town halls.

(Still) digging out of financial crisis

Cassellius is in Milwaukee because of the financial scandal that erupted last spring. State education officials withheld funding from MPS over it missed so many financial reporting deadlines, it jeopardized the aid calculations for districts statewide.

Eventually, the state realized MPS has been providing inaccurate data and got overpaid in the process, leading to the state withholding more than $42 million from this past year's aid to make up for those overpayments.

"It did happen. We did have a financial crisis here, so be transparent on that," Cassellius interjected during a question about financial reporting. "It was a financial hiccup and crisis here last year."

The crisis hasn't really ended. MPS still is working on a corrective action plan with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to turn in both past and current financial reports. The district has been posting updates about its progress, but the last such report came in January.

DPI spokesman Chris Bucher said the agency is still meeting regularly with MPS to guide its compliance with a second corrective plan. Bucher said the DPI is not ruling out another round of discipline if MPS misses another round of deadlines this spring.

"We are keeping a close eye on the anticipated completion dates of tasks in the CAP," Bucher said. "And have made it clear to MPS that failure to meet the agreed-upon deliverables could result in additional reductions in aid and increased oversight."

Cassellius said she's meeting with the district's finance team twice a week. She said an update about the district's progress will be coming soon.

"We are now very close to getting this to our auditors, and then we'll have another meeting Friday, and you can expect some communication from the state and ourselves around our new timeline for meeting those deadlines," she said. "I wouldn't say worried, but we are cautiously optimistic that we will meet our deadlines."

Another financial challenge could be coming as the Trump administration disassembles the federal Department of Education. Cassellius said she's worried the net result would be a loss of funding for MPS, which gets significant financial aid through the department's Title I program based on its high level of impoverished students.

"Title I, special ed for students with disabilities, nutrition programs, teacher preparation programs," Cassellius listed. "We're already having a problem with labor shortage in the teacher corps."

So...why take this job?

Cassellius previously served as Boston's superintendent, and before that, she was Minnesota's top education official. Given the many issues facing MPS, one might wonder why Cassellius opted to make Milwaukee her next stop.

"I've always gone to where the children need me the most," she said. "And I've always gone to where there's tough challenges because I believe Milwaukee Public Schools is winnable."

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Cassellius will be spreading that belief among Milwaukee families and lawmakers in Madison.