Governor mum on former MPS superintendent’s plea for Special Master to oversee district reform
Updated June 7, 2024
Gov. Tony Evers remained silent on a call for him to intervene in the Milwaukee Public Schools meltdown by using his education background to set up a new governance structure.
Evers did, however, call for audits of the troubled district more extensive than the financial audit at the center of the fiscal crisis.
Bill Andrekopoulos, MPS superintendent for eight years until his retirement in 2010 and an educator in that district for 38 years, said in a story published by the Badger Institute Wednesday that unless the school district was willing to yield completely to outside reform, nothing — not the financial bungling or low student performance — would change.
The governor, Andrekopoulos said, ought to appoint a Special Master, who would create an advisory panel of perhaps seven members to run MPS for three to five years. The panel would then decide on a new structure for the district, perhaps giving responsibility to the mayor of Milwaukee. The mayor could then appoint community stakeholder board members.
“One of the things that has never been disrupted in at least 40 years is the governance of MPS, and it’s time to be disrupted for the benefit of the kids and the community,” Andrekopoulos told the Badger Institute in a wide-ranging interview. “The governor, the legislative leaders, the mayor, the Common Council president and the MMAC have an opportunity to make significant changes to the governance structure of MPS. It’s time for a higher authority to intervene.”
Evers, a former state Superintendent of Public Instruction, has a unique opportunity given his skill set to take charge of the Milwaukee Public Schools, said Andrekopoulos.
Evers didn’t respond to Andrekopoulos’ and other calls for broad reform in the district, but on Friday he did call for a wider financial audit of the districts operations, as well as an audit of “the effectiveness of teaching and instruction” in the district. Evers, governor since 2019, had previously been the head of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction since 2009. He said Friday that the district hadn’t been thoroughly audited in 15 years.
Now that MPS Superintendent Keith Posley had resigned, set to give up his $300,000 annual salary at the end of June and take with him a $160,000 severance, Andrekopoulos wondered if anyone would finally listen to those angry speakers at the Milwaukee Public Schools Board hearing Monday night.
Nearly everyone who called for Posley to be fired also said it was time to clean house.
Andrekopoulos’ plan for reform would almost certainly face political resistance from the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, he said.
District leadership, elected and administrative, and the DPI, have a lot to answer for the events leading up to Posley’s resignation under pressure, he added. Chief among the questions is why or how district administrators could be so slow to respond to problems with some of its most basic funding sources. While it wasn’t until mid-May that the public became aware that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services was suspending MPS’ Head Start program, a check of board meeting minutes by the Badger Institute found references to “deficiencies” in the program going back more than a year.
The federal Administration for Children and Families in an April 26 letter to the board cited physically and verbally abused, maltreated, and unsupervised children. Without some remediation, Head Start might withhold an estimated $10.5 million in funding for next year.
Unlike some federal programs that are little more than slush funds for school districts, Head Start provides very specific guidelines and benchmarks for spending and performance, Andrekopoulos said.
“As superintendent, I went through an (Head Start) audit,” he said. “It’s shocking to me when Head Start provides a template for remediation that it could be ignored.”
Approximately a week later, Posley made public a letter from John Johnson, deputy state superintendent for DPI, asking for six audits and reports for the years 2023 through 2025, several of them overdue by more than eight months.
The language of the letter is brutal.
The letter refers to a “pattern of submitting incomplete data” and warns the district that without swift compliance DPI would withhold a special education services payment for June that could be at least $15 million.
State general aid payments in the “tens of millions” of dollars to the district were at risk, a DPI spokesperson told a local paper. The failure of by far the largest school district in the state to provide required revenue estimates could potentially rob other districts of revenue, the spokesperson said.
MPS board member Darryl Jackson has said he has been “in the dark about quite a bit.”
While it is possible Jackson, a member of the MPS’ Committee on Accountability, Finance and Personnel, and other committee members didn’t know the financial records debacle was coming to a head, he and a quorum were in attendance for a board meeting back on Dec. 21 when district chief financial officer Martha Kreitzman responded to an older audit critical of her office’s financial reporting.
Kreitzman said she hired two contractors, Robert Half and Protiviti, to reorganize the Department of Finance. In addition to making financial reporting a separate entity, a financial reporting checklist had been created, she told the board.
“Have you ever been faced with a challenge and didn’t know what direction to go?” she told the board. “The challenge seemed impossible.”
However, she painted an optimistic picture. “This year compared to last year we met most of all our deadlines now,” she said. “Things have gotten a little more difficult as we close out the financial reporting. We made all or most of our deadlines to the auditors.”
There is almost nothing in the public record of any role played in all of this by MPS’ Office of Accountability and Efficiency. The office was created in 2010 by then Board President Michael Bonds to act as a watchdog of the administration reporting to the board.
Bonds was convicted in 2019 in connection with a bribery scheme involving a Philadelphia charter school operator.
There are also questions about DPI and why it waited to publicly disclose the problems until after a $252 million referendum vote April 2 that was decided by two percentage points.
“Convenient how DPI didn’t release info about MPS’ failure to report financial data before a $252M referendum went to voters, despite the district missing deadlines months earlier. DPI was well aware of it, considering their frequent meetings with the district about the reports,” wrote Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, on Twitter.
Born told the Badger Institute that while it probably cannot be proven that DPI dragged its feet, Gov. Evers and state Superintendent Jill Underly were vocal supporters of the referendum that was always expected to be close.
Evers and several DPI officials declined to respond to emails asking for comment.
“DPI has been enabling MPS for a long time. This has been years in the making and finally it’s coming to a head,” Born said.
When asked about Andrekopoulos’ proposal to have Evers head a reform effort going forward, his frequent political sparring partner, Born, said he agreed that the change had to come from somewhere outside of the school district.
“I think people should know that this is a big deal and that something like this just doesn’t happen in the course of daily governance,” Born said. “Wherever it comes from, the mayor, the county executive, wherever. It’s time for leadership.”
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.
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