Aug Prep’s north campus will fill ‘opportunity gap’ for thousands of kids in years ahead
A family’s huge bet on bettering the lives of thousands of Milwaukee children is moving a step closer to launch as St. Augustine Preparatory School starts taking names for its $104 million north campus in Glendale.
The project takes place in a time of rising parental demand for better options in Milwaukee. Even as the number of school-age children in Wisconsin fell, attendance at independent schools via the state’s parental choice program rose 6.9 percent last year.
This week, St. Marcus Lutheran School, long a mainstay on Milwaukee’s north side, opened a $25 million expansion to accommodate 200 more students.
Further north, it was just two years ago that the philanthropists behind St. Augustine, Gus Ramirez and his family foundation, announced they would buy the campus of suddenly-closed Cardinal Stritch University and convert it into a second location for Aug Prep.
School leaders are now far enough along on construction to start showing it off to prospective students with “hard hat” tours on Saturday morning and a promise to open the doors for good by August of 2026.
Aug Prep, as it brands itself, already runs a decade-old school, kindergarten through 12th grade, on Milwaukee’s south side, that now fills facilities completed in only 2023.
On the north side, Milwaukee media this week got a glimpse at workers rebuilding and expanding two of the former college’s buildings into a high school and an elementary and middle school building.
Parts are bare concrete walls and uncovered studs, others have roughed-in carpet already.
“All this has happened in 10 months, which is incredible,” said Matt Miller, the school’s president. He expects work will be done by May. He said the school will have room for 330 students to start in August, in 4-year-old kindergarten through 6th grade and in 9th grade, with 20 teachers. The plan is to phase up by a grade per year, for an eventual enrollment of about 1,500.
The $104 million price tag is covered entirely by philanthropy, about three-fourths from the Ramirez family. Gus Ramirez and his son Austin built Husco International, the Waukesha hydraulic and electro-mechanical control systems giant.
Another $25 million, 80 percent of it already in hand, will come from other donors. Aug Prep CEO Abby Andrietsch says that speaks well of greater Milwaukee’s commitment to education.
Andrietsch, the daughter of Gus and Becky Ramirez, hastens to praise other participants in Milwaukee’s mix of public, charter and private schools: “I’m a believer that there are great schools in all three sectors,” she said.
“There’s also not nearly enough for our community, and far too many that aren’t serving kids well,” she added.
Aug Prep’s south-side campus, she said, enrolls about 2,400 students and gets around 3,900 applications; it had a waitlist of about 250 students at the start of this school year. Typically, about 95 to 97 percent of students return from one year to the next — a remarkable commitment from parents, she said, in that nearly all students attend via Wisconsin’s school choice program, meaning their families’ incomes are low enough to qualify. The school doesn’t provide busing, and students live in 49 different ZIP codes, so to Andrietsch, the return rate “is one of the biggest statements parents make about whether or not they value the school community.”
Those figures made the school’s bet on demand for a second campus a safe one. “There are some great options already,” said Andrietsch, especially in the North Shore suburbs east of the school. But, she said, of the approximately 30,000 students living within a five-mile radius of the north campus, “10,000 students are at schools with less than 10 percent proficiency in both math and reading.”
“That is not a capability gap,” she said. “It is an opportunity gap for our kids.”
The school’s bet has a second part — what Ramirez has described as “diversity by design.” The school hopes to attract children from families of all income levels — from North Shore suburbs and from the nearby north side of Milwaukee.
“Stritch was known to build that community that bridges across income levels, across cultures, across races, and that’s part of what we’re hoping to do there as well,” said Andrietsch. She specifically hopes for a mix of about 70 percent of students using a school choice grant and 30 percent paying tuition.
That mix is roughly what’s found at Pius XI High School and Wisconsin Lutheran High School, both on Milwaukee’s far west side, according to state figures. The percentage of choice students varies widely from school to school. Statewide, the average for private schools participating in parental choice programs was 60.4 percent of students using a choice grant, which schools must accept as full payment.
The socioeconomic mingling is central to the new campus’ mission, Andrietsch said, “one of the most important and exciting parts of what we’re trying to do.”
“How do we equip our kids to know and love each other for our differences?” she said.
Since a family earning even a dollar over the state’s income limits for choice is ineligible for the program, Aug Prep will set its tuition on an income-based sliding scale, said Miller. Like many other choice schools, Aug Prep has to raise additional private donations to cover its costs not covered by the choice voucher — which, at $13,371 for a high school student, is far below the $17,400 per pupil spent in the average district school statewide. Andrietsch says Aug Prep has to fundraise about $2,500 per student to cover its costs, a figure she expects to fall as the north campus fills out and the school benefits from scale.
But she reiterated what Ramirez said in 2023 — that the state’s increase that year in per-pupil school choice grants to something a bit closer to what district schools are paid for similar children is what made fundraising, and the northern expansion, feasible. Like private donations, it’s evidence of Wisconsinites’ commitment to improving education in Milwaukee.
“We have a community that, I think, is deeply invested well beyond Aug Prep in Milwaukee education,” she said. “And we need it to be well beyond Aug Prep, because even when we’re fully built out, we’re about 4,000 students. Milwaukee has so many more students that need to be served well.”
Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.
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