MPS Lost Just 51 Students This Year

Bay View High School. File photo by Carl Baehr.

After years of Milwaukee Public Schools losing one or two thousand students per year, the district is now keeping its students; enrollment losses have stopped.

In 2022–23, the district lost 1,818 students, a 2.46% decrease, and dire predictions for future enrollment were made. In last year’s budget, MPS projected a decrease of 1,437 students for this school year. That did not happen.

“In 2023–24, the district lost 51 in student enrollment, a .07 percent decrease,” according to the proposed budget for the coming year by the superintendent’s office. It predicted the projected enrollment for 2024–25 will be “a decrease of 63 students,” with a total enrollment of 66,377 in 156 schools.

School board director Missy Zombor heard Superintendent Keith Posley off handedly mentioning the trend at a school board meeting, and as she told Urban Milwaukee, she rushed over to Posley after the meeting for verification. “It wasn’t a big, long item…I had to do a double take; did I hear them right?”

Some caution must be used here. If the district was so far off in the number of students it predicted for this year, it raises the question of how much confidence we should have in its projections for next year. But the number for 2023-24 is a hard statistic and suggests that MPS is headed in the right direction for its enrollment.

In fact, MPS lost a lower percent of its students then the average for all school districts in Wisconsin, enrollment data shows: Milwaukee kept 99.1% of its enrollment from FY23 to FY24, compared to 98.9% statewide.

In past years, MPS increased enrollment only to fall back the next year. That is what happened in the 2016-17 year, when total enrollment increased, only to decline the next school year, as its statistics show. Still, the trend for MPS suggests that enrollment loss is slowing down after more than a decade of losing about 1,500 students per year.

Meanwhile, for both the state the nation, there is clearly a downward trend in enrollment. Lower birthrates mean fewer students in the future, with projections for enrollment to decline nationally through 2030.

Projecting the future for MPS is more difficult given all the various educational options for families — choice and charter schools, open enrollment in other districts, virtual and home-schooling — which have driven the long-term trend of declining enrollment.

One factor affecting school enrollment is that fewer parents sent their children to kindergarten during the COVID-19 pandemic both here and nationally, a trend that has continued since then.

That trend may have started to reverse. “We had a record number of families attending the kindergarten enrollment fair,” said Zombor.

Martha Kreitzman, MPS chief financial officer, told Urban Milwaukee that this year “We had almost 1,500 attend the fair… 550 applications were taken.” That’s a big increase from last year, when only 410 individuals showed up and only 340 applications were taken.

MPS is also seeing an increase in enrollment for high school students, Posley told Urban Milwaukee. Fewer private schools want to educate high school students because “high school students cost more money,” he noted. “We are keeping our high school students and getting theirs.”

Kreitzman states that in the 2020-21 school year, when MPS was virtual, the district had 16,771 high school students. This year, that number jumped to 18,507. “We have projected we will go up a little more at the high school level next year,” she said.

Zombor also believes that the preservation and even the increase in special programs and additional art, music and physical education have resulted in a more positive attitude toward MPS. “I’m not surprised that enrollment is stabilizing because of the investment that have been made into MPS. If you look at the increase in opportunities in programing that students have especially after the first referendum. I think families are seeing the results and that they know that students are going to have amazing opportunities in MPS.”