How MPS Got More Licensed Teachers Into Classrooms

Riverwest Elementary School, 2765 N. Fratney St. File photo by Dave Reid.

MPS superintendent Brenda Cassellius has made it a priority to have every classroom staffed this year with a licensed teacher despite an ongoing teacher shortage. She hopes to succeed where others have failed.

In its 2024 budget, as Urban Milwaukee reported, MPS actually relied on under-funding fulltime teaching positions knowing that it would have to fill many classrooms with substitute teachers at a lower pay scale. Actually budgeting teachers at a lower amount was an admission that the district knew by June that it was unlikely to fill many positions by fall.

It is not that the district hadn’t tried to fill vacancies, sending teams nationwide looking for candidates, even bringing in several hundred international teachers over the years. But the Trump administration has cut off the pipeline to international teachers. District budgets have tightened due to cuts in federal and other funding, often not allowing for increased wages for teachers.

“There are a lot of things in MPS that need to be righted,” Ingrid Walker-Henry, union president for the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) told Urban Milwaukee. “And starts with human resources because that has been issue for a very long time, and we are losing staff because of it… It goes back decades.”

Cassellius requested an evaluation of the MPS human relations office from the Council of Great City Schools. CGCS presented its findings to the school board in August. It found many of its practices contributed to problems hiring new teachers and retaining employees for the district as well.

In the meantime, Dr. Cassellius is working with what she has in front of her.

The administration first announced that 40 centrally assigned teachers would be reassigned to full-time classroom positions. Speculation by many teachers who spoke before the school board was that few would take those positions, but would look for other employment opportunities outside the district. In fact, only three resigned and two retired. Ultimately, after all interviews were conducted, most were reassigned or took classroom positions.

Anthony Tagliavia, MPS chief communication officer, told Urban Milwaukee that the district began the school district with about 100 teaching vacancies. Cassellius temporarily assigned another group of 42 central office personnel with teaching licenses to classroom positions, something Tagliavia says was rarely done. This leaves 58 classrooms with substitute teachers.

However, Nicole Janzen, who was one of the original 40 central office teachers up for reassignment, says that this was a regular procedure while she was with the district. Several times she was assigned to a school until after the third Friday when final enrollment counts are given and some teacher reassignments took place. Once she was in a position for three months before she went back to her regular assignment as restorative practice support staff.

Janzen is one of the three central office teachers that left the district. She spent 13 years as a classroom teacher and then 13 years in restorative practice support. Why she wasn’t given her position back in restorative justice while virtually all of her colleagues were is a mystery to her. She trained many of those in that area for MPS and is one of the instructors for the WEA Academy. Janzen is now the dean of climate and culture in a Milwaukee suburban district.

Restorative practices is a framework that helps build better relationships between teachers and students as well as each other. Janzen is proud of her work and believes she helped improve the atmosphere within many classrooms and kept many teachers in the district.

She states that several of the people now placed in restorative justice position are relatively new.

The question remains whether fewer and perhaps less qualified central support staff can still support classroom teachers without diminishing the quality of teaching and perhaps even keeping newer teachers from leaving the district, a finding pointed out in the CGCS evaluation. But Cassellius has made a choice to prioritize placing licensed teachers in classrooms.

Cassellius has meanwhile brought in a new human resource director, Dominick Maniscalco. He was previously deputy of human resources for the Chicago Housing Authority, having served since 2021. He is the the ninth senior leader to exit the trouble Chicago agency in the last year. How he will rework the Office of Human Resources remains to be seen.