Gus Ramirez was at Cardinal Stritch University for a ceremony for All-In Milwaukee students when he had an idea.
“When I was on campus, I realized it was just a beautiful campus and could be an opportunity for us,” said Ramirez, co-chair of the Ramirez Family Foundation that bought the campus for $24 million.
The opportunity is to create a second school to serve children in Milwaukee. Ramirez founded St. Augustine Preparatory Academy on the city’s South Side, which opened in fall 2017. He’s talked in the past about opening a second school on the north side of the city.
The 43.5-acre Cardinal Stritch campus isn’t actually on Milwaukee’s north side – it sits on the border of Glendale and Fox Point – but it does come with already built assets. Ramirez estimated the existing assets he plans to use for a school would cost $150 million to $200 million if it were to be similar in size to Aug Prep.
Instead of building those assets from scratch, Ramirez plans to spend around $10 million to upgrade and maintain the property and facilities while developing plans for a new school. Funding those investments will require outside donors, Ramirez said in an interview with BizTimes.
“The conversion, though not inexpensive, $10 million is a lot of money, that conversion is not inexpensive, but we’re working from a physical asset that’s really in good shape,” Ramirez said
He said the other buyers looking at the property were developers likely facing $25 million or more in demolition costs “just to get the property ready for any commercial endeavors.”
“We had a unique advantage in that it was worth a lot more to us than it was to others, so that’s why we moved very quickly to close out the process,” Ramirez said.
Cardinal Stritch announced plans this spring to shut down amidst mounting financial challenges. The property had just hit the market when Ramirez was on campus and he worked to have an exclusive offer on it within a few weeks.
“I believe all the people we worked with involved with Cardinal Stritch … all were very enthusiastic about the potential of the campus being used for Christian education, I think that gave us a very significant leg up in terms of getting this deal done,” Ramirez said.
While he knows the property will be a school and will be used for Christian education, the rest of the details are still to-be-determined. Questions like which grades and how many students to serve, what the legal structure will be, how it will be related to Aug Prep and what it will be called will be worked out over the next six to nine months.
“The key point is we plan to use it for educational purposes, not for commercial purposes,” Ramirez said.
It will likely be two years before a new school would begin serving students.
“I do know this, we aren’t going to grow it as fast as we grew Aug Prep,” Ramirez said. “Just because we want to make sure the culture is very, very strongly established early on and that’s going to take a lot of work.”
Aug Prep went from around 580 students in its first year to nearly 900 its second and more than 1,400 by the 2020-‘21 school year, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Recruitment will also be different. At Aug Prep, staff were able to walk from house-to-house in the neighborhood surrounding the school. The Cardinal Stritch campus’ location in the suburbs just north of Milwaukee doesn’t offer the same opportunity, but Ramirez said the performance of Aug Prep, which has a significantly exceeds expectations rating on DPI report cards, will be a draw.
“Because we have been able to deliver the good from a performance perspective, we believe that there will be people that want to come to the school,” he said, adding it is easily accessible and would be within 20 minutes of anywhere he’d look to put a school to serve Milwaukee students.
Beyond the existing assets, the recent changes to Wisconsin school funding formula that increased state support for charter and choice schools also factored into Ramirez’s decision to buy the campus.
“We would not have gone forward had we not had the new funding by the state,” Ramirez said. “There are very few choice and charter schools today that can do major expansions under the old funding formula … frankly, I didn’t make the offer until that funding was approved.”
