Less than a month after purchasing the former Cardinal Stritch University campus and announcing plans to convert it into a K-12 school, Gus Ramirez of The Ramirez Family Foundation said Tuesday that the new school could start classes by the fall of 2025.
Ramirez shared the news at a ceremony marking another milestone in the Ramirez Family’s educational mission – the opening of a newly constructed, 123,000-square-foot elementary school for K4-5th grade students attending classes at St. Augustine Preparatory Academy. The family opened the Christian education-based voucher school on Milwaukee’s south side in 2017.
The Ramirez Family Foundation acquired the 43.5-acre former Cardinal Stritch campus in Glendale and Fox Point in a $24 million deal in late July. Citing declining enrollment and significant financial problems, Cardinal Stritch decided to end its operations at the end of the 2022-23 school year.
The former Cardinal Stritch campus has 12 buildings with a combined 607,000 square feet of space. Ramirez said Tuesday that they plan to raze some older dormitories on the campus – about 150,000 square feet of space – to make way for future athletic fields.
The foundation plans to hold recruitment camps next summer for the school it plans to open at the former Cardinal Stritch campus.
Ramirez, who had talked in the past about opening a second school on the north side of Milwaukee, expressed confidence that the school at the former Cardinal Stritch campus will be able to attract students from Milwaukee’s north side and from the northern suburbs, even if those students will need their parents to drive them to school. Abby Andrietsch, president and CEO of Aug Prep, noted that the south side Aug Prep school draws students from several different zip codes and that many of those students rely on city buses and family cars to get to school each day.
One of the key goals of developing a school near the city’s north side – in addition to serving families in some of the city’s poorest zip codes – is finding a way to increase diversity among Aug Prep’s student body, Ramirez said. Currently the school is about 92% Hispanic, 5% Black, and roughly 3% white or a combination of other races, Andrietsch said.
“One of the goals we have for the Cardinal Stritch campus is to have it be more diverse. The disappointment that we have here (at Aug Prep) is that although we have some diversity, it is not enough. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to attract (students) from Bay View,” Ramirez said. “This Cardinal Stritch campus gives us the chance to attract from a diverse student body. We can do this by looking at how we recruit, and in (balancing) the percentage of tuition-paying students and choice students.”
With the Cardinal Stitch property, Aug Prep would be forming a second campus, and thusly creating more opportunities for, if not diversity on each campus, a chance for more interaction between students from the two campuses who might come from different backgrounds.
“If you look at schools in Milwaukee, even the high performing schools are usually dominated by one race. We want to change that. For any activities that make sense – swimming, basketball, choirs, plays – we will combine the two schools,” Ramirez said. “This is an opportunity to create an integrated campus. My goal is to have 4,500 to 5,000 students under the Aug Prep banner (between the two campuses).”
