In February, Milwaukee Public Schools announced that Brenda Cassellius, the former superintendent of Boston Public Schools, would be the next superintendent for MPS. Cassellius quickly stepped up to the plate and officially joined the district on March 15. Her immediate tasks include tackling urgent operations and facilities issues – including lead paint hazards in multiple school buildings – as well as rebuilding public trust in the district. BizTimes reporter Samantha Dietel spoke with Cassellius in March about her ideas for collaboration across sectors and how the business community can support her as she seeks to bring positive change to the district. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BizTimes: How have you been received so far by Milwaukee’s business community?
Cassellius: “Well, I think pretty well. I’ve met with several folks and also had outreach from others within the business community. I’m really looking forward to continuing to partner with them and get to know a broader base. I have a meeting with the (Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce) lead coming up here in a couple weeks, so that I think will be really good, and then I’ll be heading to the Rotary (Club of Milwaukee) and having a meeting there. I’m just starting to begin to engage with our business community.”
Tim Gerend, chief executive officer of Northwestern Mutual, said at our recent education event that everyone’s collective impact in education could be greater with more collaboration. Are you open to that collaboration and how would you facilitate collaboration across the education, business and nonprofit sectors?
“I’m more than open. I would welcome that. And I think it’s absolutely important for us to be able to have broader collaboration across our business community and our nonprofit community and our philanthropic community in order to build collective capacity and collective political will to really put in place the strategies that need to be in place in order for us to achieve our shared mission and goals around children succeeding.”
What ideas or plans do you have for partnering with local businesses or nonprofits here in Milwaukee?
“First, I just want them included and part of the discussion. Obviously, the governor has issued an operational audit, has issued the academic audit coming out here in May, we have a facilities audit that was done last year, and aligning all of that is going to take a lot of strategic thought and planning and engaging with the community. I want to really engage with a broad collective across multiple sectors, whether it’s governmental sectors like city and county and state, or whether it’s business sectors and nonprofit sectors, because we’re only as smart as all of us, and we want the best solutions at the table. I’ve always found that the winning solutions stick, and the solutions that are just not doable or not timely go away and are either saved for a later time when resources are available or when it’s more doable because of personnel or collective opportunity. I think that there’s just an incredible amount of goodwill out there, readiness from Milwaukee across all sectors, and I want to tap into that for our kids and our families and our community.”
Are there any specific issues that you may be interested in partnering with local businesses or nonprofits to help address?
“I still need to get briefed on everything within Milwaukee Public Schools in terms of our overall prioritization. But already, I’ve connected with a business owner, and he has offered to have his HR person work with us on a key aspect of our operational audit, which is our HR processes, IT processes and implementation in terms of our IT systems talking to one another, and his HR person really supporting us. She had over two decades of experience in working in schools and in HR and so just having that business offer already is just such a good sign of goodwill. And I’m really, really excited to partner with her and see if she can help us with kind of understanding our audit and putting in place new systems so that we can be more efficient and deliver on our goals of having an incredible culture within our district, meeting our hiring outcomes and getting a caring and competent teacher in every classroom.”
In your previous roles as superintendent of Boston Public Schools, associate superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools and Minnesota’s commissioner of education, how did you collaborate with businesses and nonprofits?
“As commissioner, you have to obviously work with the entire state, communities within the state, across all sectors. And so a lot of nonprofits, a lot of educational nonprofits doing work. A lot of associations, the unions. We’ve also worked with the state chamber (of commerce), with the business alliance on policies that they forwarded, so working on the highest level of policy implementation, vetting of those policies, having them included in working groups that I was establishing, or commissions, so really partnering with them on that. We also partnered on early childhood initiatives and securing resources for that, particularly in the child care space, working with our child care businesses around a quality-aware rating system and implementing that, which was critical to ensuring high-quality opportunities for preschool-age children, to incentivize higher quality through our scholarship program. So that was a very clear way that we were collaborating with business to push an early childhood agenda.
“When I was associate superintendent of high schools at Minneapolis Public Schools, we worked with Metro Transit to take our kids off the yellow bus and put them on our metro transit system. We collaborated with a nonprofit youth advocacy organization to help implement those passes for students and the management of that. Achieve Minneapolis (now called Achieve Twin Cities), which was a nonprofit, working with them to help coordinate college and career ready centers. A private donor who helped fund those college and career ready centers within all of our high schools.
“We’ve worked with businesses on providing scholarships and job shadowing and apprenticeship experiences for our kids. Particularly, there’s a program called Search. When I was commissioner of education, we had a Search consultant working with our special ed students who were transitioning to independent life and being able to get them work skills, so working with businesses that way, which was really fabulous.
“In Boston, we worked with our businesses, with Boston After School and Beyond. They did an amazing summer school program, and then after school programs when we collaborated across the entire city with hundreds of businesses who participated. I worked with Neil Sullivan on the Boston Private Industry Council, had a seat on the board. I would send my high school superintendent to attend those meetings when I couldn’t attend, but they did workforce readiness skills. Obviously, at the City of Boston, we had a Step Up program. City of Minneapolis, when I was there, we had a Step Up program for kids.
“There’s lots of ways I’ve worked with business in the past, which has always been extremely beneficial. Something I’m very, very proud of – I didn’t start it, but I helped continue it – was through EdVestors. It’s a nonprofit that works with our business community within Boston to put arts programming into our schools. And so again, I didn’t start that, but I was very supportive of it.”
What did you learn from forging those partnerships, and how do you hope to apply those lessons here in Milwaukee?
“What I learned is that you can absolutely provide greater opportunity for children when you are engaging with cross-collaborative partnerships and using multiple sectors and taking an all-hands-on deck approach. And I learned that there’s a lot of really goodwill out there. You just need to give them the pathways in which they can match their mission and their vision for how they can help, and then find ways to engage with them and bring them into our schools so that the whole community is engaged within the success of the children. That just makes it more sustainable, I think. So, I learned that you have greater sustainable opportunities for students that last a much longer time than just one-time visits, or getting business people to come in and read to your kids, for instance, is a really positive and wonderful thing. But you want to do it in a way that’s much more sustainable, like having a business adopt a school, for instance, which we also did (in Minnesota). I think that those are really key relationships to value and to support, so that kids get everything that they need to succeed.”
What do you want or need in terms of support from Milwaukee’s business community?
“What I need – which I’m already getting – is the welcome mat rolled out, to be able to partner with them and to support our students and our schools, to come in and be true partners in the work, to offer their human and financial resources ensuring that all of Milwaukee’s children are getting what they need to succeed. And to help us build the political will of support across all of Milwaukee and throughout the state.”
What’s your call to action for the Milwaukee business community? Why should they support you and MPS during this time of new leadership?
“I think that we have an incredible opportunity. I think that there’s great hope and there’s a readiness right now, and I think that the time is now. I bring to Milwaukee more than three decades of experience and a real desire to work alongside business, and to work alongside our city and county and state leaders and all of our internal MPS team to get it right for our kids. And I think that we have an incredible opportunity in front of us, and we should work together and forge new relationships and new partnerships to actually get it done for our kids.”
How do you plan to restore public trust in the financial management of MPS after the issues that surfaced last year?
“Well, one is they’re already working. We have new leadership in the department, and they are working on the CAP, the corrective action plan, with the state, meeting with them very regularly to make sure that we’re meeting the deadlines and getting proper accounting. We also are committing to quarterly reviews and accounting to the public and reporting to the public. The last board meeting that they had, they passed an oversight resolution. They’re going to create an oversight committee. This is something that I strongly support, and we will report out. The best way to show the community that we are responsible, good stewards of the public trust is to actually deliver on that and to report publicly on our progress.”
What is your approach to facilities management and what to do with unused or underutilized buildings?
“I have to still get briefed on the building and facilities situation. Obviously, now we have the lead in the schools, and so we have to also get underneath that. I am going to be hiring a chief operations officer and a team of folks who are going to be working on that issue specifically. I’ll have more to chat with about that over the next couple of weeks here, so that we can get a good handle on what we’re facing in the schools. That will probably also play into our overall determinations on how we should handle any underutilized buildings, or buildings that need to be reprioritized. One thing I know for sure is we are going to look at academics first, and we are going to determine where we need to put additional effort and where we maybe need to scale back some to match an academic program of focus for our students at the elementary, middle grades and high school grades.”
