La Casa de Esperanza, a charter school in Waukesha that opened in 2015, has submitted plans for an $8 million expansion project to be phased in over the next five to seven years.
Around 90 K-4 and K-5 students are enrolled at the school’s current location, 403 Arcadian Ave.
Expansion plans submitted to the Waukesha Planning Commission in December call for a three-story, 43,000-square-foot elementary school addition to the La Casa community Center at 410 Arcadian Ave. to house 12 classrooms for K-4 through Grade 6. Also planned for the building are a library, a cafeteria, office space, a parent center and a parking lot.
School leaders also want to build a 20,000-square-foot middle school addition in the early 2020s with six classrooms for grades six through eight and additional office space.
“Our goal is start construction in September this year,” said La Casa president and chief executive officer Anselmo Villarreal.
The project is broken into three phases. The $3.5-million first phase, planned for completion by September 2017, would include building-out the exterior of the elementary school and finishing the interior of its first two floors.
The interior of the third floor would be completed in Phase II, which would cost about $2 million. A target completion date for Phase II was not specified.
The middle school addition would be built in Phase III and cost about $2.5 million.
La Casa de Esperanza is the first charter school to open in Waukesha. It’s authorized through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is not affiliated with a public school district, although it is publicly funded.
The school is run by La Casa, an organization that offers financial literacy and childhood education programs to low-income families, particularly Hispanic families with poor English language skills.
Villarreal said the charter school’s top priority is to shrink the achievement gap in education between wealthy white students and low-income minority students.
“We have an incredible amount of flexibility,” Villarreal said. “We open at 6 a.m. We have mentors and tutors, we have a summer program … every child is going to have a mentor in the school. We are able to provide a lot of resources for our children.”
Todd Gray, superintendent of the Waukesha School District, said he’s not worried about the charter school’s expansion cutting into school district enrollment.
“It is what it is,” Gray said. “Obviously it’s competition for us, but I’m not too worried about it. The opportunities that we offer are much more diverse and higher quality. We have a couple schools that are very diverse and we have the highest-quality bilingual programs … we can offer any kind of program to any kind of student, even if they don’t know English very well.”
