MPS board questions officials on lead plan; no total cost estimate yet

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Board members for Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) questioned district leaders Wednesday night about their plan to test schools for lead and clean them as necessary. So far, nine MPS schools have closed at various parts of 2025 due to the discovery of dangerously high lead levels.

MPS administrators released their lead action plan Monday morning. It was at that press conference they announced two more schools, Brown Street Academy and Westside Academy, will be closed next month for remediation after the discovery of unsafe lead levels in those buildings.

The lead issues so far have been tied to lead paint in older buildings. While district leaders have committed to testing 106 schools built before a federal ban on lead paint in 1978, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said the district did not yet have an estimate for how much it will cost MPS to test each school and clean them as necessary.

"We are adjusting, right now, our plan as we move forward based on what we're seeing and the site visits and the visualizations that [inspectors are] doing, to be able to adjust those costs," she told the board. "But we don't have a real number because the number shifts and changes."

Cassellius told the board MPS has spent about $2 million so far on testing and remediation. She said administrators will have a defined number in early June when Cassellius shares her proposed budget for the upcoming school year. She's already said the plan will include two full-time positions dedicated to the effort.

Both board members and speakers in the public comments section sought specifics about how MPS will respond.

"Let's get into the details a little more because people are really hungry for that," board president Missy Zombor said.

The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA) released a statement Wednesday calling for the teachers union to have a voice in which schools are prioritized for testing and remediation. The union's president, Ingrid Walker-Henry, also called for the city to pitch in money toward cleaning efforts.

"The mayor and common council recently mandated a new 2% sales tax on Milwaukee that is bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars per year," Walker-Henry said. "There should be a conversation about using a portion of those funds to maintain and improve the public school facilities owned by the city and accelerate the replacement of lead pipes to ensure safe drinking water for students now and for generations to come.”

MPS officials originally hoped they'd get federal assistance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the form of experts consulting them on what to look for and which schools to address first. Instead, the Trump administration fired those workers as part of its sweeping cuts to federal agencies.

The CDC notified Milwaukee earlier this month it would not be able to help the city and MPS address its lead crisis.

In a call with CBS 58, Jeff Flemming, a spokesman for Mayor Cavalier Johnson, said while Milwaukee might hold the deed to MPS school buildings, it's the district that functionally controls the properties.

"State law is very clear that maintenance and care for school buildings is explicitly the responsibility of MPS," Flemming said. "The city has been a partner in identifying and guiding the remediation of the problem, but the city does not have the resources to remedy the lead paint problem that's developed at older schools."

MPS administrators reiterated their timeline for testing buildings. Their plan is to test 54 schools -- including seven already remediated -- built before 1950 by the start of the 2025-26 school year. That would leave 52 schools built between 1950 and 1978, when the federal government banned the use of lead paint. The district hopes to finish testing and cleaning those schools by the end of December.

Beyond that, Cassellius said the lead crisis should nudge the district and its families to have hard conversations about the future of its school buildings. 

Given the buildings' ages and declining enrollment over the last two decades, the district's long-range facilities plan calls for MPS to consider closing more than a dozen low-enrollment schools.

Cassellius said those conversations should revolve around which buildings are worth renovating and which should be closed and consolidated into new buildings,

"I really think that we have some reckoning to do here as a community," she said. "And we need to start thinking about the buildings we want to send our children to."