(The Center Square) – Milwaukee Public Schools are getting some better news as it gets ready to open for the new school year.
New Superintendent Brenda Cassellius took city leaders and reporters on a tour of one of the newly cleaned lead-tainted schools in the city.
“I know that there’s some that didn’t think we would get it done but we had a great team in here,” Cassellius said of the work at the Auer Avenue School.
Auer Avenue is one of 30 schools that crews cleaned over the summer. Cassellius said she hopes to have as many as 50 schools cleared of lead by the time students report to the first day of class Tuesday.
That would leave more than 50 others that are still lead-tainted. Cassellius said there were 106 schools on Milwaukee’s lead clean-up list at the end of the last school year.
“They’re working all weekend to get it ready, and now we just get the air tested in there and then we can go into those affected areas, but those areas are closed off,” she added.
There are also 25 MPS schools that saw damage from this month’s floods.
Riverside University High School and the Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education were hardest hit. MPS said they will both have to have asbestos crews come in to deal with damaged tiles.
The clean-up news comes as MPS got some better financial news this week as well.
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Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction on Monday released $17 million in state funding that had been withheld because of MPS’ late financial reports. Those reports were for the 2023-2024 school year and were due in December.
Last week DPI released a separate $16 million in once-held state aid.