Milwaukee Public Schools is hiring more than 200 new teachers and undertaking more than $16 million in new spending for the second semester, with the goals of improving students’ reading and math abilities and improving high school programs.
Frequently using the phrase “a sense of urgency,” Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said this week that the unusual midyear shakeup in the status quo in many MPS schools is causing stresses in some parts of the system and on many adults but will benefit children.
Speaking about a new program to teach reading to older students who are reading poorly, he said: “We’ve done something we haven’t done before, create a sense of urgency around improving children’s reading. . . . Sometimes, if that makes people uncomfortable, so be it.”
The initiatives are clearly stretching the capacity of the system, from the central office, which is scrambling to hire teachers, to individual schools, where sometimes major changes in schedules are being made at midyear and with short deadlines for implementation.
In part because of the new programs, MPS has an unusual number of teaching positions available – 397 such openings were listed on the system’s Web site as of Monday, the most recent update. That equals about 7% of all teaching jobs in the district. Andrekopoulos said that without the new jobs included, the total openings would not be so unusual for this time of year.