Private schools accused of ‘special access’
As the city was finishing work on a guide for reopening schools in the fall, a group of charter and private school leaders sat down with health officials to raise concerns with a key section. The lobbying effort worked.
Steve Baas, a lobbyist with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, let the workgroup know that he had just talked to two city health officials, Claire Evers and Marlaina Jackson. They would be changing a section of the guide, he said, that would let these schools continue to operate during limited coronavirus outbreaks under certain conditions.
“After yesterday’s meeting they took the concerns raised by the group to their public health leadership team and the mayor,” Baas wrote to the private and charter school leaders on Aug. 7. “As a result, they have been given the goahead to return to our previous … policy with several additions to deal with possible outbreaks at a school.”
Four days later, the mayor publicly released the school reopening guidelines, including the changes advocated for by the private and charter school workgroup.
Baas’ group then put out a news release praising the guide.
“This is a great step forward for parents and children in the city,” MMAC
President Tim Sheehy said, suggesting the guidelines struck the right balance between safety concerns and educational needs.
The Baas email is among some 400 provided to the Journal Sentinel by the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, the union for the city’s public school teachers. Union officials, who have raised concerns about the safety of returning to in-person learning, say the emails show there is a hotline that private schools and their lobbying partner, MMAC, have had to top Health Department staffers during the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to influencing the details of the reopening guidelines, private school leaders met regularly with city health officials and often got speedy replies to their coronavirus-related questions — once in just one minute on a weekend.
“It is alarming to know our public health department has a school group that our public schools and Milwaukee Public Schools workers has no voice in,” said Ben Ward, executive director for the MTEA. “Instead, the private schools and business insiders had special access and treatment … during a public health crisis.”
Ward said the union has brought up a couple of issues with the city Health Department, one on closing summer camps and the other on special education students and teachers, and nothing happened on either. A spokesman for MPS said the public schools weren’t involved in drafting the city’s reopening
guidelines. The public schools drafted their own safety plan in consultation with city health officials.
Two members of the Milwaukee School Board, Larry Miller and Bob Peterson, said they were also concerned about the close working relationship between private school advocates and public health officials, as shown in the emails. Peterson is a past president of the teachers union.
“What I find disturbing about the series of emails is it seems like a very closed group of the MMAC and private school operators basically trying to shape the scope of the Health Department’s policies,” Peterson said.
But Baas dismissed the criticism, saying he was just doing his job.
The emails show that Baas, a former high-ranking legislative aide, has spent months serving as a go-between for private groups — including bars, restaurants, small businesses and private schools — and the city Health Department.
“I hope it comes as no surprise to anyone that the MMAC is intensely interested and involved in ensuring as much of our economy can remain open as possible and that those sectors that are open are operating safely,” said Baas, senior vice president of government affairs with MMAC.
The teachers union and private schools have battled for decades over the use of tax dollars to fund vouchers for children to attend private and parochial schools. There are more than 72,000 MPS students and some 30,000 students in the school choice program.
Jackson, the city’s interim health commissioner, also rejected the notion that the private school advocates are getting special treatment.
Jackson said she agreed to the meetings with the private and charter school leaders because they represent about 40% of the students in the city. She said she also meets regularly with one of the regional superintendents for MPS. She said there has been no discussion of bringing together the private and public school officials together in a single group.
All of these meetings, Jackson emphasized, were held primarily to disseminate information, not to influence decisions. Politics, she said, has not been a factor in driving her agency’s actions.
Mayor Tom Barrett was not endorsed by the teachers union earlier this year after he declined to take a position on the $87 million spending referendum for Milwaukee’s public schools. The measure got 78% of the vote in April.
As for the changes in the school reopening guidelines in August, Jackson said her agency agreed to changes “that were realistic for the schools to safely operate.”
“What the emails don’t show is the very tense conversations that were had where (the city Health Department) was not able to accommodate requests — things that did not make it into the plan including sports and higher capacities,” Jackson said.
Early tensions over in-person education
The relationship between city health officials and private and charter schools hasn’t always been so cozy.
In July, health officials announced that in-person instruction was prohibited at Milwaukee-area schools because of concerns about COVID-19.
Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, said schools had been blindsided by the decision.
“Nobody saw this coming,” Bender said. “Schools did not have any sort of consultative role in these changes. And they didn’t get any communication from the Health Department that the changes were being made.”
Baas took immediate steps to try to rectify the situation, the emails show.
Within days, Baas set up a meeting between three top Health Department officials, including Jackson and Evers, and two dozen private and charter school advocates. A smaller committee, dubbed both a workgroup and a task force, was formed soon after.
The first order of business was to work on the school reopening guidelines, including a checklist that would be used to evaluate school safety plans.
In a July 30 email, Patricia Hoben, one of the members of the workgroup, wrote as if she was one of the ones who drafted the checklist, relying on a template used for bars and restaurants. Hoben, head of City Forward Collective, which represents choice and charter schools, said she had already drafted a reopening plan for schools in her group.
“I volunteered to draft the checklist for the task force, thinking that if the checklist followed the same order of topics as the safety sections of our school reopening planning template, it would be easier for schools to fill it out,” Hoben said in a statement. “Once it was drafted, the school safety checklist draft was reviewed by the task force and modified by Health Department staff before it was published.”
But Jackson said she was the one who actually wrote the checklist based on research done in Madison and across the country.
“It is not a true statement that our guidance was created by Patricia Hoben or the private school group,” Jackson said.
“It is a more accurate statement to write that during the months of July, August and September, documents were being created everywhere. Information sharing, idea generation and problem-solving were happening at all levels of education.”
Indeed, at some points, health officials and the private school workgroup would split on important issues.
In an Oct. 21 email, Baas told Evers, a deputy commissioner at the city Health Department, that a ban on school sports might force the Catholic schools in Milwaukee to join a lawsuit challenging the right of public health agencies to regulate religious schools.
“I have actually been impressed by the unified front we’ve enjoyed so far with Choice and Charter here in Milwaukee during this pandemic,” Baas wrote. “I fear that this might split if the public health adjustments are too dramatic.”
On other occasions, things did go smoothly between the private schools and the public health officials.
In early September, Bender asked Jackson if her agency would approve a school safety plan for a group of eight Lutheran schools. Just hours later, Jackson said it would be OK’d later that day.
At 5:20 p.m. on Sept. 26, a Saturday, Baas made a similar inquiry to Jackson regarding Milwaukee College Prep’s safety plan. MCP operates public charter schools.
“It’s being reviewed this weekend,” Jackson responded one minute later.
Contact Daniel Bice at (414) 3136684 or dbice@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanielBice or on Facebook at fb.me/daniel.bice.