Choosing success: School choice grows amid controversy in Wisconsin
By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Reporter
MADISON — The fire took everything.
A community inside a school brought it all back.
Jeffrey Robb, development director for Messmer Catholic Schools, home to Milwaukee’s famous school choice voucher program, said the story of Ayanna Murrell, a Messmer High junior, the fire that claimed her family’s home, and the way the private school community responded, is emblematic of the “Messmer way.”
The student and her family were burned out of their inner-city Milwaukee apartment. They leaped from their third-story apartment window to escape.
After the fire, the girl reached out to her theology teacher, Robb said.
“She thought it was an act of faith, leaping from this building,” he said. “It was not only remarkable that she had the courage to leap and to survive, but the response of our students and faculty here. They rallied together and literally found the family a new place to live, provided furnishings, food, books, clothing and enough money to get back on their feet.
“That speaks to our community.”
As Messmer President and CEO the Rev. Bob Smith often puts it, education isn’t a function of test scores and homework — it’s about making better human beings.
Still Messmer boasts some pretty impressive academic achievements by Milwaukee and national education standard, arguably making the nation’s oldest voucher program a shining example of school choice.
The voucher system, allocating public money to send students — generally poor, minority students — to private, often faith-based, schools, opened in Milwaukee in 1990 when the state, led by thenGov. Tommy Thompson, cleared the way for the Catholic school to accept voucher students.
Robb said the early years were a struggle, a time of anxiety, when faculty, parents and students wondered whether the whims of politics would change its voucher status.
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided the constitutionality of the question early last decade, just as school choice programs continued to expand.
National School Choice Week, a nationwide series of events spotlighting the need for educational options for children, is from Jan. 22-28. (Click here to find events in your area)
No doubt some have been controversial, and some have failed during the past two decades, but there is no questioning the growth of school choice initiatives in Wisconsin and nationwide.
