On the surface, it looks like a big financial blow to the Milwaukee public schools.
But a closer look reveals a much bigger picture of what is going on.
Milwaukee Public School District has a budget of nearly $1.4 billion.
That is just under half the size of the city’s total economy.
The district has also struggled to keep up with the rapid growth of charter schools.
Charter schools have sprung up all over the country.
But Milwaukee Public has the largest population of charters in the country, and that has allowed the district to make a big profit.
As Milwaukee Public tries to figure out how to stay competitive with its competitors, it is also struggling to make ends meet.
According to an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the district is expected to have $1 billion in annual operating expenses by 2020.
That means Milwaukee Public is about to lose nearly $3 billion in operating revenue over 10 years.
In the past decade, the school district has cut staff by about 6,000 people.
A budget that is so large and so heavily dependent on a few hundred teachers is not a recipe for success, said Mary E. Wintrich, the chief financial officer for Milwaukee Public.
The district has to find ways to manage that money.
Wintrich said she is concerned that the district’s finances are not as sound as they need to be.
She said she and her colleagues are concerned that some of the district�s most talented and dedicated teachers are either going to the suburbs or they are not going to be able to afford to come back to Milwaukee.
“We are not financially stable, and we are going to have to find a new way to manage this,” Wintry said.
MCSD has also been grappling with declining enrollment.
The school district reported a 1.5 percent drop in students in 2019-2020, down from 2.4 percent the previous year.
The decline was particularly dramatic among African-American students.
More than half of the school�s African- American students attend a charter school.
At the same time, the number of students in the district dropped by 6 percent from 2020-2021.
Despite these challenges, Milwaukee Public faces some big challenges in the next decade.
Milwaukee Public will have to rely on an aging population to support its schools, said Superintendent Tom Dennison.
Milwaukee is also in the midst of a budget crisis.
The city budget is forecast to increase by more than $20 million for fiscal 2021.
That increase would mean an additional $300 million in operating expenses for the district, according to Wintury.
This is not good for the students, Winty said.
The budget cuts are going in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile, the city is struggling to find the money to keep the district operating.
Dennison said he is concerned about the future of the District.
The current plan is to close all schools for the next five years.
That would save the district about $400 million, he said.
But that is not enough to keep a district open.
Last month, the City Council approved a new $2 billion budget.
But the money would have to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the city budget.
Some Milwaukee leaders have suggested the district can save by cutting costs elsewhere.
But Wintress said that is unlikely to happen.
When the district closes schools, they will have fewer people in the school system, she said.
And that will put a big dent in enrollment.
It is hard to imagine a scenario where the district would be able in a decade or two to stay solvent, Winrich said.
Milwaukee is already a model for how charter schools work, Wartrich said, and the district needs to do everything possible to replicate the success that it has seen in the past.
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