Milwaukee Public Schools will begin an audit of special education programming in March. (NNS file photo)
By Alex Klaus
This story was originally published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, where you can find other stories reporting on fifteen city neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Visit milwaukeenns.org.
Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius is gearing up for a district-wide special education audit.
“As we move into our literacy plan and providing Tier 1 instruction to our students, it’s just really important for us to understand how we’re currently serving our students and how we’re programming for them to ensure that they get everything that they need,” Cassellius said.
The district has hired the Council of the Great City Schools, the same organization that conducted the district’s Human Resources audit earlier this year.
Cassellius said the organization is scheduled to begin the audit in March.
Audit will inform future programming
MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius wants to make sure the district is adequately serving the most vulnerable students. (Photo by Alex Klaus / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / Report for America)
Cassellius introduced the idea for the audit in a Listen and Learn engagement session in early October.
In the meeting, Cassellius told attendees that the audit should give recommendations for serving students with disabilities across the district and inform future programming.
The audit will address special education services at all levels, including early childhood services and early intervention programs, Cassellius said.
Over 20% of MPS students are identified as having a disability, Cassellius said. “That’s a pretty large amount of students.”
According to data from the Wisconsin Department of Instruction, 65,599 students are enrolled at MPS.
Serving the most vulnerable students
Cassellius, who has a child with a disability, said that these students are often the most vulnerable.
“I’ve always really cared deeply about our children who have disabilities and the services they get within a district,” Cassellius said.
Cassellius hopes the audit will help the district better meet the individual needs of students with disabilities, especially those with high support needs or complex health impairments.
She said creating more inclusive classrooms benefits all students.
“When you serve children with disabilities well, you really actually serve everybody well,” Cassellius said. “Teachers learn new skills and how to meet the needs of the children who have a disability, but those are transferable to all kids really.”
The Council of the Great City Schools will engage with Central Office staff providing special education services, social workers, counselors, teachers and paraprofessionals as part of the audit. Cassellius said they will also consult with parents through the parent and special education parent advisory groups.
What can the district improve?
Gardner Seawright’s child has been in a comprehensive unit since he started at MPS.
Comprehensive units typically serve students with more significant medical needs. The unit follows a different curriculum from general education and is segregated from general education.
Seawright said an ongoing struggle for parents has been the limited number of schools that are able to offer the specialized attention students like his son need.
Seawright said MPS only has a few schools with capacity to serve students in comprehensive units and that many of the children who attend those schools don’t live nearby.
He said he often travels 15 to 20 minutes to get his child to school and isn’t always comfortable letting his child take the bus because of his medical needs.
He also said he worries about seclusion and restraint in the district. His child hasn’t experienced it, but he said the practice is more likely to be used in comprehensive units.
Seclusion and restraint incidents at MPS
Seclusion refers to separating and involuntarily confining a student in a room where a student is physically prevented from leaving, while restraint is the restriction of a student’s ability to freely move their body, according to Wisconsin state law.
As of 2020, Wisconsin law prohibits seclusion or physical restraint by school staff unless a student’s behavior presents an imminent risk to the physical safety of students or school staff.
While MPS reported fewer incidents of seclusion and restraint last year, students with disabilities continue to be affected at higher rates, according to district data from the 2024-2025 school year.
Less than a quarter of MPS students have an Individualized Education Plan with their school, but these students make up 64% of students who were secluded and 59% who were restrained. A year earlier, during the 2023-2024 school year, nearly 81% of students secluded and 76% restrained had disabilities across the state.
Joanne Juhnke, an advocacy specialist with Disability Rights Wisconsin, said seclusion and restraint has historically disproportionately affected students with disabilities.
Learning emotional-regulation skills can create a learning curve for students with disabilities, Juhnke said, which puts them more at risk for acting out.
“It feels much more damaging and much more punitive,” Juhnke said. “From what we hear from students with disabilities themselves who have been subjected to this, it feels like punishment.
Disability Rights Wisconsin doesn’t advocate for the complete banning of restraint because it recognizes that restraint is sometimes necessary for a child’s safety, but it believes seclusion should be banned entirely, Juhnke said.
‘Answers actually rest at the state level’
Seawright said the district has limited resources to introduce many improvements he’d like to see.
“I’m glad they’re doing an audit, but I think a lot of the answers actually rest at the state level in terms of funding,” Seawright said.
He feels that, despite these limitations, the district has done a pretty good job servicing his child.
In particular, Seawright praised the special education teachers who work with his son.
“There’s some really stellar teachers,” Seawright said. “They do amazing work with limited resources and it’s really impressive.”
In Wisconsin, school districts, including MPS, can now be reimbursed for 90% of costs for students with disabilities with high support needs if they generate over $30,000 in special education costs. The change in policy, enacted as part of the state’s 2025-2027 biennial budget, gives districts like MPS more room to service children with disabilities who have high support needs or complex health impairments.
Cassellius said she’s interested in the higher reimbursement and wants to use the opportunity to look closely at what supports they have in place for these kids, including ratios between students and support staff like paraprofessionals.
Cassellius wants to make sure students with high support needs get appropriate services. One student with autism, for example, might have individual needs requiring very different programming than another student with autism, or a student with a different medical condition.
“Now we have this greater opportunity, I think, to take a deeper dive and a deeper look with new eyes to make sure that we are employing national best practices and really putting in place those services for our kids,” Cassellius said.
Alex Klaus is the education solutions reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
This article first appeared on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.