Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy nearly two-thirds of the way toward raising $25 million for new high school in Bronzeville
Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy has raised nearly two-thirds of its $25 million goal to build a new high school and turn its current building into a middle school in fall of 2023.
The development, which still needs city approval from Milwaukee's Board of Zoning Appeals, would add space for hundreds more students in the high-demand charter school.
The land at 2212-2228 N. Phillips Ave., just south of West North Avenue, is currently a parking lot and storage building. It would be gifted to the school by its current owner, Royal Capital, which is also the developer for the project, said Cory Nettles, a co-chair of the school's capital campaign.
With four stories totaling nearly 70,000 feet and accommodating about 500 students, the building would be a major upgrade from its current location on West Capitol Drive and North 29th Street, a single-story near-windowless building that fits about 330 students.
That current building, which could be remodeled to serve middle school students as a feeder school for the high school, is in the process of being gifted to the school by Goodwill, Nettles said, after years of leasing. The middle school would need approval from the state Department of Public Instruction and city Charter School Review Committee.
The site is about 10 blocks from Milwaukee Public School's North Division High School, where academy officials previously wanted to move.
The new location was chosen in part because of other developments in the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood.
It's across the street from the American Black Holocaust Museum, which — among other subjects — teaches about the neighborhood's history. Surrounded by racist housing policies, Black residents built up Bronzeville as a thriving center of Black businesses in the early 1900s. As the museum's Head Griot Reggie Jackson explains, federal "urban renewal" programs then demolished old buildings with a promise to rebuild, which never materialized.
Recently, a variety of organizations and developers have looked to build in the neighborhood. Just across from HFCA's target site is the former Garfield Avenue Elementary School, which closed amid declining enrollment and has been renovated into apartments.
Plans are also underway for two major arts-oriented developments just blocks away on North Avenue: the Bronzeville Center for the Arts at King Drive, and the Bronzeville Creative Arts and Technology Hub at 6th Street.
And construction started early this year on a $105 million redevelopment of the old Schuster's department store into new offices for the Medical College of Wisconsin and Greater Milwaukee Foundation, affordable and market-rate apartments, a food hall, an early childhood education facility and a blood donation center.
Focusing on leadership
Howard Fuller, a North Division graduate, former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and lifelong civil rights activist, founded the academy in 2004 with a group of pastors who wanted to see a school controlled by African Americans that focused on leadership. Fuller stepped down in 2020 from Marquette University, where he served as a distinguished professor of education and founder and director of its Institute for the Transformation of Learning.
Fuller, 81, continues to serve at the academy as board chair emeritus and still regularly meets with students and teachers.
The school began as a private school, running on vouchers through the parental choice program, but transitioned to become a charter school in 2011 because it could receive more funding that way, Fuller said.
As a charter school, it can still be independently run by its own nonprofit board of directors but must be regularly authorized for operation by a public board. Most charter schools are authorized by the public school district, but HFCA is authorized by the city's Charter School Review Committee — a controversial power the city's mayor has opposed.
The school doesn't need any approval from Milwaukee Public Schools. The new location would be in MPS District 5, represented by school board member Jilly Gokalgandhi. It's just outside District 4, which includes North Division and is represented by Aisha Carr, who is also a board member for HFCA.
School Principal Judith Parker said there's already strong demand for more seats. The school has doubled the number of graduates since 2015 and is continually hitting the capacity of the building. She said 140 freshmen have applied for this fall, with about 95 spots.
HFCA enrolls students based on a lottery system for those who apply, giving preference only to those who already have siblings in the school. Fuller said the school would remain committed to being non-selective with enrollment.
"We've actually lost board members because you hear the argument, well, if you really want to be a 'high flying school,' you can't keep taking kids who come in here two and three and four grade levels behind," Fuller said. "My thing is, I literally don't care. The idea is to take every single child."
Connecting students to college
The school focuses on enrolling its graduates in higher education. Students are required to apply to at least four colleges before graduation and the school advertises 100% of its graduates are accepted into higher education programs.
That does not necessarily mean the students actually enroll in higher education. About two-thirds of the class of 2021 has not enrolled. Parker said the pandemic also led many of the school's alumni to return home.
"The pandemic definitely hit our alumni hard," Parker said. "Their campuses closed their dormitories and forced them off campus to unstable housing. When they returned home, many of their families either needed them to work to add to the family income or to watch school-aged children as our families are made up primarily of those who were coined 'essential workers.' "
A new alumni engagement coordinator is helping some of these students reconnect with colleges.
The school's exact performance numbers are hard to verify.
A check of a state database shows lower graduation and college enrollment rates than what's shown in the school's promotional materials. Parker said the state numbers are off because a former staff member made errors in previous reporting and other staffers have had to piece together the right numbers.
For the class of 2021, Parker told the Journal Sentinel about 32% of its graduates enrolled in postsecondary education — compared to 33% of MPS graduates and 45% statewide in the state data. The HFCA rate was down from about 59% in 2020 and 68% in 2019, according to Parker, with the pandemic playing a significant role.
The state also shows HFCA with greater disparity by economic status than MPS, with about 24% of economically disadvantaged 2021 graduates enrolling in postsecondary education, compared to about 31% of those in MPS. Parker said the school's rate was usually higher but the school doesn't track economically disadvantaged students as closely because the state's definition misses many families who are struggling.
Further, the fundraising campaign bills HFCA as the highest ranking school for college readiness among Milwaukee schools that don't give preference to enrolling higher achieving students. The score cited from DPI in 2018 is based entirely on its graduation rates that year.
In the most recent state data, the four-year graduation rate was reported as 47.1% for the class of 2021, but Parker said that was also a data error. She said 57 of 58 students in the class of 2021 graduated for a rate of 98%.
School leaders said by their senior year, 20% of students are able to take courses at partner colleges while still in high school, as early as their sophomore year. Students also take seminar classes in their junior and senior years where they work on college applications.
Jadius McGhee, a 2020 HFCA graduate, said taking those courses in high school helped prepare him for attending college now at UW-Madison. HFCA staff had also helped him get accepted to 45 colleges with a total of more than $1 million in scholarship offers.
"It was really easy to adjust once I got there," McGhee said.
Fuller said his goal is for every student to see college as an option, even if they don't end up choosing to go.
"Even if you don't go to college, you should make that decision; there shouldn't be some other people out here making that decision for you, like 'Oh, you shouldn't go,'" Fuller said. "And the reality is a lot of young people will say I don't want to go to college but then a couple years later they do want to go, but if you had not ever prepared them, then they can't make that decision."
Plans up for city approval
The plans could be considered by the city's Board of Zoning Appeals as early as its next meeting July 28, though city officials said it was too soon to confirm whether it would be on the agenda.
Nettles said the school hopes to break ground this month, work on construction for a year, and move in to start the school year there in August 2023.
The school has already raised $16 million toward the work, Nettles said, including major donations from Northwestern Mutual, Wisconsin Energy Corporation Foundation and other "high-net individuals."
Northwestern Mutual CEO John Schlifske has publicly derided Milwaukee Public Schools and pledged a goal of funding 5,000 additional seats in "high-quality schools" by 2025. Sinking $2.5 million in HFCA, Schlifske said, is part of that pledge, which he said would put "more of our students on track to graduate and thrive."
Plans for the middle school, not yet finalized, would need multiple approvals from state and local agencies.
Contact Rory Linnane at rory.linnane@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @RoryLinnane.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy plans new Milwaukee high school
