Through the Fire: A Look at Milwaukee’s Public Schools

There is a reason Chaka Khan’s classic “Through the Fire” has endured for nearly four decades. It is a song about survival — about holding on when everything around you is collapsing, and trusting that what’s on the other side is worth the burn. This week, as I watched footage of Lincoln Avenue School engulfed in flame and smoke on Milwaukee’s south side, I couldn’t get that song out of my head. Because if there is any institution in this city that has been walking through fire for decades, it is Milwaukee Public Schools.

In the early morning hours of June 30, a five-alarm fire tore through Lincoln Avenue School, a 109-year-old building near 18th and Lincoln that served roughly 480 of our youngest learners. Milwaukee Fire Chief Aaron Lipski said crews battled flames on every floor before pulling back, unable to safely continue the fight from inside. By the time the smoke cleared, most of the century-old structure was gone. Thankfully, no one was hurt. But a neighborhood lost its school, and a community lost a piece of its history.

Chaka Khan sang of going the distance and paying the price, of coming out the other side stronger for what she endured. That is the story MPS families are living right now — but it shouldn’t have to be. Because this fire was not simply an unfortunate accident. It was the predictable result of a long-range problem that Milwaukee has been warned about for years.

A Building Stock in Crisis

Lincoln Avenue School had no fire sprinklers. That is not unusual — it is the norm. District officials confirmed that only about 20 of MPS’s 140 school buildings have automatic sprinkler systems installed. The rest, including Lincoln Avenue, were constructed before 1974, when sprinklers became a code requirement for large buildings in Milwaukee. On average, MPS school buildings are 85 years old. Some, like Lincoln Avenue, are pushing well past a century.

Interim Chief Operating Officer Michael Turza was blunt about why: money. Retrofitting a single school with sprinklers can cost multiple millions of dollars, and with a long list of deferred maintenance needs competing for scarce dollars, safety upgrades keep getting pushed to next year, and the year after that. It is a version of the same verse repeating — the fire builds, and still we wait.

An Ownership Problem Unique to Milwaukee

Here is something many readers may not know: Milwaukee Public Schools is the only school district in the state of Wisconsin that does not own the buildings its students learn in. Every MPS school building is owned and maintained by the City of Milwaukee, a structural quirk dating back generations. That means the district that is held accountable for student outcomes does not hold the keys — or the capital budget — to the buildings where those outcomes are supposed to happen. Responsibility is split, funding streams are tangled, and when a building like Lincoln Avenue needs a multimillion-dollar sprinkler retrofit, no single entity is fully positioned, or fully funded, to make it happen.

Whose Fire Is This, Really?

It would be easy to lay this solely at the feet of MPS or the City. But the deeper truth is that both are operating under a state funding formula that has starved Wisconsin’s public schools, and Milwaukee’s in particular, for years. Our state legislature has repeatedly declined to adequately fund public education, capping revenue and leaving districts like ours to make impossible choices between textbooks, teachers, and roof repairs. You cannot mandate excellence while withholding the resources to achieve it. Lincoln Avenue is what happens when that math finally runs out.

Chaka Khan’s song ends not in defeat, but in triumph — she made it through. Milwaukee’s students deserve the same ending. That means state legislators must stop the political banter and cut the check for real capital investment for our schools, the City and MPS must resolve the ownership tangle that leaves accountability unclear, and every remaining school without a sprinkler system must be identified, prioritized, and funded — before the next five-alarm fire, not after.

Our children should not have to walk through fire to get an education. It’s time Wisconsin made sure they never have to again.