The state of the Milwaukee Public School system is dismal. It only graduates 46% of students. School choice is helping but, the heavy bureaucracy of the public school system is dragging things down even further. A quick sum of the salaries of just the MPS administrative staff list comes to $308,694,970.02, yup, $308 Million for all the administrators. Oh wait! That’s without fringe benefits, the MPS administrators collect another $116,865,415.83 in fringe benefits, bringing the grand total to: $425,560,385.85. And that’s not even including any teachers! No wonder they increased their tax levy this year while simultaneous experiencing a decrease in enrollment!
So with all these high paid administrators, one would think there would be a veritable cornucopia of new programs coming out to improve performance and graduation through focused study programs, new approaches to learning and merit based pay for teachers and administrators…
Wrong. Instead, we have this:
“The Milwaukee Public School System will expand the services provided by its gay-friendly high school and apparently become the nation’s first school system to create a gay-friendly middle school.”
Shouldn’t all public middle schools and high schools be gay-friendly? Do we really need to put all this effort, cost and focus into a specifically gay-associated school? It seems performance should be paramount in new programs, this is a new affinity group. In times of crisis, we should be focusing on the fundamentals, not new affinity programs.
The final interesting piece of this story is Marty Lexmond, the new “director of school innovation for Milwaukee Public Schools”, who was a spokesperson/driver for the new school. Some preliminary web research points to the fact that his former title was “Marty Lexmond, MPS Director of High School Redesign”. What is his new role as director of innovation? I would be interested to see any other projects he is working on along with pay information. He is not listed in the 2008 Administration Salary list but, he was listed on the 2007 list as the Principal of Hamilton High making a $85,446.00 salary and $35,965.00 in fringe benefits.
Don’t get me wrong, maybe this would be something MPS would want to do as a PR move in a period of success and higher graduation rates but, right now I would much rather see cost and performance-based innovation in Milwaukee Public Schools than some new affinity school.
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Tags: Dismal, gay, homosexual, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools, MPS
Good job exposing the gay-friendly school… I did that about a week ago on my blog: http://wissup.blogspot.com/200.....w-gay.html
Perhaps we should have schools set apart for heterosexuals. And bisexuals. And…. The very idea just sickens me.
Did you really enjoy going to school with gays?
Personally, if they want their own school fine by me.
This school idea is not gay friendly, it is gay centric.
The point of the school is to give LGBT-identified students a safe space to learn in, since many mainstream schools do a poor job of policing hate speech and harassment within their student body. LGBT teens are much more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual students, and bullying certainly doesn’t help that statistic any.
That said, I disagree with the idea of outright labeling a school “gay friendly”, and I’m gay myself. Separate but equal is inherently unequal, and removing LGBT students from the general population and isolating them in their own LGBT-friendly world is harmful in several ways. One, it doesn’t give gay students the opportunity to interact with those who are different from them, allowing them to learn the social skills necessary to survive day to day in what could be a hostile environment (not unlike American society as a whole). Two, it prevents heterosexual students from interacting with gay students, which is incredibly important in the fight for acceptance. Statistics show that people are significantly more likely to be accepting of gay people if they actually know someone who is gay. If we take all the gay kids out of public high school, we’re just begging for a graduating class full of ignorant kids who don’t understand those who are different from them. I think gay high schools/junior highs actually hurt the healthy development of LGBT youth, not help it.
And Super Id, real classy.