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Mayor Cavalier Johnson joined a number of other dignitaries, including MPS Interim Superintendent Eduardo Galvan and school board member Henry Leonard, Monday afternoon at Greenfield Bilingual School, 1711 S. 35th St., to cut the ribbon on a much-needed expansion at the school.
The three-story, 10,672-square-foot addition – designed by Bay View-based Foundation Architects – has four classrooms that are used for art, music, ESL and other classes. There’s also a new kitchen, teacher meeting space, a loading dock and upgraded internet service.
The school serves 569 children from K4 through eighth grade and earned a “meets expectations” on its most recent Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction school report card, released last November.
The addition, which cost about $4 million, was largely funded with federal dollars from the pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds.
Before the addition opened at the start of the school year, teachers led art and music classes using materials on carts moved around the building.
“What this does is it just gives you more dedicated spaces,” says Galvan, who was a teacher at Greenfield earlier in his career. “Like that ESL (room) ... when you need those spaces where you can work more one-on-one with students.
“This provides more opportunities for students to do different things. Next door is (the) band (room). They used to store all those instruments on the stage, which was just a nightmare, (plus) you're taking away gym time.”
The school, which recently celebrated its centennial has long adapted to changes.
Greenfield is one of a number of MPS buildings that were not built by the district but instead absorbed when the City of Milwaukee annexed the entities that constructed them.
In this case the school was acquired in 1926.
It had previously served Towns of Wauwatosa and Greenfield as Joint District School No. 16, which built it, announcing in June 1922 that it would erect a two-story fireproof grade school with an auditorium to hold 600, a gymnasium, an office and 16 classrooms at a cost of $250,000.
It was designed by R.A. Messmer & Bro., a firm run by Robert and Henry J. Messmer, sons of Swiss-born architect Henry Messmer, best known here for designing churches like St. Hyacinth, St. Hedwig and SS. Peter & Paul.
Work on the building began late that year and it was opened in 1924.
It has the nice woodwork, skilled decorative masonry in the foyers and terrazzo floors you’d expect from a building on its era. In the auditorium – which doubles as a gym – there are decorative grilles and more woodwork.
While some residents in those towns opposed annexation, 20-year Greenfield resident William Ehlhardt was not one of them.
“We have paid taxes for years and years and got nothing for them,” he said at an annexation meeting held in what the Journal called, the new school building in 1924.
“This was a fine place 20 years ago but conditions have changed since then. Now it is congested and factories have been built around our homes. Our well water is unfit to drink and insanitary conditions have become unbearable. Those who have sewers and water should help others get those improvements. The town board is powerless: it can’t compete with Milwaukee in giving us improvements. We must have sewers and water.”
Access to Milwaukee’s high school and trade and vocational schools were also considered benefits of annexation, the paper reported.
In fact, part of the early argument for the annexation of that part of the Town of Greenfield – which included about 40 blocks between Lapham to Lincoln, and had initially opposed annexation – was that students living there were been attending Milwaukee schools and in 1921, according to a newspaper report, the Milwaukee school board considered “excluding all outside pupils from Milwaukee schools after next September.”
That led clerk of the Joint District Henry F. Kellermann to opine, “there isn’t anything for us to do but come into the city.”
However, it appears, that there was another option: the joint district could build a school of its own, and did so.
While the annexation was completed in 1925, the relatively new school was not acquired by MPS until July 1926.
“It was made apparent at a district meeting Tuesday that the deal, involving more than $300,000, will be completed very soon,” Joint District No. 16 treasurer John Byrne St. told the Sentinel early that month.
In its first year as part of MPS the school had an enrollment of 638.
A couple years later, a gleaming new junior high school – named for one of Milwaukee’s founders, George Walker – was completed just across Burnham Park, likely pleasing long-time area residents and annexation supporters like William Ehlhardt.
While the names of some schools were updated around 1931 to align with street name changes (30th Avenue became 35th Street, for example), Greenfield kept its moniker.
In 1983, the school was the birthplace of a public Montessori program to help meet the demand created by MacDowell Montessori. The program would move – not without controversy – to Bay View’s Fernwood School in autumn of 2001, where it still operates as one of the most popular and successful programs in the district.
Soon afterward, a bilingual program was added at Greenfield and now it leads classes in two languages: English and Spanish.
Last year, Greenfield had its schoolyard greened as part of the ongoing Reflo collaboration that redevelops asphalt schoolyards to create more green space for kids and control stormwater runoff.
By 2011, via later additions – including one in the 2003 that serves as an early childhood/kindergarten wing – Greenfield had 25 classrooms, covering 69,540 square feet and had an enrollment of 625, which exceeded its capacity of 506 by 124 percent.
A 2024 report prepared for MPS by consultants Perkins Eastman noted that Greenfield had 555 students enrolled in a building with a revised capacity of 361 for a 154 percent utilization rate.
It also suggested the school could be ripe for additional space.
But MPS was already on it, using the same ESSER funding that helped underwrite many projects across the district, including work at Vincent and Reagan High Schools, Milwaukee High School of the Arts, Goodrich School and Greenfield.
Schools were asked for wish lists and principals detailed more than 700 projects which totaled nearly half a billion dollars.
MPS received about $770 million in ESSER money, $63 million of which helped schools take care of a backlog of facilities and maintenance issues, everything from bottle filling stations to interior painting to classroom additions and more.
The new space, tucked between the existing building and the sidewalk on South 26th Street, looks modern from the outside but not exceedingly so, thanks to carefully matched masonry and window arrangements and stone courses that reference the original structure.
Inside, it’s brighter and the kitchen, especially, is a massive upgrade.
As late as last school year, the single kitchen service window was tucked into the back of the auditorium with a dining space across the hall. But now, there’s a large kitchen with updated fixtures and multiple windows where kids can get their meals.
The upgrades are also, hopefully, a tangible message to children about their importance.
But, at the moment, with the mass erasure of federal funding and the threats to the Department of Education, it’s hard not to think we won’t see more of these kinds of improvements anytime soon.
“I'm hard pressed to say so,” Galvan concurs, “at least in the near future with just the kind of stripping down of (federal funds). It'll be interesting what happens with Title funds. There's been a lot of talking until we get clarity.
"For our students and our families, it doesn't matter Hispanic or not, if you have needs, there’s going to be a major impact.”
If these kinds of massive cuts had come sooner, schools like Greenfield and the others might never have gotten these expansions.
“I shudder to think what it might have looked like,” Galvan says. “Would there have been any? Who knows?”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
