Manitowoc Public School District. PC: Fox 11 Online
MANITOWOC, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — At Wednesday night’s school board meeting in Manitowoc, after months of committee meetings, the group tasked with identifying the best path forward for the Manitowoc Public School District (MPSD) amid declining enrollment and excess building space offered its official recommendation.
Declining enrollment is something school districts across the nation are dealing with. It’s nothing new in Northeast Wisconsin, either.
The Green Bay Area Public School District has shuttered three schools and will close three more ahead of the next school year. Oshkosh is also working on a plan to consolidate several schools.
In the last eight years, MPSD has lost 600 students. It’s projected to lose another 900 in the next decade.
“Primarily, it’s just a general decline in population,” says MPSD Superintendent Lee Thennes. “Manitowoc, for example, if you look at the average age of our citizens, we’re a fairly older community. Birth rates are lower.”
For the last nine months, dozens of volunteer community members and school employees have been meeting monthly, taking a deep dive into enrollment numbers and trends, looking at the district’s buildings and campus and reviewing the learning environments students work in every day.
And at Wednesday night’s school board meeting, they gave their official recommendation.
“They’re recommending we go from six elementary schools down to four, which means closing, idling or repurposing or selling a couple of our school buildings. Obviously, everybody wants to know, ‘Well, what ones are those going to be?’ But that’s what our team will work on over the next month,” Thennes says.
That means the committee isn’t deciding which elementary schools will close, but rather, district leadership will look at the collected data and information, talk with community members and parents and make the ultimate decision.
“Anytime you’re making a decision like this, you want to involve the community. I think the primary reason you want to involve the community is so that they learn all the things that go into this, and I want them to understand that we used a process that took time. I want them to understand that we had staff looking at this, as well as over 30 members of our community who volunteered to be on this team,” Thennes says.
We think it’s really important that the community gets a chance to digest all of this and provide feedback and get their questions answered because ultimately, we’re here to serve them and their families, and that’s why we’re here.
Thennes says the following are some of the biggest factors leadership will consider when it comes to which elementary schools they choose to close:
- Age of schools
- Condition of schools
- Cost to repair schools
- Geographic location
- Energy costs
Along with two school closures at the elementary level, the committee’s recommendation Wednesday reformats the district’s two middle schools. Instead of serving 6th, 7th and 8th graders, one will serve 5th and 6th and the other will serve 7th and 8th.
As Lincoln High School is the district’s only high school, restructuring it was not necessary; therefore, no changes were recommended by the committees.
The full Facilities Advisory Committee document can be viewed here.
It’s a much different recommendation from the district’s previous leadership. In 2024, after a district-wide building audit, then-superintendent Jim Feil recommended the board vote on a multi-phase plan that would require several multi-million dollar loans, close two elementary schools, combine the middle schools into a brand new building and completely refurbish or build an entirely new high school. That plan never moved forward and never included community input.
At that time, the elementary schools they were focusing on for potential closure were the oldest and most expensive: Jackson, Madison, Franklin and Riverside.
In 2024, Feil’s reasoning for moving forward with the last recommendation — seemingly abruptly and without community input — was due to the district’s millions of dollars worth of deferred maintenance across many of the school buildings. The building audit reported there were safety and security issues district-wide.
Thennes, who replaced Feil, says the district has since taken care of many of the most critical issues.
“The good news is that we went out and asked the public for permission to borrow $25 million to tackle some of those immediate needs, and we wasted no time. We got over $2.5 million where the project’s done over the summer, which included a new roof on the high school, some asphalt and flat work around the district,” he says. “Exterior work on one of our elementary schools, a new state-of-the-art camera security system in the district that replaced an old one.”
He says another $10 million in projects will happen next year, too. Thennes hopes the school board will have a decision by January so changes can be implemented by the start of next school year.
“No matter what buildings we recommend closure to, that will be hard for some people. So we want to have a very compassionate and empathetic approach to all of this,” he says. “We gotta remember, school board members are volunteers in your community. They’re just community members, and sometimes they’re forced into making some really hard decisions. So our job as an administrative team is to provide them with all of the facts, logic, goals, rationale and information for them to make the best decision possible for the future of the district.”
Thennes says the first public input session will be held this Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Manitowoc’s district office building, located at 2902 Lindbergh Drive.
After the board makes its official decision, Thennes says they will hold another public input session for community members to offer their perspective, concerns and ask questions then, too.
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