Dan Cody

I missed the original run of the article but the Journal Sentinel had a piece up earlier in the week about the sad state of guidance counselor positions within the Milwaukee public school system. Believe it or not, there are only 84 guidance counselors in the entire district to serve 82,000+ students!

That’s one guidance counselor for every 1,000 students, which is shameful. When you’re responsible for that many children, you unfortunately can’t serve any of them well. The kicker is six of the 84 counselors are set to be fired in the upcoming school year.

Milwaukee has 84 licensed counselors to serve 82,096 students in the district, according to the most recent DPI information, resulting in a counselor-to-student ratio of almost 1-to-1,000.

That number is about four times the 1-to-250 ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association. That recommendation is seldom met, in Wisconsin or nationally. The state average counselor-to-student ratio is 1-to-454, about the same as the national average.

Wisconsin’s standard requires districts to have a “school board approved plan for the provision of guidance and counseling services” and a program that is “developmentally based and available to every pupil in every grade of the school district.”

MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said no plan can be brought to the School Board because the district has never had enough counselors to serve all its students.

If there’s ever been an example of the kind of bureaucratic BS that hurts MPS, it’s that last quote from outgoing Superintendent Andrekopoulos. The whole, “Well, gosh! No one filed a TPS report with us that the bus was broken because we knew the bus was broken!” attitude from a guy who pulls in the the same salary as the six counselors combined who are going to be fired and has done absolutely nothing to improve the school system he’s been in charge of for 5+ years is disgusting.

As a number of people can allude to, I’ve really been having a hard time getting behind the MPS administration lately and have soured on the whole thing. As our current Superintendent is showing, you don’t really have to do anything to make $250,000 a year. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t do anything so you can keep your job and if you’re lucky, you can use it to vault into the next job which hopefully pays a bit more and you can start the whole cycle over again.

And while it’s frustrating for me as someone who loves Milwaukee and wants to see it do it’s best, it’s only frustrating. There are tens of thousands of kids who are having their own future impacted because bureaucrats who implement policies like 1-1000 student/guidance counselor ratios are in charge.

Two other quick notes… 1.0 of the 6.4 guidance counselor positions being next year is my wife Jenny, so yes I have a personal stake in this. Second, if you ever want to get a sense of the kind of uninformed and frankly moronic opinions held by people in and around Milwaukee about the issue of MPS and education in general, look no further than the comments submitted at the bottom of the article.