Tech-ed charter school would serve region

Cedar Grove-Belgium School District Supt. Chad Brakke wasn’t looking to start a charter school to bolster technical education for the area, but the idea became more logical the more he talked to educators and industry alike.

When the district began to examine its facilities in preparation for a possible referendum, Brakke wanted to “reimagine” the district’s tech-ed space.

“You just realize how hard it is to do everything for everyone,” he said.

But the need was there. A tech-ed teacher at Port Washington High School — Brakke was principal of Saukville Elementary School in the Port-Saukville district before being hired as superintendent at Cedar Grove-Belgium last year — told him Charter Steel has been asking the district to build a welding academy the company could use for training its employees.

Brakke also met with Lakeshore Technical College about how to have high school students earn college credit.

“One of the challenges is having certified staff in all these areas or even finding tech-ed staff,” Brakke said.

Other discussions with area industry professionals and Lab Midwest, a Mequon company that distributes curriculum and training equipment for educational and industrial use, led Brakke to the big idea.

Brakke wants to create a charter school in Belgium that would serve as a regional training facility for companies from Sheboygan to Milwaukee counties, as well as draw high school and college students from the area.

“The facility itself could be a 24-7 facility for training for companies in the area or LTC night classes,” he said.

“Everybody I talk to, parents and manufacturing partners, are just super excited about the possibilities.”

That includes the Cedar Grove-Belgium School Board, which unanimously supports the plan. Board president Chad Hoopman and other board members had lamented about the lack of employees in the trades for the last few years.

In working with manufacturing partners in the region, Brakke said, areas of need that were determined include industrial information technology, industrial maintenance, computer-numerical-controlled machining and pre-engineering.

Brakke would like to set up a program similar to that of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Sheboygan Campus and LTC’s industrial engineering initiative that joins a two-year program into a four-year degree.

LTC was on board from the beginning, and Brakke said he will also reach out to Milwaukee Area Technical College, since Cedar Grove-Belgium is positioned on the northern tip of the MATC region and the southern tip of LTC.

“We have a lot of manufacturers between Milwaukee and Sheboygan struggling to find workers,” Brakke said.

The initiative would be known as a Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) center, which are located across the country but not in Wisconsin, Brakke said.

“I think it would be a pretty exciting thing to have in our area. It’s pretty unique,” Brakke said.

The school would help small schools in the area that have difficulty meeting their technical education needs without having to hire staff members and use their own facilities.

In turn, it would also help bolster Cedar Grove-Belgium’s enrollment. The district is losing $400,000 through the state’s open enrollment program that allows students living in one district to attend another, according to district  Business Manager Tera Rogers. State aid follows the students to their new districts.

Most students at the school, Brakke said, would be juniors and seniors who could drive themselves to the school. A fully immersed student could work on a 54-credit degree with the opportunity to spend part of their day at a company and work toward an apprenticeship.

Brakke said he envisions eventually starting an outreach program that could draw inner-city students for training.

Core classes such as English would still be taught but in a different way such as through technical writing.

“That writing then has meaning for those students and they could apply it in their job,” Brakke said.

A governance board for the school, essentially a school board for the charter school, has been formed and includes representatives from industry and education.

The Cedar Grove-Belgium School Board last week unanimously agreed to apply for a $900,000 non-competitive grant to start the school that is due in January from the Wisconsin Charter Schools Program, which is funded by a $95 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The board also approved applying for a competitive grant from Wisconsin’s Innovation Grant Program for $2 million that is due late this month and agreed to pay a representative from the Cooperative Educational Service Agency to write it since Brakke doesn’t have time given the tight deadline. The grant request cost is slated to be around $10,000.

The state had 236 charters schools in Wisconsin last year.

The school’s board of governance is slated to meet Oct. 26.

The hope is to start the school in fall 2023, Brakke said.