Voices of Freedom - Interview with Anthony McHenry

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

An Interview with Anthony McHenry, Chief Executive Officer, Milwaukee Academy of Science When it comes to urban education, the news is almost always negative. Poor academic performance, abysmal graduation rates and unruly classrooms have become the norm. Students have suffered because of these failures, often falling through the cracks. Yet there are schools in Milwaukee that defy the odds, showing that success is not only possible, but should be the expectation - even for schools that cater to students facing significant obstacles outside the classroom.  One of those schools is Milwaukee Academy of Science (MAS). Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Anthony McHenry, CEO of MAS, a STEM-focused, K4-12 charter school whose mission is to graduate urban students prepared to compete at the post-secondary level. McHenry discusses what’s behind MAS’s success and how to offer more opportunities for students to get ahead. Topics Discussed on this Episode: McHenry’s story and how it drives him to be a leader Why society has failed kids, and the opportunities squandered because of it The circumstances causing students to be in volatile situations How MAS addresses the challenges its students face, particularly when it comes to transportation How MAS encourages students to imagine the possibilities for their lives How to get kids excited about and engaged in science MAS’s efforts to keep high quality teachers and administrators What MAS’s new addition will allow it to do and what will it mean for the families it serves What needs to be done so that there are more opportunities for kids to succeed Anthony McHenry has been CEO of MAS since 2016. Under his leadership, MAS has increased enrollment, entered into new partnerships and improved academic outcomes.  MAS has also developed one of the area’s top school athletic programs. Prior to joining MAS, McHenry served for nearly 20 years as executive director of the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center in Milwaukee’s Westlawn neighborhood.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. When it comes to urban education, the news always seems to be bad. Poor academic performance, abysmal graduation rates, unruly classrooms have become the norm,

and students have suffered as a result. Yet there are schools in Milwaukee and there are schools all over the country that defy the odds, showing that success is not only possible, but really should be the expectation, even for schools that cater to students facing significant obstacles outside the classroom.

Milwaukee Academy of Science, or MAS, is a STEM-focused K-4 through 12 charter school whose mission is to graduate urban students prepared to compete at the post-secondary level. It's been successful by some traditional measures. Graduation and college acceptance rates are as high, if not higher, than any wealthy suburban school, but the real cause of its success is the length to which MAS's faculty and staff go to serve their students. With me to discuss is Anthony McHenry, CEO of MAS since 2016.

Under his leadership, MAS has increased enrollment, entered into new partnerships, and improved academic outcomes. And it has developed one of the area's very top athletic programs. Welcome, Anthony. It is wonderful to have you. Rick, it's so great to be a part of this and thank you so much for the opportunity and thank you for your continued support of our school community. It is our great pleasure. You know, Anthony, as you and I have gotten to know each other, and it's been years now, I've picked up pieces here and there of what motivates you, what drives you. I think our audience would be interested in your story.

So share your story with our audience and talk to us a little bit about how it drives you to be a leader. Yeah. Well, I think that it is safe to say, Rick, that the route that we are taking to support and educate our young kids has everything to do with how I was raised and how opportunities were presented to me that changed my life. So I grew up in many ways very much like the kids that we serve. I was somewhere between poor and extremely poor. Most of the years of my childhood went to a school that was a neighborhood school.

And while I loved my time there, it's not necessarily the place that people would have selected for their children to go to those schools but I had a couple of things that that really worked in my favor that allowed me to you know escape some of the negative and oftentimes horrific things that outcomes that many of my friends who grew up in my community had and one of those things was my father died when I was really young I was things that outcomes that many of my friends who grew up in my community had. And one of those things was my father died when I was really young. I was fortunate to have a mother who you know, not only was a loving mother, but really was was pretty strict and no nonsense with me. And so even while I was into mischief and oftentimes, you know, making really really poor decisions,

the opportunities to do so were limited because of how strict my mother was. I also was blessed to have some athletic ability and went to a school that allowed me to exercise those athletic abilities and be able to receive a scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where really my life kind of turned around and I'll talk a little bit more about that. And then, you know, I have to give credit to God for putting me in a situation that I was able to, you know, quite frankly, escape some of the consequences that maybe I should have had and some of the things that were in place for me that allowed me to avoid some

consequences. Some of the things just as simple as I got a job for my 16th birthday because my mother couldn't afford to get me anything. And, and many times because I was at work in the evenings, I came home and a friend would have been shot or arrested or some of the things of that nature. And so all of those things go kind of work together to get me to a place where I was able to attend a prestigious university.

And quite frankly, Rick, I can't necessarily say I was prepared for the academic rigor of such an institution or kind of the social emotional challenges that were coming from a kid growing up poor in an urban environment and having to attend all black schools all of my life to then showing up at UW Madison where I was one of I was the lone kid, the lone black kid in my political science 101 class amongst 435 other students and so but Because I was on an athletic scholarship, they provided so many supports. Yes, academic supports, but they also provided a lot of the social emotional supports that

I needed to kind of overcome so that I could navigate a community that was very different than the one that I was accustomed to and also learn how to do college. And so with all those supports, my freshman year, I got a bunch of C's. And by the time I was a junior and a senior, I was getting all A's and B's because poverty did not keep me from being intelligent. I just did not have the opportunities to learn how to do school in the same way that many of my peers at UW-Madison did. And so there was a turning point in my life when I was getting close to graduation

where I had to figure out exactly what I wanted to do and I decided that I wanted to help kids that were growing up in communities similar to the one that I grew up in. Because one of the really, really important things that I noticed was so many of my friends who I had grown up with were dying young and or going to jail. And yet here I was graduating from a prestigious institution and I wasn't any better than them as human beings. I wasn't any better to them in terms of my character versus their character when we were both 17 year old high school students. It was the opportunity that I had which was the

difference in the support that I had at UW and as a student athlete in high school that allowed me opportunities that they didn't get. And so that is really at the core of what motivates me, knowing that yes, the kid that walks in here, already a great student, already having the learning tools in place at home, really isn't any better than the kid who's currently homeless. It's just the opportunities that are being presented

to them, whether good or bad, that is having them, that's impacting their abilities to maximize their goal. And so that really motivates me to make sure that all of our students have the supports that they need because each of them can be Anthony McHenry or better, given those proper supports. And that's how we're building our schools to make sure that they have those. Did the coaching staff play a role in this? He played under Coach Alvarez at the University of Wisconsin. I got to imagine there was some tough love there at times.

Yeah, yeah. So Rick, I tell you between my mother, my high school coach and Coach Alvarez, I'm like, that was tough love. Yeah, yeah. So Rick, I tell you between my mother, my high school coach and Coach Alvarez, I'm like, that was tough love. But absolutely, there was some things that I was confident in as a young man, but most of those things weren't necessarily going to change the trajectory of my life.

Being under a coach like Coach Alvarez is really what kind of changes the trajectory where you start to believe in yourself, not only as a football player, but you believe in yourself as someone who could be a contributing member of our society. And the expectations were set at that you was going to grow as a human being, as you was also growing as a football player.

And he was really no not sensitive as an approach, which I, which I appreciate. And so I definitely think that, that having a leader like Alvarez and having opportunities that come with being on a football scholarship really accelerated my opportunity to be the person that I am today and be able to serve other kids that we serve in our community. Let's talk from a high level about K-12 education in this country. Do you think society is failing our kids in this country today? And what opportunities are we squandering because there's just a lot of kids that are being left behind. Yeah. The answer is yes. We probably have heard of this saying from a messiah tribe

in Africa where when they greet each other, they say, how are the children? Well, if we're really honest in America, the answer to that is either not so good, they're not well, or we would have to segment it and say, there's a certain group of kids that are well and there's a certain group of kids that are not well. And far too often it's whether kids are well or not has everything to do with the resources from the communities that they grow up in. And I don't know a person that really believes that that should be the case, right?

Certainly people who have made good decisions and have done well financially in life should have the opportunity for their kids to have a high quality education. But none of us would say that people who have not had those opportunities, their children should have a worse education, right? We all fundamentally believe that education is critical

to the success of individuals becoming self-sufficient adults in this country, and yet too few kids actually have the opportunity to get a great, great education. And so the strength of our country, just like the strength of the city of Milwaukee, is not going to be based on the top 2% of the educated kids, right? It's going to be the masses. And so in my opinion, we're failing the masses because financial resources are far too often determining who gets to have a quality education, who doesn't. And it just clearly does not make sense. And I'm a prime example of that. Right? Had I not been a good athlete, I likely don't go to college and I likely

am not a positive contributing member of society. Maybe I'm just barely making it but because I have these abilities I get put into a community of kids who for the most part grew up wealthy or at least upper middle class and I think that that we should extend that to all kids. Totally agree. Let's bring it down to MAS level to the to the school you go to work at every single day. Let's talk about some of the difficulties that your students and their families are facing. What one the circumstances that cause these kids to be in such truly difficult volatile situations? Yeah, for whatever reason, people in the education community are afraid to talk about race and

social economics, and I simply do not. I think that if we're going to really give kids an opportunity to reach their God-given potential, we have to understand how social economics and race play a part of what's happening. And in Milwaukee, what you and I know, Rick, and maybe the audience may not know, is that black children in Milwaukee are underperforming at the lowest level amongst the top 50 largest cities in our country. And so there's something different that's happening here in Milwaukee that is minimizing the opportunities that our kids and families are having. And so poverty, whether it's in a rural community,

whether it's in an urban community, does impact the type of schools that kids go to, the funding levels that those kids have, and that in and of itself creates some barriers and challenges. But in a city like Milwaukee, there's like some other contributing factors that I think make things even more difficult. I'll start with the housing shortage. There's just too few middle income, low income housing available to families here in the city of Milwaukee, which then forced people to be in rent situations, which then unfortunately in a

city like Milwaukee, particularly on the north side, we also have the disadvantage of having the kind of the highest rent to income disparity. Families, adults, single mothers or single fathers who are out there working really, really hard, but we can making low wages, are living in poor housing situations, but still having to pay $900,000 in rent. And so it just simply does not add up. And so, you know, for our school community, 97% of our kids are economically disadvantaged. And what that means in terms of a household of three is less than $25,000 of income. Like, who can live off that as a single adult? And so what happens far too often is that our families are forced to move, oftentimes

multiple times in the course of one school year, to avoid evictions. And that does something to not only the psyche of the adult, but also to the psyche of the kids and all of those things create added stress, added stress, oftentimes creates added volatility. And that volatility stress gets passed down to the kids. And so that's, that's a, you know, kind of the financial impact, but also there's kind of a cultural dynamic that we're dealing with here in the city of Milwaukee, particularly in the black community where the, the, the violence

and the volatility in these communities is, is substantial. Far too many of our kids have siblings, adults, parents who have been victims of gunshot. And if they haven't experienced it within their own families, unfortunately, we know for certain that they're experiencing in their communities. And all of those things impact the kids' wellbeing, and those kids show up at our door with all of this baggage that they didn't create themselves.

And they have to try to navigate those, try to become the best version of themselves. And we have to be able to help them to do that. Well, and I know that your school is really pretty good at handling these challenges. And I know that for many, maybe not, maybe almost all of your students, school really becomes a place of stability. It becomes a constant in their lives, which is really important. Talk a little bit about how you're dealing with these challenges,

especially when it comes to making the school logistically accessible through your transportation program. You said kids are moving sometimes multiple times a year, but that creates a real challenge for you in getting kids to school every day. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things that I want to kind of just put out as data points before actually talking about why we're addressing things like we do. When I took this position, Walkie Academy of Science was annually turning over about a third of their kids every year. There is no way to create a strong, strong school culture when that's the case.

And so one of my challenges right away was how do we stabilize our community? And so we decided to extend our busing citywide. And I also thought it important to extend it from kindergarten to 12th grade, because initially it was just elementary school only. And so we created this, I would suspect, one of the, probably the largest bussing zone and bussing district in the, probably in our state. But I thought it was critically important if we were going to try to retain our kids year after year, which is, which is central to us, you know, building the school community

that we wanted and ensuring that our kids are prepared for post-secondary education. It's an expensive, expensive model. It's over $2 million we're're gonna spend this year on it, but you know at a time where schools across the country are trying to get rid of transportation, we're committed to it because we know that's the only way to be able to keep our kids attending MAS throughout the year, but also year after year. And that's kind of just one example of the things that we're doing that schools don't have to do or probably even shouldn't do that we choose to do because it's in the best interest of our kids.

And I think that's really been the recipe for our success is what we call our add-ons. What are the things that we need to do to support our kids and families that we're not required to do as a school? And transportation is a big piece of it, but it's also we've created a whole homeless program that supports our families that are in and out of homelessness in a variety of ways. Everything from something minimal like purchasing all of their school attire, their book bags and things of that nature, to paying people's security deposit to get them back into stable housing or better yet, paying their rent when they are about to become evicted.

That's not the role of a school. But if we're going to try to keep our kids, if we're going to try to make sure that our kids have some sense of stability, then that's what we need to do to make that happen. Sometimes you're operating on the fly, aren't you? I mean, you make special arrangements for one child to get to school on a particular day that may not be on the normal bus route. You make special arrangements for one child to get to school on a particular day that may not be on the normal bus route.

Yeah. Rick, we just, we just purchased a second van about a month ago, because that the number of families that are moving to avoid evictions or being because of evictions continues to just increase, we oftentimes couldn't get them onto a bus right away the next day. And so sometimes it takes a couple of days or up to two weeks to get them from one bus to another bus. And so we now have this van that are going to pick up kids in between.

They're being moved from one bus to another. Sometimes Rick, that's a five o'clock call of a parent saying, I picked my kids, not going to be able to make it in the school tomorrow. We're going to be way over here. We don't have transportation. Then we're like, all right, give us the address. We'll get it to our driver. We'll make sure our driver can get there. Again, it's an expensive thing to do,

but it's the right thing to do if we want to ensure that these kids who we know otherwise wouldn't get the quality education that we provide, that's what we have to do. Well, that's special and that's unique. And that's fantastic. Every kid matters for sure. Kids of all backgrounds are underperforming in science in this country, but probably especially black and Hispanic kids. Yeah.

How on earth are you getting kids excited about engaged in science? Yeah. I know I had a hard time getting engaged in science. Yeah. It's, I have to give credit to our founder, T. Michael Bolger, who was the president of the Medical College of Wisconsin at the time that he started this school, which to me, just blew my mind. Outstanding man.

But he did it because of the thousands of matriculars coming into the medical college each year, less than 1% of those are minority from the city of Milwaukee. And so he had a desire to help kids develop a level of sciences. And I so greatly appreciate that, that he created a STEM focused school. I don't think we would be as good of a school as we are if we were just a traditional education model. And I always like inside feels so warm and good when I hear our kids talk about their career interests being in the STEM fields.

And when I asked kids varying grades, what are their favorite subjects and they're saying science and math. And I can't speak for any other community except for the one that I grew up in. But all I heard from black people growing up was we hate science and we hate math. And I can't speak for any other community except for the one that I grew up in. But all I heard from black people growing up was we hate science and we hate math. That's all I heard. And I can tell you, and so much so, I even tell our parents in our parent meetings,

don't say that in front of your kids. Because we're gonna make sure that they love science and math here. And so, and that is our reality. My guess is if you ask our kids what is their favorite subject, my guess is 70 to 80 percent of them are going to say science or math. That's fantastic. Yeah and some of the things that have really helped us and I can't take any credit for this because this did this did

happen before I got here was one because we are a STEM focused school we actually have STEM programming starting with our four year old kids. And so before they even get a chance to say they don't like science and math, like we're already giving them really engaging opportunities in the science and math spaces. And we continue that through the K through 12 spectrum. And I often jokingly say this, but there is some truth to it when I tell people that we want to keep this a secret. We don't want to let our high school students know this.

But one of the secrets to our graduate, our post-secondary acceptance rates and our kids' interest in the STEM field is that we have, our kids have to have double the credits in science than they are required to from the state. And so both urban schools, but also suburban schools, our kids are getting double the amount of sciences. And so they don't know that. So they don't know that they can complain about it, but it works for us. And so rather than taking some of the fluff courses that I took my senior

year, our kids are taking AP science, computer science classes, really high level math and science courses. It's just a part of the fabric of our school community. And so, but because there's such high level courses, kids have a different level of engagement with it. And it really does create opportunities for kids to fall in love with a variety of sciences that we see is happening.

And if I could just share a quick story, Rick. There was a kid that transferred to MAS midway through his ninth grade year. I had the fortune of bringing him to school each day because I knew his family and for the first month or two all he did was complain that he wanted to go back to his old school. He wasn't used to having homework. He wasn't used to the type of rigor that we have at our school and then eventually he got used to it and he became okay with it. That was his freshman year.

His junior year, I was, I was leading a group through a tour of our school and he happened to be in the hallway. And as I do oftentimes I called him over and asked him to introduce himself. And he did. And then the guest said, what would you like to become when you're an adult? What's your career interest? And he said, a biomechanical engineer. I don't know if you saw my facial expressions, but like, I'm like,

whoa, what is happening here? And so after the tour, I went and found him and said, like, tell me more about this. Like, when did this happen? And his answer was something that, um, that we see so often here. He said he fell in love with his engineering course, and that's what he wants to do with his life. And that was just a reminder of how important having these highly engaged STEM and science courses, how they impact our kids and can create opportunities

for them in terms of future careers. I could see it. Last time we were there, you had us meet with some students and I know you don't prompt them. You're not quite sure what's going to come out of their mouths, but you could see their motivation. You could see that they were thinking about life ahead, where their careers might take them, what potential they might have as people. And it's really pretty inspiring.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I'll say this joke real quick, Rick. We had a young kid, maybe a third grader that we had at one of these tours and because we don't prompt them, we don't know what they're going to say and one of the guests said, what do you want to become? And he said, I want to be a wrestler. I said, oh, good. Not part of my STEM focus. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. Let's switch gears just a little bit and talk about a problem that I know is a tough problem

for you and that's keeping teaching and administrative talent. It's tough anywhere, probably more so in a demanding and competitive urban environment like Milwaukee. What are you doing to address that and to keep and retain high quality staff? Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's a real challenge for us right now. And as we're growing as a school community, it's going to continue to be even more challenging.

So we've done a couple of things that I think has really helped us. And one of them is all about who we are as a school and how we choose to serve our school. And so for many, many years, whenever our principals were hiring teachers, prior to them offering them a contract, I would meet with them. And I know to them, it would sound like a scare tactic, but what I would really try to make sure is that we are the right school for the candidate, right? Yes, we're interviewing you. We want to make sure you're right for us, but I want to make sure that we're right for you. And so then I would have to tell them that we are a school that believes that the burden of education is on the adult.

It's your responsibility to make sure that the kids are learning and growing. So kids don't have permission to just sit in classes and fail. And so that may require you to do more. That may require you to give up some of your prep time or your lunch time to be with a kid who's not getting it. Some of our kids are coming from really you know volatile backgrounds and they may not always be at their very best and may say some things to you that are inappropriate. We will address the kid and discipline the

kid when necessary. But our expectation is that when you see that kid, you love that kid like it's your own and that you're going to embrace that kid. And our expectation is that you're going to reach out to parents. Some of our parents are dealing with tremendous, tremendous stresses. So we need to build a partnership with them in order to get the best out of their kids. And all of those things are not necessarily teacher as usual. And so if you want to teach as usual, this isn't the place for you.

And maybe that has scared off some, some, uh, candidates, but what it did was it made sure that the ones who did accept the role committed to not only what we're doing here, but the idea that they're going to be required to do more than maybe a normal teacher would. And that's really helped us with our retention. I'm really happy to say that even in the midst of the challenges we're facing now that we continue to be at 90% return rate for our teachers and similarly for our leaders. But we also have to like work really hard because there is a shift

that's happening. There are less people coming into the education career. I hear this is true in almost all career types of careers now where people just have less grit. They don't stay as long. Their commitment levels may not be the same as they were even just five years ago. And so we're having to work really hard to ensure that our coaches are getting the support. I mean ensure that our coaches are getting the support, I mean that our teachers are getting the support that they need through our coaching model. We created a staff wellness program that really is trying to look at a staff member just like we look at our kids holistically. So a part of that is kind of just their social emotional health and mental health wellness. We're providing some opportunities for support in that area. Also for

their physical health, we're doing some things around that as well, but also for their financial health. We don't, I would love to pay our teachers as much as they desired. If I had a magic wand, I would make the teaching profession one of the highest paid professions, not on the other end of the spectrum. So now we're trying, we have a financial wellness program that we're doing to try to help our, our, our staff. Understand their four or three B's, understand their, their retirement benefits and how to leverage that.

Also, we're doing some things around housing to try to get them out of the rental situation into home ownership. So we're trying to do a bunch of things to best support our current staff. Cause the best thing we can do is keep. And then we are now two years ago, hired a talent acquisitionist so it's someone who every day wakes up trying to figure out like how do we recruit the best and brightest teachers to come to M.A.S. and how do we retain our own talent I don't know why it took me so long to to determine that I needed to do that and

then the other thing we're doing Rick is is we've now created a teacher pipeline for our students. And if our students are always reminding us that they love M.A.S. because of the relationship that they have with their teachers, they're prime candidates to become teachers in the future for M.A.S. And so right now I think we have 22 kids that are in our teacher pipeline.

They're taking dual credit courses at UW-Milwaukee and we will support them into UW, where they'll continue to service those kids and keep us informed of their progress. They'll do their student teaching here, and then we will hire them to be MAS teachers. And so I'm really excited about that and looking forward to that first batch to become our next workforce. But I say all those good things, but I don't want to underestimate that it is a real, real challenge right now. Trying to keep our teachers and it's even

more of a challenge to try to find the next great teacher because there's just so few of them that are coming out of colleges now. And quite frankly, we're at a competitive disadvantage as an independent charter school. We received about $3,500 less than the school that's two blocks away from us, that's not serving 97% economically disadvantaged kids. And that's almost $6 million that we don't have to inflate our salaries to pay our teachers more. And so every teacher in our building

knows that they can go to the school district and make more money. They know they can go to the suburban community and make even more money. And so that is a challenge that will continue to make things more difficult for us. And we hope that there's some relief coming around the corner. We're thankful for the reduction that did happen, but there's still a ways to go in terms of leveling the playing field. You've never backed away from challenges and you undertook a big one with your recent expansion,

second campus that makes, you know, it's not easy. That's hard. That's hard work. But what will the addition of this new location permit MAS to do and what's it mean for the families that you serve every day? Yeah. Um, you know, I, I, I, I stayed a lot of facts that are true and good, but the only real thing that I like to boast about is the fact that we've gone from zero kids on a wait list, you know, just eight years ago to now, uh, well up to 1500 on a, on a wait list last

year. And even with the new site that we opened up in August, we still have 926 kids sitting on a waitlist. Not too long ago, we only had 200 applications for enrollment and two out of the last three years, we had over 2,000 and we've not spent a single dollar on any mass marketing and recruitment of our school. That to me is worthy of bragging. Yeah. We took all of those dollars that was being spent on radio ads and billboards and all

those things and put those into the classroom to enhance the experience of our kids. And, and hopefully we were able to find a way. My goal was to try to retain our kids, provide them with a quality experience for both the kids and the parents, and then hopefully they would tell their friends and their families. And that's what's happened. And that's what's really grown this. And so when you think about a school that has a $6 million funding gap, also having 2000 applications for enrollment with thousands of kids on a wait list, it says two things.

One, we're doing some things right, but also there's a lot of schools that are doing some things really, really wrong, which has created this tremendous demand for our services. And so we're really excited about the opportunity that we're gonna be able to serve 600 more kids thanks to supporters like the Bradley Foundation and others, those are 600 more kids in our community that's going to get a quality education, that's going to graduate

and go on to their post-secondary experiences or careers. And so we're thankful for that. But the other thing that it did was it really helped stabilize our kind of financial outlook. You know, one of the things that that we could forecast was that we was going to have to change our model of service in the next couple of years. If we did not expand because the cost to educate our kids, the way that we educate them was growing much faster than the per pupil revenue and our ability to raise money through our own development efforts. Even with the success we've had

in both of those spaces. And the example that I like to use was we had 18 school buses two years ago. We had 18 school buses last year, but it cost us $200,000 more for those 18 buses. And the same thing is happening in terms of the supplies, the curriculums, teacher salaries. All these things are escalating and we were about to go into a space where we were not going to be able to have two adults in our elementary classroom. We were not going to be able to provide transportation in the same way that we've always done it. We were not going to be able to compensate our staff even at the rate that we

are now and so we get this privilege of serving 600 more kids, but we also have the privilege of a brighter financial forecast that I think is gonna get us probably through the next five years or so before we're probably gonna be facing a similar dilemma. Anthony, let's close with this. Are you optimistic that we're at a point in time in this country where there'll be more, walkie academies of science, not only in Milwaukee, but around the country.

Do you think we're at an inflection point where maybe we can start to turn the corner? Yeah, that's a tough question. I, I, I think, I think we're definitely at an inflection point or a breaking point. Yes. Yes. Just not convinced that policymakers and school leaders are going to choose children over adults and or business. And I'm not talking about businesses because the business community is fully aware of the problem and wants to be supportive of it and in Milwaukee

I've been supportive of it. But I'm talking about the business of education. I just don't see enough evidence that they're gonna say, okay, these schools have been failing for 30 plus years. We're gonna require them to do something different. Have not seen that occur. Yes. The only schools in our community that are closing are schools that they're just simply not enough kids attending those schools.

And then those kids then get shifted to another low performing school. And so I'm hopeful that we decide that our children are important enough to make some tough decisions and make some people upset, but I'm not necessarily optimistic. And so we need to make sure that those who are, particularly in the charter and choice space, have the resources that they need so that, you know, if this, if our city does not improve its overall education program,

and maybe we should, MAS needs to go from 2000 to 5000, right? And so, I am hoping, I wish we would get to a place where schools like Milwaukee Academy of Science weren't even needed because the neighborhood schools were performing so well. But I'm just not optimistic that they're going to make that change. Fight continues, doesn't it? The fight continues. Anthony McHenry, thanks so much for your time today and truly thanks for your leadership. You're making a difference in our community, you're making a difference in the lives of many, many kids and we truly

do appreciate it. Yeah, thank you and same to you Rick and same to the Bradley Foundation, you're great, great partners. I so greatly appreciate the work that you're doing both locally and nationally and I appreciate the opportunity to share our story. Thanks so much. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]