This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/the-amazing-100-million-story-of-aug-prep-and-school-choice/

Unlocking potential for thousands of children

The news of a $100 million investment in a new school on metro Milwaukee’s north side by St. Augustine Preparatory Academy, a school participating in Wisconsin’s pioneering school choice program, puts a number on a development predicted last summer. 

The announcement this week followed news last August from Gus Ramirez, the Milwaukee businessman whose family foundation put millions into starting Aug Prep a decade ago in a new building on the city’s South Side and grew it to 1,900 students today. 

After the Ramirez Family Foundation bought the campus of the just-closed Cardinal Stritch University with the aim of building a new northern campus for the fast-growing choice school, Ramirez said the foundation couldn’t have justified investing for growth had the Legislature and governor not agreed to substantially increase the state’s per-pupil funding for school choice to a sustainable level. Gov. Tony Evers agreed to the Legislature’s plan to boost funding, which had languished at only about 60% of the per-pupil funding for district schools. 

The increase, Ramirez told the Badger Institute, relieved Aug Prep from having to do an “unsustainable” amount of fundraising for operating costs, permitting the school’s donors to invest instead in expanding the facility and the number of children it can serve. “Because the funding was so sparse, choice and charter schools were impeded from growing at the rate they could,” Ramirez told the Badger Institute, but with the increase, expansion made sense.

The school’s announcement Tuesday repeated a message Ramirez had outlined earlier, saying the new campus would be “diverse by design,” aiming to attract both low- and middle-income families using school choice and students from higher-income families as well. “I think we have parents all across Milwaukee who are hungry for great schools for their kids,” Aug Prep CEO Abby Andrietsch said last summer.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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