Today is the day that MPS, Racine Unified and other southeastern Wisconsin public school districts begin enrolling kids for the 2011-12 school year.
In Milwaukee, the three-choice enrollment runs through Jan. 28 and allows parents and students to list three school choices. Nearly everyone, 99 percent, will get into one of those three schools and last year 95 percent actually got into the first choice school.
Considering the many options in a large urban district -- MPS has nearly 200 schools -- that gives families flexibility and a measure of control. They can choose from one of nine Montessori programs, for example, a Waldorf school, language immersion programs and more.
This is nothing like when I went to grade school. Of course, at the dawn of the 1970s most kids went to their neighborhood schools, although desegregration had already begun to send kids -- especially African-American kids -- far afield in buses.
There was no question that I would go to the public school in walking distance of my home. The same was true of junior high. My grade school fed into a few JHS options in the area but students couldn't choose (one was attended by John Cassisi, who was then on TV's "Fish," with Abe Vigoda!) . We crossed our fingers and breathed a sigh of relief when I got into the closer one, which my brother was attending.
Luckily, both were good schools and I was fortunate enough to have a great magnet high school in my neighborhood, that accepted me, too.
Times have changed and our homes as adults aren't organized as they often were when we were kids, in households with one parent working outside the house. Having mom home at the end of the school day made neighborhood schools workable from that standpoint.
Nowadays, sending our kids to the school in our neighborhood isn't automatically as convenient as it once was, even if that affects the way we think of our neighborhoods and our schools and alters the reality of parental involvement in schools for some.
Also, back then there were Montessoris, language schools, Waldorfs and the like, but they were almost never public schools and they were out of the reach of many, if not most, working class families.
This, of course, is just one of the many changes in school landscapes over the past few decades.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
