For those of you who don’t teach at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) or, as is the case with myself, aren’t married to someone who teaches there, then you are likely unaware of the crippling requirement that MPS imposes on its staff and the damage that it does to its students. If you are employed by MPS, you must live within the city of Milwaukee. Not Milwaukee County, mind you, but the city itself. There are, of course, a handful of nice areas to live in, but to restrict where someone is or is not allowed to live simply because you are their employer is unjust.

The reasons behind the requirement, when it was instituted in the late 70’s, seemed at the time to make sense. If teachers live in the communities that they teach in, they will send their kids to schools in the city and will therefore better relate to the schools, helping the community as a whole. After 30 years, however, one can easily see that teachers tend to live on the outskirts of the city in a few select neighborhoods, often not anywhere near the school at which they teach and many teachers send their kids to private schools, not community schools.

The socioeconomic failure of the residency requirement might not be enough to justify its repeal, but the drastic limiting of the job pool is. At any given time, there are 500+ vacant teaching positions throughout the district. Without opening up applications to teachers who already own homes outside the city and don’t want to sell or who are otherwise unwilling to move in to the city, there is simply no way to fill the open positions. There are certainly tons of excellent teachers throughout the district, but for the schools to tell themselves that they don’t frequently end up hiring bad-eggs simply because they need to fill positions that they have too few applicants for is a lie and, most important of all, is unfair to the students. For every low-quality teacher that the city is forced to hire out of desperation there are plenty of teachers currently working – or unemployed – in the surrounding areas who would jump at the chance to get the job if it didn’t mean selling their home and moving to the city. If the purpose of the residency requirement is to benefit the students to build a better future for the city, then which is more important: Hiring anyone who applies because there are too few applicants or having an abundance of applicants, even if they might have to commute, and being picky with who you choose to teach the city’s youth.

There are two ways in which Milwaukee’s teacher residency requirement can be repealed:

• Legislatively, the state senate and assembly can pass a bill which would make it illegal. This has been unsuccessful many times before, but is nonetheless being tried again this year with Assembly Bill 89 and Senate Bill 54. I encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them to support those bills.
• The teachers’ union also has the power to undo the requirement through collective bargaining. Both the MTEA and WEAC support a repeal of the requirement, but it falls below things like salary and benefits when it comes to contract negotiations and ends up being tossed in the pot as a bargaining chip.

Regardless of which how it is done away with, the residency requirement is antiquated and needs to be repealed.