The Milwaukee County School Committee was created by the state legislature in 1947 to
create a plan for the reorganization of the county’s school districts and study the
possibility of tuition increases. The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors
appointed the six-member committee. While the Milwaukee County School Committee
published recommendations for redistricting in the county in 1950, the plan was
never enacted. The successor to the Milwaukee County School Committee was the Agency
School Committee, created in 1965.
The need for school district reorganization in Milwaukee County grew out of
population changes during the first half of the 20th century. As middle-class and
wealthy Milwaukeeans moved increasingly to the suburbs and exurbs, the City of
Milwaukee’s school district lost much of its taxpayer base, putting the district in
financial trouble. Many small school districts existed – 67 as of 1950 – which led
to large inequalities in facilities, teachers, and quality of education across
Milwaukee County. The Milwaukee County School Committee was the state’s attempt to
reorganize the school districts in order to rectify this issue.
Membership in the Milwaukee County School Committee was regulated by three guiding
principles: 1) Every member of the committee must have “a recognized interest in,
understanding of, and sympathy for the problems of the common schools”; 2) The
committee should include “people experienced as teachers, principals, school board
members, city and town officials, and as school system executives”; and 3) three
members of the committee must be from cities or villages and three from townships,
“but each member is duty-bound to tackle the school problem from a county-wide
viewpoint.” (Source: Your Schools: A Plan by the Milwaukee
County School Committee for Reorganizing School Districts)
