School Climate and Culture
Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is dedicated to creating a positive climate and culture across the district so that all students are engaged and able to succeed.
Key Components of School Climate
All MPS staff members help to create a positive climate through the use of the district’s Five Key Components for School Climate.
| Five Components | Example Practices |
|---|---|
| Relationships and Community | Spaces for student work and student sharing, icebreakers, community walls |
| Expectations and Procedures | Expectations that are co-created with students, connections to student home and community environments, modeling |
| Skill Development | Social-emotional learning curriculum, student-led behavior lessons, strategies for emotional regulation, breath work |
| Response to Behaviors | Redirection strategies, mindfulness practices, calming spaces |
| Systems of Acknowledgement | Verbal praise, classroom acknowledgements, student shout-outs, all-school celebrations |
Improving Climate and Culture
Creating a positive school climate and reducing disciplinary actions starts with focused action steps at the beginning of the school year and consistent maintenance throughout the year. For 2025–26, our focus is on supporting students and school staff members based on their needs. This includes:
- Aligning work within the Attendance Improvement Plan to positively change school culture and climate for all students
- Providing professional development and coaching for school leaders, school teams, and individual staff members
- Highlighting best practices within the Culture, Climate, and Alternatives to Suspension Toolkit
- Aligning district climate resources and messaging to support the most vulnerable schools (based on regular data review)
- Continually analyzing data to identify individual schools and students to focus on to ensure supports are aligned and address needs
Cultivating Joy and Community
To continue to build positive climate and culture, MPS is emphasizing the power of cultivating joy and community with all students. This includes staff members regularly spending time building community with students through morning meetings, instructional icebreakers, two-way communication home, classroom team-building activities, and more. Additionally, staff members cultivate joy through various activities like brain breaks, mindfulness practices, positive affirmations, and celebrations of student success.
Schools are also focusing on the research-based “2x10 intervention” to build community with identified students. This intervention involves the classroom teacher spending two minutes a day for 10 days straight talking to a student about their interests. Topics might include a student's pets, favorite movies or TV shows, favorite sports teams, favorite bands or musical artists, or what they did over the weekend. This intervention has been proven to positively increase connections between staff members and students as well as improve students’ academic, behavioral, and attendance outcomes.
When we unearth joy, we are bringing rich experiences into the classroom that children remember, that they feel loved by, that they feel invigorated by, that they feel a sensation throughout their body when they’re learning. That’s joy. We feel the difference and we remember it, but most of all, we learn.Gholdy Muhammad
Author of Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning
Centering Equity
MPS is committed to creating a positive educational climate for all students by fostering growth mindsets, improving cultural competence, building relationships, and taking responsibility for creating a positive educational climate districtwide.
In an effort to address disproportionality across the district, we are emphasizing six research-based best practices: defining and categorizing behaviors, talking about race and bias, engaging student voice, interrupting bias during vulnerable decision points, addressing re-entry of students after discipline, and implementing the key components of school climate through an anti-racist lens.
Courageous Conversation®
MPS continues to utilize the Courageous Conversation framework to hold conversations about bias and systemic disproportionality across the district. This nationally recognized framework provides staff members with the language, tools, and perspectives needed to analyze and discuss important policies, practices, and systems. All MPS staff members are trained in the tools of the Compass, Four Agreements, and Six Conditions.
Culturally Responsive Problem Solving for Teams
To address bias within school and district meetings, MPS is engaging in Culturally Responsive Problem Solving, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction model created by Dr. Markeda Newell. This model helps to ensure MPS teams are utilizing a strength-based approach to using data to find effective and student-centered solutions. Within this framework, school teams learn about identifying and interrupting when they are making unfounded, untrue, and unalterable attributions about students, families, and the community.
Elevating Student Voice
Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council (SSAC)
Through the Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council (SSAC), high school students from across the district regularly meet with the superintendent to share genuine insights into school culture, policies, and priorities.
Student Growth Committees (SGCs)
Fall Student Leadership Summit: Friday, October 10, 2025
Spring Student Leadership Summit: Friday, May 29, 2026
All traditional middle and high schools have a student committee that meets regularly to discuss and provide recommendations to school and district leadership about improving climate and discipline. During the 2025–26 school year, students voted to change the name of this committee from Student Discipline Committee to Student Growth Committee (SGC) for a more positive focus.
Each SGC meets monthly at the school level to tackle a yearlong school climate issue that the students want to spend more time researching and addressing. Students involved with their schools’ SGCs meet twice a year as a whole (in the fall and the spring) at the MPS Student Leadership Summits. Students from all over the district attend these summits and collaborate across schools. In the fall, attendees begin to analyze data and best practices together. In the spring, all SGCs present their problems of practice and recommendations to the school and district leadership in attendance.
Previous topics SGCs have focused on include:
- Creating more opportunities for community building in school
- Providing more mental wellness supports
- Surveying students on instructional practices and classes they would like to see
- Providing more opportunities for students to engage with clubs and activities
- Analyzing consistent use of policies, including scanners, cell phones, and tardies
- Addressing the re-entry of students after suspension
- Defining what it means to feel safe at school
- Preventing bullying and addressing the use of social media
- Building career readiness skills
- Implementing restorative discipline practices
Resources and More Information
- Components of School Climate
- Directory of Support for Building an Educational Community and Equitable School Climate
- Guide: Educational Community and District Climate
- Research-Based Best Practices to Address Disproportionality
- Parent/Student Handbook on Rights, Responsibilities, and Discipline
If you have any questions, please contact Jon Jagemann, discipline manager, at jagemaj@milwaukee.k12.wi.us or (414) 475-8645.