Harambee Community School remains shuttered

January 10 2011 by Jake Frodsham in School Section |No Comments

A once highly regarded private school that limped along this year after being kicked out of Milwaukee’s voucher program didn’t open after holiday break and has remained closed this week.

The situation has caused headaches for schools accepting students from Harambee Community School, an approximately 40-year-old institution that was one of the first schools to join the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

“We have been enrolling as many children from Harambee as possible, but parents have not been able to obtain student records,” said Phil Harris, spokesman for Milwaukee Public Schools. “That makes correct grade-level placement very difficult.”

Harambee’s chief operations officer, Lenora Davis, has not returned numerous calls to confirm the school’s closure. Phone calls to Harambee at 110 W. Burleigh St. are met with a busy signal. The school has been locked when a reporter visited several times during the day. The sidewalks in front of the school, as well as the steps and parking lot, remained unplowed Thursday.

A sign on the inside of the glass doors said that children should return to the school on Jan. 3.

The future looked bleak for Harambee when it did not receive accreditation by December 2009. Stricter mandates for schools in the voucher program required that all participants had to be accredited by that state deadline. The Department of Public Instruction subsequently dropped Harambee from the program, which means the school did not receive state-aid payments for each low-income student that qualified for a voucher this school year.

Instead of shutting its doors, the school was still serving a couple hundred students this fall, said a former office worker who managed the school’s accounts. She said teachers and staff started leaving because they weren’t getting paychecks this fall.

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