Urban spelunking: A new plan for West Allis' now-closed Longfellow School

From the Article:

“Sentimental Adj. of or prompted by feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia.

“Yup, that about sums it up. The last bell has rung, the last attendance has been taken, and the last student got their lunch. The last teacher vs. staff flag football game happened. The last recess occurred. It’s been a great run, Longfellow. #wawmproud”

That was the final post on the now-inactive Facebook page for Longfellow Elementary School, 2211 S. 60th St., in West Allis. At the end of the last school year, in June, Longfellow merged with Jefferson and Pershing Elementary Schools, ending a more than 100-year run for the school.

The move was part of a plan, approved by the West Allis-West Milwaukee School Board a year earlier, that also merged Madison Elementary with Walker Elementary, and Lane Intermediate with Frank Lloyd Wright Intermediate.

“What precipitated all of this, is that at one point we had over 12,000 students,” explains Steven Eichman, the district's manager of facilities, “and now we have just over 7,000.

"Before we consolidated these schools, we were operating the same square footage as we had when we had 5,000 more students. Programmatically and financially it makes no sense to keep doing that. It's not efficient.”

WAWM School District hired a consulting firm to make long-range demographic and enrollment projections as part of a district-wide facilities and maintenance plan, Eichman says.

“They did, I think it was 25 years of projection of enrollment and what that looks like,” he recalls. “They looked at some of the developments that are going on and all of that.

"People say, well, ‘we have a lot of apartment buildings, so there's a lot of families,’ and all that, but if they're predominantly one- and two-bedroom (units), that's not conducive for families and children, typically. And you don't see a lot of three-bedrooms in those (new buildings).”