Closing every Milwaukee public school on Friday was the right call. If you're mad about it, you're mad at the wrong person. Superintendent Brenda Cassellius closed the schools because you can't run buses, deliver food, and staff buildings while somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 people pour into downtown for a parade.
The Brewers won the first World Series in franchise history Wednesday night, beating the Rays 4-1 in Game 5. This is a team that's been in Milwaukee since 1970 and had reached the World Series exactly once before, losing to the Cardinals in 1982. It's the city's first championship parade since the Bucks in 2021. Nobody's arguing the city shouldn't throw it.
The real evidence this is about logistics: The Hop, Milwaukee's streetcar, isn't running during the parade either. The people whose entire job is moving passengers through downtown looked at the crowd and decided Friday wasn't a normal operating day. When the streetcar operators and the school district reach the same conclusion, believe them.
There is one complaint worth pulling out of the noise. A city that treats a lost school day as a civic gift this week is often the same city that frames a teacher's sick day as "learning loss." Pick one. If a single Friday off for a parade does no lasting harm, then quit pretending a teacher who's genuinely ill is robbing kids of their future. You don't get to hold both of those opinions at once.
The failure starts above Cassellius, with Governor Tony Evers. He declared Friday "Won Our Way" Day and told people to try waving the proclamation at their employers, while admitting in the same breath that he has no power to make a single boss honor it. A nurse, a line cook, a warehouse worker gets no Brewers day off. Evers handed them a permission slip their employer can drop in the trash, then collected the applause for generosity he never had to pay for.
MPS left its own hole, too. The closure went out by email Thursday. It said nothing about whether the day gets made up, about meals for kids who rely on school to eat, or about child care for parents still working Friday. Two days' notice was enough to announce the closure. It should have been enough to answer the obvious question of what a working parent does with a kid at 7 a.m.
The metro area didn't shut down in lockstep, either. Wauwatosa and Cudahy closed specifically for the parade. West Allis, Whitefish Bay, and Germantown already had the day off for unrelated reasons. Shorewood kept its schools open and UW-Milwaukee held classes. It's a patchwork of districts making their own calls.
Celebrate the team, and aim your anger correctly. The superintendent made the safe, correct call; Evers made a show out of a day off he can't actually grant to the people who need it most. One of them did her job. The other wanted a parade of his own.
