Small Business Funding

Carmen Schools of Science & Technology kicked off construction for a new $55 million high school Thursday, marking the first time the charter school network will have its building independent of Milwaukee Public Schools. The new school is going up at the corner of 20th Street and Oklahoma Avenue, on Milwaukee’s south side. A former Medical Arts Pavilion currently sits on the property but will be razed, making room for the new school. “Finding a place that’s close by, that has enough acreage to accommodate all we want to make happen for our kids, took about ten years,” said Aaron Lippman, CEO of Carmen Schools. Expected to open in time for the 2026-27 school year, the new campus will unite students and staff from the existing Carmen South and Carmen Southeast high schools, which operate out of Milwaukee Public Schools’ ALBA School and Pulaski High School. Those buildings are about three miles apart from each other. Carmen Schools is a public charter school network that operates within the MPS district and until now, exclusively out of MPS buildings. “At the schools that we have now, because we share them because we rent those spaces, we don’t have complete autonomy over them,” Lippman said. “Having a soccer field, having a modern gymnasium, having a modern library and science and lab spaces, having a STEAM space, those are just things that we have never had before. So, we’re super excited about that.”Carmen touts high achieving students, with 99 percent of their most recent graduating class headed to college, and $28.7 million was awarded to their students in scholarships. “We’re able to build a high school that can house 1,000 to 1,100 kids, which gives us scale and allows us to open up possibilities around electives, before and after school offerings, and extracurriculars that we couldn’t do the same way before,” said Lippman. “We are thrilled about the potential.”This $55 million project isn’t funded by taxpayer dollars.”We have funding that we’ve just saved for years knowing that this project is coming,” Lippman said. “We are going to fundraise for some of it, and then we’ll finance it like you would a mortgage on a home.”Administrators say the new high school will offer brand new learning, arts, and athletic spaces — along with career development opportunities and gathering places for the community.The Carmen Charter Schools Network offers K-12 education and has six schools across Milwaukee that serve more than 2,000 students.Enrollment is open to the public, but some schools do have waiting lists. Administrators say when a waiting list is involved, admission is granted through a lottery system. MPS recently announced they plan to close or merge 13 schools in the district. Neither of the schools Carmen is vacating is on that list, but WISN 12 News has reached out to MPS administrators to see how Carmen’s departure could affect those buildings. So far, we have not yet heard back.