Milwaukee – Page 24 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

New Cristo Rey High School Has High Career Aims for Students

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:October 7, 2015
Post category:Education & Law Milwaukee Public Speakers at Marquette

For Maritza Contreras, the Cristo Rey experience began with seeing high school kids in her neighborhood on the way to school all dressed up. She was about nine at the time and the idea of going to school in your best clothes was “the weirdest thing I ever heard of.” But she was attracted to it. She made it her goal to go to Cristo Rey High School, a private school in her Chicago neighborhood where teens were required to work part time in real jobs in real work places and to aim to go to and succeed in college so that they could become adults working in places like the ones where they did their student placements.

For Contreras, Cristo Rey meant being asked for the first time about her college plans. It meant learning a set of skills and expectations that opened avenues for her, including small but important things such as how to shake hands firmly while making eye contact with someone.

And it meant enrolling in Marquette University with major scholarship support, graduating cum laude with a degree in nursing, and setting aside her nursing ambitions “for now” to get involved in helping the community as director of administrative management services for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin.

Cristo Rey has grown also. Starting in 1996 with the school Contreras attended, there are now 30 Christo Rey schools across the country. A local school, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, opened this fall with 129 ninth graders, almost all of them low-income and benefitting from the state’s private school voucher program. The school is based in a church in West Milwaukee, just south of Miller Park.

Urban Neighborhood Expert Gives Hopeful Message to Milwaukee

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:September 17, 2015
Post category:Milwaukee Public Speakers at Marquette

Yes, there are good things happening in even some of the poorest neighborhoods in urban America.

Yes, there are ways to use data, research, and good policy decisions to strengthen the quality of life in such neighborhoods.

No, it’s not easy and there are no quick solutions.

That can be seen as a summary of a two-day visit to Marquette Law School by one of the most influential figures in America in urban research, Robert Sampson, who is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and director of the Boston Area Research Initiative. Sampson’s 2012 book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, is playing a significant role in a surge of big-data projects aimed at thoroughly assessing the strengths and weakness of neighborhoods in cities and using that knowledge to shape more effective ways of preserving and improving neighborhoods.

Peter Park Advocates for Urban Life “at the Speed of Walking”

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:September 10, 2015
Post category:Milwaukee Public Speakers at Marquette

Much of the land on which the Park East Freeway stood on the north edge of downtown Milwaukee has been vacant for years, but Peter Park has no regrets about his important role in advocating for tearing down that section of elevated highway.

The day after Milwaukee County sold a large piece of the land for $1 to the Milwaukee Bucks for development connected to construction of a new basketball arena, Park returned to Milwaukee to pick-up where he left off in 2003, criticizing urban freeways and advocating for “multiple use” downtowns and neighborhoods that are attractive to pedestrians.

Park spoke at an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall. He was the planning director for the city of Milwaukee from 1995 to 2003 and was an influential advocate of changes in downtown Milwaukee that have been made (two-way streets replacing one-way streets) and are still coming (a street car system).