When Milwaukee Public Schools announced the dismissal of Sean Kane as senior director of facilities and management this week, it was the culmination of mounting dissatisfaction with his handling of a lead health risk at several schools.
A handful of community groups last month had called on the school district to dismiss Kane for what they said was a disregard for lead abatement safety practices and for saying the school district had completed its lead assessments when the state’s health agency said it hadn’t.
“How many more egregious errors will this department make at the expense of our children’s, workers’ and MPS’ staff health?” Kristen Payne, a representative of a parent-led group called Lead-Safe Schools MKE, said in late March when her group and others sought Kane’s dismissal. “Sean Kane assured the community that annual facility inspections were completed as part of his department’s lead-based paint compliance program. Yet, the Milwaukee Health Department’s findings suggest otherwise. Now we’ve learned of multiple violations of lead-safe renovation practices, with MPS parents never properly notified as required by state law.”
The groups calling for Kane’s dismissal, including Lead-Safe Schools MKE, Metcalfe Park Community Bridges and the Get The Lead Out Coalition, got their wish on April 3 when the school district’s superintendent, Brenda Cassellius, announced Kane and the school district were parting ways. "Sean Kane, who has served as senior director of facilities and maintenance services, will no longer serve in that role and is separating from the district," said Cassellius at a press briefing reported on by WISN12.
The school district oversees more than 125 schools that were built before 1978, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report says. That’s the year federal agencies released rules banning lead-based paint and requiring mitigation of its risks. A state health department assessment found seven of the district’s schools have elevated exposure risk because of deteriorating paint. Four of them have been closed while the district undertakes mitigation. Four students have been diagnosed with lead exposure, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
Kane had been facing criticism for months over his handling of the problem.
“The current lead crisis has been caused by inability or unwillingness to follow legal obligations and health and safety regulations at the highest levels of the MPS facilities administration,” the coalition of community groups said in their complaint last month. “For example, at Fernwood Montessori School, DHS [the state health agency] found that MPS did not pre-clean the work areas before the work started or cover surfaces with plastic during paint scraping, and observed a significant amount of paint chips and renovation debris within arm’s length of a child’s desk. DHS also documented that MPS had children back in classrooms that contained these hazards, cementing a clear failure of Mr. Kane’s leadership to the detriment of Milwaukee’s children and school staff.”
Milwaukee Commissioner of Health Michael Totoraitis said Kane had prevented Health Department officials from going into one of the schools to do a risk assessment, the WISN12 report said. It wasn’t until the following week that Kane told them a crew was in the school working.
"I never want to see anybody lose their job or their role," Totoraitis said, according to the WISN12 report. "However, I do think at this moment, it was warranted to help move us into this next step."
The problem with deteriorating paint, which increases the risk of exposure through the release of lead dust and paint chips, predates Kane, who was hired as the facilities chief in 2021. Critics say the problem goes back 30 years, when the school district shifted the burden from a dedicated team that regularly repainted schools to having individual schools pay for their own work, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report. Today, it can take over a year after a work order is submitted for old paint to get repaired, the report said.
“We are under no illusion that all of this rests on [Kane’s] shoulders," Payne said in a Wisconsin Public Radio report. “There’s lots of blame to go around here. But certainly, he is the senior director of that department, and so he really is in charge of oversight of the facilities,”
To replace Kane, the school district has brought in Mike Turza, a retired school district employee, to head the facilities department until a permanent replacement is brought on board, Casellius announced at the press briefing. The district has also brought on board Mikhail Mannan, director of the city’s home environmental health division, to oversee the lead mitigation effort.
“I had called the mayor and asked for help,” Cassellius said at the news briefing.
Ousting Kane and bringing in help from the city is an early move by Cassellius, a former Boston schools chief who was hired by the Milwaukee school district in mid-February. “I'm used to mayoral control of schools,” she said at the briefing. “It's going to be a community-led, community-driven, collaborative process.”
Prior to his dismissal, Kane was also under scrutiny for allowing his certification as an architect to expire. Kane’s certification lapsed in 2020, several months before he was hired in 2021. That led the state’s Department of Safety and Professional Services in February to issue him a reprimand and a $1,319 fine for misrepresenting himself as credentialed at the time he was hired. The state requires his role to be held by someone who is credentialed either as an architect or an engineer, according to information included in the reprimand.
Kane couldn’t be reached for comment. Milwaukee Public Schools didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
