A Milwaukee high school serving at-risk students on the south side of the city will close.
Grandview High School, which is operated by Seeds of Health Inc. and authorized under the state’s children-at-risk law through a partnership with Milwaukee Public Schools, will close after the 2026-27 school year. Grandview, 2745 S. 13th St., will be replaced by Veritas East High School, another Seeds of Health school, starting in the 2027-28 school year. The original Veritas High School, 3025 W. Oklahoma Ave., will be renamed Veritas West, according to a July 23 announcement by Seeds of Health.
Grandview High School serves students at risk of not completing high school or who experience difficulty in a traditional high school setting. It provides students a traditional school-day program along with online work to accelerate credit earning and recovery. Students can graduate at the end of a trimester if they’ve met graduation requirements, meaning the school’s enrollment can fluctuate throughout the year, said Seeds of Health Inc. CEO Jodi Weber.
Grandview High School opened in 1987 to help school-age parents who were at risk of not graduating from high school to earn their diplomas “in an environment where they were cared for and embraced,” she said.
Over almost 40 years, as teenage pregnancy rates declined, Grandview continued serving students who needed a different environment to successfully complete high school. The teen birth rate in Wisconsin was 9.8 per 1,000 girls in 2024, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health. In 1987, it was 37.1.
As the birth rate has dropped, a variety of options for high school have emerged in Milwaukee that did not exist 40 years ago, Weber said.
The school’s average enrollment has declined from a high of 230 students. In the last few years, in particular, there has been a decrease in interest and enrollment due to other nontraditional high school options emerging, including programs at students’ own local high schools, Weber said. The school had an enrollment of 212 students in the 2025-26 school year, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
“As we approached the final year of our current contract with Milwaukee Public Schools, we re-evaluated the needs of our community and considered the demand we have long seen for the Veritas High School model. We determined that winding down the Grandview program and establishing the second Veritas campus would allow us to best meet our mission,” she said.
Due to the nature of Grandview’s program, most students at the school spend less than two years there. Students with enough credits at the end of the 2026-27 school year will graduate from Grandview. Seeds of Health will work with students with credits left to earn to find and move into another program to complete those credits, Weber said.
In an email July 28, Milwaukee Public Schools’ spokesperson Stephen Davis shared a statement from the district that said: “Milwaukee Public Schools has been a partner with Grandview High School since 1988 and we recognize the long standing service to students and families. While we recognize the loss this presents to our community, we agree that there are a host of alternative high school options available for families seeking them and welcome any interested family to contact us.”
Contact Alec Johnson at 262-875-9469 or alec.johnson@jrn.com. Follow him on X at @AlecJohnson12.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: As teen pregnancy rate drops, Milwaukee school serving teen parents will close
Reporting by Alec Johnson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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By Alec Johnson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
