When Principal Cynthia Ellwood started at Harford ten years ago, it was a different story. UWM wouldn’t even send student teachers to the school because of the harsh environment inside.

Hartford Quick Facts
llment: 670
Establishment: 1917
Test scores-proficiency levels compared with MPS average
Elem. Reading: Hartford: 70% MPS: 63%
Elem. Math: Hartford: 58% MPS: 48%
Middle school Reading: Hartford: 69% MPS: 58%
Middle school Math: Hartford: 50% MPS: 42%

Kids run around screaming on the blacktop behind a tall wire fence. Big yellow school buses line up on Maryland Avenue at approximately 2:15 p.m. An empty basketball court sits besides an old brick school that thousands of university students walk by on their way to class.

Those are the common sites for an outsider looking in at Hartford University School for Urban Exploration: a tiny elementary and middle school dwarfed by the towering University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus that encloses it. It is also celebrating its 90th anniversary this year.

The hard auditorium seats are still the same and the old wood floor creaks on the main floor, but it’s far different from the scene Jane Voss Holroyd walked away from in 1953, when she graduated from Hartford in eighth grade.

When Voss Holroyd used to walk to school from her house on the 2900 block of Stowell Avenue, she walked through a field were the UWM Union is now.

Over the years, the university has absorbed the area, but the school still remains on the corner of East Hartford and North Maryland avenues.

When it was built in 1917 and when Voss Holroyd attended school there in the 50s, buses didn’t line up along North Maryland Avenue. All of the students walked to school and went home for lunch. There wasn’t even a cafeteria, and girls never wore pants.

Inside the classroom, girls headed to off to sewing or cooking class while the boys headed to shop class, Voss Holroyd recalled.

Returning to the school, on Oct.6 with former classmates, Voss Holroyd was blown away by the vibrant art work plastering the walls and news of Hartford’s exciting academic achievements

Second graders learn about feminism by creating ceramic plates inspired by various female role models. Middle school students team up with the architecture and film department to work on college-level projects.

It’s all a typical day for the 670 students, ranging from 4-year-old kindergarteners to eighth graders, who enter through the gates on Maryland Avenue five days a week.

While other Milwaukee Public Schools cry out for more school police officers and the need for higher test scores, Hartford continues to top the charts academically through their liberal arts approach to learning.

When Principal Cynthia Ellwood started at Harford ten years ago, it was a different story. UWM wouldn’t even send student teachers to the school because of the harsh environment inside.

Now UWM has more than 20 students working there and Rob Longwell-Grice, who works with placing student teachers in various Milwaukee Public Schools, calls Hartford one of their “best placements.”

A lot of the change has to do with the hard work of art specialist Steve Vande Zande, who used to work until 10 p.m. almost every night after school when he was establishing the program seven years ago.

Hartford’s art program goes beyond a collage of pictures on the wall and extends to the floors and ceilings. As a part of creating a community, Vande Zande and fellow teachers worked with the kids to find out how they wanted to improve their school artistically.

“It gave the kids some ownership over their school,” Vande Zande said.

Walking downstairs into the art room, the tiles down the hallway were largely designed by the kids themselves. And the cream ceramic faces and mosaic tiles outside the Hartford entrance allows the kids to leave a part of their work behind and know they are part of something bigger than a simple picture that goes on the refrigerator.

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