Wisconsin health officials reported the death of an infant related to the ongoing measles outbreak in southwestern Wisconsin.
It’s the first measles-associated death in the state in more than 35 years, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
DHS reported that the coroner listed measles as the immediate cause of death. State officials said no further information about the death is being released to protect the privacy of the child and the family.
DHS Secretary Kirsten Johnson said in a statement that her “heart is broken for the family.”
“Any death of a child is a tragedy and even more so when it is related to a vaccine-preventable disease,” Johnson said in the statement. “Measles can cause serious illness and death, and it is important for all Wisconsinites to evaluate their risk and take steps to protect themselves and their family.”
Doctors recommend children get their first dose of the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, between 12 and 15 months.
But Dr. Ryan Westergaard, DHS chief medical officer and state epidemiologist for communicable diseases, announced Thursday on a call with reporters that the state is now recommending infants who are 6 months to 11 months old receive an early dose of the shot if they are at an increased risk of exposure due to the outbreak.
“In an outbreak, when we know that an infant may be exposed to measles, there is a benefit to providing that protection earlier,” Westergaard said. “For families with babies younger than 6 months or others who cannot be vaccinated, the most important protection is making sure that the people around them are immune. That’s one of the reasons that maintaining high vaccination coverage is so important.”
Kids younger than 5 years old are among those most at risk of serious complications from measles, along with people who are pregnant and those with weakened immune systems. The highly contagious virus can cause pneumonia and swelling of the brain.
Westergaard said the red, bumpy rash associated with measles doesn’t usually occur until several days after someone becomes sick. He told reporters than an infection typically starts with fever, cough, runny nose, and red eyes, and he urged people to avoid contact with others as soon as these symptoms occur.
“We need people to recognize measles infections when they do occur and do everything we can to avoid exposing others,” said Westergaard, adding that those with symptoms should contact their local health department or medical provider for further guidance.
There have been 431 measles cases across 13 Wisconsin counties as of Tuesday. It’s the highest number of cases in the state in more than 35 years, according to DHS.
And it’s “almost certainly an underestimate” of infections, according to Westergaard. He told reporters that not everyone who becomes infected gets tested or comes to the attention of public health.
Westergaard pointed out that widespread vaccination changed measles from a common childhood infection to a relatively rare disease until recent years.
“That was an extraordinary public health achievement, but it wasn’t permanent and it wasn’t inevitable that we would have that success,” he said. “It depended on doing the hard work of maintaining high levels of immunity in our communities. The death we’re reporting today is a tragic reminder of what can happen when measles begins circulating again.”
The vast majority of cases in Wisconsin this year have been linked to spread of the virus among residents of Grant, Iowa, Lafayette and Vernon counties.
The remaining measles cases have been linked to people being infected with measles during travel out of state.
So far, nine Wisconsinites have required hospitalization for severe symptoms from measles. Over 99% of cases have been in people who are unvaccinated.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been four other measles-related deaths reported in the U.S. this year.
The MMR vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles when the person has completed the medically recommended two-dose course.
State health officials are urging residents to check their and their families’ vaccination status through the state’s online registry or with their medical provider.
DHS reported some progress on improving the state’s vaccination rates. Since Aug. 1, the state has delivered 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to local health departments in measles-affected communities. Across the state, over 42,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered since Aug. 1.
Immunizations against COVID-19, the flu and RSV are available now. Recommendations vary depending on your age, health and other risk factors.
Earlier in the fall is a good time to get vaccinated against respiratory viruses, and you can get multiple vaccines at the same appointment.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that COVID-19, the flu and RSV could cause a similar number of hospitalizations this fall and winter as they did last season.
Last fall and winter, the U.S. experienced its highest levels of respiratory illness in more than 25 years. According to preliminary data from the CDC, millions of people were infected with the flu, at least 390,000 were hospitalized for it, and 24,000 died from it. This year, the agency predicts that COVID-19, the flu and RSV could cause a similar number of cases and hospitalizations.
The good news is that immunizations to protect against all three viruses are now available, and most eligible people can get them for free.
“Respiratory viruses sicken and even kill thousands of people every year,” Dr. Preeti Malani, infectious disease physician and professor at the University of Michigan, tells Public Good News. “Vaccination is a safe and effective way to help prevent illness and prevent severe illness.”
Read on to learn more about the immunizations available, who should get them this season and when.
Which immunizations are available this fall and winter, and who are they recommended for?
Updated COVID-19 and flu vaccines are available this respiratory virus season, along with RSV immunizations for certain groups. This year, a new mRNA flu vaccine option, Moderna’s mFlusiva, is available for people 50 and older.
All adults 19 and older, especially those 65 and over and people at higher risk of severe COVID-19, such as people with diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung diseases, or cancer.
Children ages 6 to 23 months. Malani explains that young children “have lost immunity provided by their mothers after birth and their own immune system is still immature.”
Children and teens ages 2 to 18 years who are at increased risk of severe COVID-19, have never been vaccinated or live with someone at high risk. Vaccination is also an option for other children whose parents want them protected.
People who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says that these maternal antibodies can help protect newborns.
What COVID-19 vaccines are available this season?
mRNA vaccines: Made by Pfizer and Moderna, these vaccines give your cells instructions to produce a harmless piece of the virus, which helps your immune system recognize and fight it.
Protein-based vaccine: Novavax offers a vaccine that uses a protein from the virus to trigger an immune response. This may appeal to people who prefer a vaccine without mRNA technology.
Both types help protect against severe COVID-19, and neither is generally recommended over the other for people who are eligible for both.
Flu
Who should get the vaccine?
Everyone 6 months and older.
Vaccination is especially important for young children, older adults, pregnant people, and people with certain underlying health conditions.
What flu vaccines are available this season?
Standard flu shots: These are appropriate for most people ages 6 months and older. Some are made using eggs, while others are egg-free. People with egg allergies can generally get any flu vaccine, including egg-based vaccines, because they contain only a very small amount of egg protein. However, your doctor may recommend that you wait after your vaccine for observation as an extra precaution.
Nasal spray vaccine:FluMist is a needle-free option for eligible people ages 2 to 49 years old. It can also be administered at home in some states, but it isn’t recommended for people who are pregnant or immunocompromised or have certain other medical conditions.
Vaccines for older adults: Adults 65 and older are advised to get an enhanced flu vaccine, which is designed to produce a stronger immune response or may offer better protection than standard-dose vaccines. These include high-dose, recombinant, adjuvanted, and mRNA vaccine options.
New mRNA flu vaccine:mFlusiva is the first mRNA flu vaccine, approved for adults 50 and older. Clinical trials found it was more effective than a standard-dose flu vaccine, although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better than other vaccines recommended for older adults.
RSV
Who should get an immunization?
All adults 75 and older.
Adults ages 50 to 74 who are at increased risk of severe RSV because of underlying health conditions or other risk factors.
People who are 32 to 36 weeks pregnant during RSV season, generally September through January in most of the U.S., to help protect their babies after birth.
Infants younger than 8 months entering their first RSV season whose birthing parent was not vaccinated during pregnancy, whose birthing parent’s vaccination status is unknown, or who were born less than 14 days after maternal vaccination.
Some children ages 8 to 19 months who are at increased risk of severe RSV and entering their second RSV season.
What RSV immunizations are available?
Eligible adults can receive an RSV vaccine. Unlike COVID-19 and flu vaccines, RSV vaccines aren’t recommended every year. People who have already received an RSV vaccine generally don’t need another dose.
Infants get an antibody medication — not a vaccine — that helps protect against severe RSV. Most infants don’t need both maternal vaccination and an antibody product.
When’s the best time to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the flu this season?
Both Malani and Chin-Hong agree that earlier in the fall is an ideal time to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the flu. It’s also safe (and convenient) to get both vaccines at the same appointment.
Chin-Hong says the timing is particularly important for the flu vaccine this year because flu activity is increasing earlier than usual.
“It’s important to get vaccinated before respiratory virus infections start to increase,” Malani said. “Especially since it takes a few weeks to provide a protective immune response.”
Are COVID-19, flu and RSV vaccines free this year?
Yes. Most major health insurance plans, including Medicaid, Medicare and CHIP, are expected to cover COVID-19, flu and RSV vaccines at no cost to eligible patients. However, coverage can vary depending on your insurance plan, age and where you get vaccinated.
If you have private insurance, check that your health care provider or pharmacy is in network to avoid unexpected costs.
If you’re uninsured, you may be able to get vaccinated for free or at a reduced cost through your local health department or a community health center. Children who qualify can also receive free vaccines through the federal Vaccines for Children program.
The annual winter moratorium on disconnections for nonpayment starts soon.
The moratorium runs from Nov. 1 to April 15 and prohibits utility providers from disconnecting residential heating services for nonpayment.
To avoid disconnection, the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin advises customers who have fallen behind on payments to contact their utility to set up a payment plan.
Customers who are currently disconnected have to make arrangements to restore service because utilities are not required to reconnect service until payment arrangements have been made.
Though you can’t get cut off starting Nov. 1, winter weather and increased costs for energy could mean your debt can pile up high.
Customers who are behind on their bills may be at risk of disconnection if payment arrangements are not established by April 15, 2027.
Customers should contact their utility provider to make a payment or arrange a payment plan.
We Energies, which serves most of Milwaukee, can be reached at 800-842-4565.
If you cannot reach an agreement with your utility, you can contact the Public Service Commission by calling 608-266-2001 or 800-225-7729, or by submitting a complaint online.
Focus on Energy partners with service providers to connect Wisconsin residents and businesses to affordable energy efficiency services. The program offers free energy-saving packs annually.
All households, apartments included, are eligible for a free pack that has things like efficient LED lights, water-saving shower heads and a weatherization pack that helps you get your home ready for winter.
The Wisconsin Home Energy Assistance Program assists eligible households with their heating and electric bills. Eligible families must make less than 60% of the median state income, which is $39,864 for a household of one and $88,927 for a household of five.
The program provides energy conservation services in eligible households to help reduce home energy costs and save energy. The program covers work like insulation, sealing air leaks and repairing or replacing inefficient furnaces or other appliances.
The Energy Assistance Program provides qualified Milwaukee County residents with a one-time, annual payment toward heating and electric bills. How much assistance you receive depends on your household size, income and energy costs and goes directly to the energy supplier.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership betweenCatchLight LocalandReport for America.
An advocacy group for older adults is demanding state health officials continue reporting who owns nursing homes, citing concerns about the takeover of county-operated facilities by private companies with a track record of lower quality care.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services maintains a directory of all licensed nursing homes in the state, including contact information and the number of beds available.
Up until this year, the directory also included the name of the facility’s owner and the type of ownership, including for-profit corporation, nonprofit or government-owned.
But the latest version of the directory no longer has ownership information listed.
Advocacy group Small Town and Rural Seniors, or STARS, sent a letter to DHS in August demanding the agency restore the information on the directory.
“Anybody who is looking at a nursing home for their loved one, that would be good information to have: Who owns this? What kind of company are they?” said Judy Brey, a retired teacher and STARS organizer in Reedsburg.
Before the county board voted to sell the nursing home in 2024, Brey said officials would not divulge the name of the private buyer.
“We figured it out because we went into the DHS records and found out that this Aria company, you know, already had their name on our nursing home,” Brey said.
She said the directory also allowed concerned residents to identify the other Wisconsin nursing homes owned by Aria and look up their quality of care ratings.
Wisconsin has more county-owned nursing homes than most other states, and the facilities tend to offer better care. But in recent years, a number of counties have considered privatizing or sold the facilities due to financial pressures or staffing shortages.
DHS did not provide comment on the change to public data despite repeated requests from WPR.
In an email obtained by WPR, Jessica Radtke, director of the Bureau of Nursing Home Care at DHS, told a STARS organizer that the agency had recently transitioned to a new data system that does not include ownership information, which is what led to its removal from the directory.
Radtke pointed out in the email that ownership information is publicly available through the online Cost Compare tool from Medicare.
But Brey said the response passes the buck.
“This is Wisconsin data that should be in (the state) database for people to look at,” she said. “Frankly, with what’s going on at the federal level, we don’t trust that they’re going to have that information for very long.”
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Wait times for medical visits are common statewide as the health care labor force shrinks and the population is older than the national average.
However, people don’t have to settle for long wait times. Wisconsin Watch spoke to two experts about strategies to lessen wait times.
They advise patients to ask follow-up questions when they set up an appointment, to get on a waitlist, to check with their primary care provider if it’s OK to wait, to use their connections and to consider seeking care from another health system.
Have you ever called to schedule a medical appointment and learned the next opening is months away?
Back in July, we asked readers how long they’ve waited to see a doctor. Responses poured in from across the state.
One reader in Mount Pleasant told us she waited 10 months to see a dermatologist. A reader in Kenosha said when her partner tried to schedule a visit to the neurologist after several fainting episodes, he learned he’d have to wait until June 2027 — nearly a year away. A reader in Auburn said he worries his wife, who began showing signs of dementia last year, won’t live long enough to go to the neurologist appointment he scheduled 14 months out.
Sometimes a wait is unavoidable. Health systems nationwide are struggling to fill job openings as baby boomers retire and an aging population demands more medical care. In Wisconsin, the labor force is shrinking, and the population is older than the national average, exacerbating the problem. Meanwhile, some rural hospitals have closed, making surrounding health systems even busier.
But sometimes it’s possible to get an appointment sooner than you’re offered, especially if you’re willing to be persistent or creative. Wisconsin Watch talked to two experts about what to do if you’re facing a long wait for medical care. Here’s what they said.
How long a wait is normal?
Typical wait times vary depending on where you live and the kind of care you’re seeking. 3Dhealth, a Chicago-based consulting company that helps health systems across the country determine how many doctors to recruit, has been gathering data on wait times in Wisconsin since 2012 through a “secret shopper” process. Posing as new patients seeking appointments, 3Dhealth calls doctors’ offices within its client health systems and records the outcome.
From 2012 to 2024, the company made more than 8,000 calls to Wisconsin physician offices covering 62 specialties across eight Wisconsin health systems. About 7% of those calls went unanswered. When callers reached a staff member, they found about 15% of the practices were closed to new patients. Those that accepted new patients had an average wait of 33 days. Half of patients waited 21 days or longer, and 1 in 10 waited more than 75 days.
Primary care doctors had shorter average waits than most specialists (33 days versus 42 days) but were more likely to be closed to new patients (roughly 24% versus 11%).
In 2024, the company called doctors offices in just two Wisconsin health systems, one predominantly rural and the other urban. Doctors in the rural system tended to have longer waits (a median of 27 versus 22 days), and they were more likely to be closed to new patients (roughly 17% versus 11%).
The problem seems to be growing nationwide, said 3Dhealth President and CEO Ron Flower. Wait times are getting longer, fewer practices are accepting new patients, and patients are having more trouble getting a hold of practices.
“All of that has been getting worse in general across the country, especially over the past five years since COVID,” Flower said.
In the Madison area, patient advocate Sarah C. Schaefer agrees that wait times for primary care are getting longer. Schaefer, who worked as a nurse practitioner for about 20 years before starting Ascent Patient Advocates, now helps people navigate the health care system and coordinate their care. Her clients often have to wait two or three months for certain specialist appointments — if the practices are open at all.
“It’s a problem that I definitely deal with and work through with my clients on a regular basis,” Schaefer said.
Explore your options
If you’d like to see a provider sooner, experts recommend asking follow-up questions. Employees who schedule appointments may not suggest alternatives on their own, Flower said, as your call might be one of thousands they receive in a day.
“They’re trying to get you on and off that phone as quickly as possible so that they can get to the doctor or the charts, or they can get to the next person calling in,” Flower said. “If you prompt them … all of a sudden, their brain clicks in that way: ‘Oh yeah, I can help you.’”
3Dhealth found that of the practices that were closed to new patients, those in rural areas were less than half as likely as those in urban areas to suggest alternatives if the caller didn’t ask.
“Oftentimes, if you do that little bit of pushback, show a little bit of anxiety, they’re going to say, ‘Well, I’ve got an appointment tomorrow (that) we’re holding for an established patient or a walk-in. But why don’t you come on in at that time?’” Flower said.
If you’re able to travel, consider asking if an earlier appointment is available at a different clinic within the same health system. Alternatively, consider asking if you might be able to see a nurse practitioner or physician assistant instead of a doctor.
“This varies by insurance or potentially health system … I would say sometimes appropriate, sometimes not, but something to explore for sure,” Schaefer said. If the clinic says yes, you may still need to check with your insurer to be sure it will cover the visit.
Get on a waitlist
One of the top tips for those facing lengthy waits: Get on a waitlist. Many practices keep lists of patients hoping for earlier appointments, but they may not mention that option unless you ask.
Some practices have automated waitlists that send a text message offering an earlier appointment when one becomes available and a brief window in which the patient can respond to accept the offer.
Even if there’s no waitlist, patients can call back to see if the options have changed.
“That’s one thing that I do frequently,” Schaefer said. “People can cancel appointments on their patient portals … all times of the day and night, so appointment slots do open up.”
Keeping a waitlist can benefit clinics too. “It’s smart on their end,” Flower said. “We get things that come up. It’s called life. So let’s have a way of filling our practice and making our practice more productive and profitable and helpful.”
Find out if it’s OK to wait
Sometimes patients think their issues are more urgent than they are, Flower said, noting that by the time patients finally pick up the phone to request an appointment, they may have already put it off for quite a while.
“Health care professionals oftentimes know the urgency of your situation; they have a good sense of it, right?” Flower said. “So in some ways, it’s trusting the process.”
If you’re worried, Schaefer recommends contacting the referring provider to check that the referral was coded correctly.
“Go with your gut. … Call back to your primary (care provider) and say, ‘Hey, you made it sound like this is an urgent issue. They’re telling me three months. I just want to let you know,’” Schaefer said. “Maybe they didn’t click that ‘urgent’ button, or maybe this is a scenario where the doctor needs to pick up the phone and call another provider and chat.”
Use your connections
If you have a family member who’s already seeing the kind of provider you need to see, Schaefer suggests asking if the provider will take you as a patient too. Some providers give preference to the family members of their current patients, accepting them even when they’re otherwise closed to new patients.
Consider a different health system
If all else fails, Schaefer said, consider looking outside your current health system. This can be complicated, as insurance coverage varies. Schaefer recommends contacting your health insurance provider to ask for more information.
Alternatively, patients seeking prompter primary care can consider purchasing a membership at one of the growing number of “direct primary care” practices. At these practices, patients pay a monthly fee that covers unlimited access to certain primary care services, with no health insurance involved. While some parts of Wisconsin now have several direct primary care practices, other parts may have few or none.
Tell us about your experience
Wisconsin Watch plans to continue covering the state’s health workforce and efforts to fill gaps. If you’ve waited a long time to see a doctor, or if you’ve found a way to speed up the process, email me at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org to tell me about it.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership withOpen Campus. Email her atnyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
At the end of 2025, Milwaukee Water Works still had over 55,000 residential homes or properties with lead water lines on the utility-owned side, customer-owned side or both. The utility had yet to identify the makeup of pipelines serving another 27,000 properties.
But Milwaukee can’t replace all the pipelines at once — and some neighborhoods face greater risks from lead exposure than others.
So which areas should officials prioritize?
Part of the answer lies in a surprising place: a tool University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers originally developed to study the connection between neighborhood disadvantage and human health.
Lead does not impact neighborhoods equally
Milwaukee’s pipeline problem dates back to 1872, when the city mandated the use of lead in service lines. Although the city abolished the mandate in 1962, older lead pipelines remained in many older residential buildings.
Historical topographic map of Milwaukee and surrounding area, 1957 – 1959, by U.S. Geological Survey. Red shading indicates urban built-up areas. (Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch)Historical topographic map of Milwaukee and surrounding area, 1957 – 1959, by U.S. Geological Survey; overlaid with lead service line inventory data (2025) by Milwaukee Water Works. (Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch)
Today, most homes known to have lead lines are concentrated in the older neighborhoods surrounding downtown, while most homes with service lines made of “unknown” materials tend to be farther away.
Downtown Milwaukee includes a scattering of homes with non-lead service lines — many due to having already been replaced by the city.
Milwaukee has replaced nearly 15,000 pipelines since beginning its broader efforts in 2017, said Milwaukee Water Works Superintendent Patrick Pauly. When federal funding became available under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the utility expanded its effort, increasing the pace from about 1,000 lines a year to 5,000.
But scaling up the effort required more than funds and construction crews. The city also needed a systematic way to decide where to work — one that recognizes disproportionate risks across the city.
“We needed to expand the lead service line replacement program, and we needed to develop a, for lack of a better word, defensible method to expand that program,” Pauly said.
70% comes from the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a measure of relative socioeconomic disadvantage developed by UW-Madison researchers.
25% comes from the percentage of local children who tested positive for lead poisoning.
5% comes from lead service line density in the area.
Together, these measures help the utility determine where replacement will yield the highest benefits.
The city updates each property’s score every other year as new information becomes available, Pauly said.
The scoring weights heavily toward neighborhood disadvantage as broader challenges residents face can compound risks posed by lead exposure.
Nationwide, communities burdened by economic disadvantages and racial inequalities can face greater risks of lead exposure, according to a Montclair State University study of New Jersey. Such neighborhoods often contain older housing and sit near former industrial sites.
The ADI relies on attempts to quantify disadvantages in Milwaukee, and its origins have little to do with water infrastructure.
A tool developed to understand health disparities
The ADI measures neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage or adverse social exposure using 17 U.S. Census American Community Survey measures. They include factors related to income, education, housing, and employment.
The index assigns scores to census block groups — small geographic areas that generally contain several hundred to a few thousand people.
Block groups receive a national percentile ranking from 1 to 100 or a statewide decile ranking from 1 to 10. Higher rankings indicate greater socioeconomic disadvantage relative to other areas.
Statewide Area Deprivation Index (ADI) of Milwaukee area
The ADI measures neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage or adverse social exposure using 17 US Census American Community Survey measures.
Legend
Colors represent ADI of census tracts in Milwaukee area.
1 -> Least fiancially deprived
-> State median level
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
10 -> Most financially deprived
Statewide Area Deprivation Index (ADI) of Milwaukee area
The ADI measures neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage or adverse social exposure using 17 US Census American Community Survey measures.
Legend
Colors represent ADI of census tracts in Milwaukee area.
1 -> Least fiancially deprived
-> State median level
10 -> Most financially deprived
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
Researchers have long recognized that people’s health depends on far more than the medical care they receive. But measuring the influence of social and economic conditions on health isn’t easy.
Dr. Amy Kind has spent much of her career trying to figure that out.
Kind, a professor of geriatrics and gerontology at UW-Madison and founding director of its Center for Health Disparities Research, grew up in Niagara, Wisconsin, before training as a physician.
During her residency in Boston, she saw that the medicine she prescribed could do only so much when patients returned to homes without healthy food, stable housing or access to other basic resources. Those experiences helped shape her interest in finding ways to measure such disadvantages.
Researchers have used indexes like ADI since the 1980s. In 2014, Kind led a group of University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health researchers in updating ADI using modern census data, refined it to the census block level and validated its usefulness across several scientific studies.
“(Like any marker), it may not be the thing that ultimately drives the risk,” Kind said. “But it has been an extremely strong marker that something going on in that area is increasing risk, whatever it might be.”
An unexpected use for health research
“When we first developed the metric, we thought that perhaps it would be used primarily by health systems, primarily in the research community,” Kind said.
Instead, Kind and her colleagues heard from many community groups and local governments that were interested in using index data to guide their public health work.
Amy Kind, a professor of geriatrics and gerontology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, is shown in her Madison office. Kind and her colleagues developed the Area Deprivation Index in 2014 — a tool that has been used in hundreds of different projects, including in Milwaukee’s lead pipeline replacement efforts. (Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch)
Since 2014, the University of Wisconsin has tracked over 3,500 academic papers citing the index and more than 400 examples of its use across different fields. That includes a recent Kind study linking environmental factors to the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, the index helped officials in Puerto Rico decide where to send nurses to combat dengue fever and the mosquitoes that carry it.
That wide interest prompted Kind to develop the Neighborhood Atlas in 2018, making the data more accessible.
Kind said she enjoys seeing the index be used in sometimes unexpected ways to address local challenges. That includes Milwaukee’s effort to protect children from lead exposure, where officials are using it as one component of their model.
Thousands of pipelines replaced, thousands more to go
Milwaukee Water Works has replaced lead pipes at more than 6,000 properties under its priority program, which launched less than three years ago.
Prioritization Project Operational Areas since 2024
Legend
Replaced in:
2024
2025
2026
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
Prioritization Project Operational Areas since 2024
Legend
Replaced in:
2025
2024
2026
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
The work has been largely concentrated on the city’s North Side but has also expanded into near South Side neighborhoods.
Pauly expects the utility to reach a milestone next year of 20,000 lead lines replaced.
But officials will soon face a difficult question: how to pay for replacements after Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding runs out in 2028.
One possibility is returning to a funding system that required homeowners to pay part of the cost of replacing the privately owned portion of their service lines.
“I don’t believe the city has the financial capacity to take on fully funding the private side replacement costs,” Pauly said.
That could present another challenge for a program designed to prioritize neighborhoods where residents already face financial disadvantages.
For now, residents living in homes with lead service lines that are not yet scheduled for replacement can take steps to better understand their own risk.
Julie LaRose, lead and nutrition program coordinator at the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary, runs one of the many programs in the city where residents can submit samples of their tap water for free lead testing.
LaRose recognizes residents’ concerns about their tap water. But she also emphasizes that Milwaukee water is highly regulated, and she has not seen any samples tested through her program exceed one part per billion (ppb) of lead.
That’s far below the FDA limit for lead in bottled water (5 ppb) and the EPA’s threshold for utility action (15 ppb).
“If you’re nervous about this, let’s test it,” LaRose said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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The New Friends program at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute has paired people with early-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia with UW-Madison students.
The students will go into careers as nurses, doctors, therapists or social workers.
Mentors, students and program leaders say the program is mutually beneficial: The semester-long program gives students firsthand experience being around someone who lives with mild cognitive issues, and the mentors get social connection during what can be a lonely time.
New Friends also helps dispel myths about people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia, many of whom are able to live independently, hold jobs, socialize with friends and raise kids or grandkids.
The first sign seemed harmless.
Bill Ducett drove his carload of friends in the opposite direction of the Chicago conference where they were headed. His wife Diana — a nurse — watched out the car window, concerned, as they passed unfamiliar streets. When she corrected Bill, embarrassment washed over him as he quickly turned the car around.
It was a small slipup, unless you know Bill: a 78-year-old with a razor-sharp internal compass and an Illinois native who knows the city like the back of his hand.
Diana convinced Bill to go to the doctor. After five hours of testing, he emerged with a diagnosis: mild cognitive impairment, and a prescription: car GPS.
Now, for three years, Bill has met with medical students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about what it’s like to live with an early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
The program, dubbed New Friends, has for 14 years connected people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia with future medical professionals to learn from one another.
The goal is to teach future health care workers lessons they can’t gain from coursework alone: firsthand experience with people living with cognitive changes outside of a classroom and textbook. Many of the participating students go on to be nurses, doctors, therapists or social workers. Together, they help challenge misconceptions about dementia and work toward better care for patients experiencing it.
“I thought I could be, with my own journey, helping to be productive for somebody else to do something about this. So the motivation was to give back. But in giving back, I’m getting so many benefits,” Bill said.
As Wisconsin’s population ages, elder care workers are in short supply, and even rarer are those with prior experience with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The arrangement is mutually beneficial: Students get experience connecting with people living with cognitive changes, and mentors get social connection during a particularly lonely time.
“Oftentimes medical students are really good at the medicine side of things, but their bedside manner or their understanding of people living with dementia wasn’t the best,” said Sheryl Spensley, education coordinator at UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
How it works
The program started small in 2012. Since then, it’s grown exponentially, and more than 300 students have participated. Usually, each mentor takes on two students.
Spensley plays matchmaker, pairing students and mentors who have the most in common.
The meetups look different for every pair. Some gather at the mentor’s home to sit and talk. Others go to parks, coffee shops, restaurants or museums. Some opt for more activity, watching sports, going bowling or playing board games. Bill and Diana’s “friends” have chosen to paint pottery together or attend plays put on by Bill’s son, a teacher at their local school in Oregon, Wisconsin.
There are logistics to navigate that students usually don’t consider in their everyday lives: How will the mentor get to the meeting? Is there suitable parking and seating? Is the meeting place too loud or overstimulating?
“That’s a good learning experience about how differently abled people have to navigate the world, capacity to get in and out of places, and how much time that takes for people,” Spensley said.
“I was a school teacher. I was a professor in education. I mentored students in their 20s, so I meet with these future medical professionals because I can get back in teaching mode. For me, it’s all very comfortable,” said Bill Ducett, left, of participating in the New Friends program. His wife, Diana, right, attends sessions with Bill to explain her role as a caregiver. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
All mentors are squarely in the early stages of dementia. In the mid to late stages, communication becomes more challenging, people may live in an assisted living facility, and reflecting on what they’re experiencing can be difficult.
“For some it can be more emotionally distressing at that point,” said Molly Schroeder, outreach program manager at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute who helps coordinate New Friends.
Much of the conversation can tend to revolve around the mentor, as students ask about things like the logistics of their medical care or their everyday hurdles, but former mentee Meghana Ram said they also often just talked as friends. She found the meetups felt less like an interview and more like a social hangout.
Some of the mentors have caregivers who join and talk about their responsibilities and careers. Technically, Diana joins the meetings as Bill’s mentor.
“She’s a caregiver, but you know, she’s more of a commentator,” Bill joked.
Throughout the semester-long process, students keep a journal where they reflect on what their mentors teach them. They also take surveys before and after the program measuring their attitudes toward people with cognitive decline — questions like, “how comfortable would you be sitting one on one with someone with dementia?” By the end, students’ perceptions grow more positive.
Dispelling myths, challenging stigma
When Bill started telling his neighbors and friends about his diagnosis, he felt their sympathy. But he also noticed that they became uncomfortable and started “pulling back” from him.
“They don’t know what to say,” Diana said of people who learn about Bill’s diagnosis. “They’re afraid of how they’ll be interpreted … They feel sorry for both of us. They’re a little too afraid to get involved.”
Nowadays, the symptoms Bill experiences are small and often harmless: forgetting that he made a cup of coffee for Diana until the cup is cooled. Temporarily losing his keen sense of direction. But he still drives, still attends his son’s plays, still lives his life mostly as normal.
Diana Ducett poses for a portrait in Oregon, Wis., on Oct. 7, 2026. Diana first noticed changes in Bill that led to his early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
During dementia’s early stages, people often experience confusion or small memory lapses that don’t always impact their ability to live independently. Many with this early diagnosis still have jobs and social lives and are raising kids or grandkids, Schroeder said.
But many people don’t realize that, she said, “because unfortunately, a lot of what we see in the media is, we see people more at the later stages in a nursing home, sitting in a wheelchair in front of a TV. But there are years before that where it doesn’t look like that at all.”
Bill doesn’t feel that same judgment with the New Friends students. They meet him with pure curiosity. He’s mentored eight students over three years.
“I was a school teacher. I was a professor in education. I mentored students in their 20s,” Bill said. “So I meet with these future medical professionals because I can get back in teaching mode. For me, it’s all very comfortable.”
Students say the program dispels many of the myths about dementia they once held, mostly regarding what someone’s daily life must look like after diagnosis.
“Culturally, how we look at the elderly, it’s not good,” Spensley said. “This program shows students that even when you have early-stage dementia, you still have things to contribute to society and things you can learn. That’s why they’re called mentors.”
‘Different than just a textbook definition’
When Ram worked as a CNA at an assisted living facility throughout high school, she kept meeting dementia patients, and she didn’t feel she had the tools to fully connect with them.
After enrolling at UW-Madison, she joined the New Friends program to improve her communication with patients.
For a year, she set aside time to play at an arcade and go out to eat with her mentors. She asked questions like: “How did you react to the diagnosis? How did you tell your family? Has your social life changed?”
The answers showed her the importance of establishing a personal connection with patients.
“A lot of these patients don’t necessarily have someone to talk to or have someone to listen to them,” Ram said. “By doing that, you can learn so much of what each individual person needs … to make them feel better. Realizing that the experience of this illness looks so different from person to person, and that sometimes it needs a tailored approach, and that only comes with building that trust and having those conversations and listening.”
Ram loved the program so much that when she moved home to Green Bay, she started a mini version with local students.
The program ran for two years in partnership with Curative Connections, a support program for adults with dementia or other cognitive issues. It ended when Ram moved to Wausau to study to become a physician’s assistant. But she hopes to restart something similar someday.
“(I wanted to) go into those patient rooms with better communication methods, or remembering more of the experience, not only for me, but for the patient, too, and maybe for family members,” Ram said. “I think understanding the experience of a disease is so much more different than just a textbook definition of it. Getting to hear that from patients firsthand is really neat.”
Like Ram, not every student will go on to become a caregiver for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. But they’ll be prepared when coming across people with cognitive changes, whether they be patients, family members or perfect strangers.
“Whether that’s at a restaurant, a bank, the grocery store,” Schroeder said, “it’s important to know how to communicate and support those individuals.”
But it isn’t just about preparing students for the people they’ll meet in the future.
Many of the New Friends pairs end up forming a bond and keep in touch after their time in the program ends. Ram said she and her mentors kept in touch for a while by texting each other photos and updates about their lives. Bill and Diana follow where their students go after graduation and look forward to meeting more, semester after semester.
“We feel that those young people have enriched our lives so much,” Diana said. “They keep us looking forward to the next set of friends.”
This article is part of the Cap Times series Deadly Divide, investigating Wisconsin’s ongoing Black infant mortality crisis. Erin McGroarty reported this story as a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2026 National Fellow and a participant in the Center’s engagement initiative.
David Crowley leads the largest county in Wisconsin, which regularly ranks among the worst states in the nation for its Black infant mortality rate.
A majority of those deaths typically are concentrated in Crowley’s county, in central Milwaukee ZIP codes.
This crisis isn’t just a policy priority, the Democratic candidate for governor told the Cap Times. It’s a measure of whether Wisconsin can consider itself a success.
Crowley provided those insights in response to a questionnaire from the Cap Times, where health reporter Erin McGroarty is investigating the state’s long-standing status as one of the deadliest states for Black newborns.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor, did not complete the questionnaire or respond to multiple emails and phone calls over a seven-week period requesting responses.
The Cap Times has been unable to locate any public statements by Tiffany’s campaign about Black infant health in Wisconsin.
Crowley’s responses to the questionnaire can be found below.
Some responses have been edited for brevity.
Do you consider Black infant mortality a public health priority in Wisconsin?
Black infant mortality is not only a public health priority — it is one of the clearest measures of whether our systems work for every family.
Changing that requires looking beyond hospitals and clinics to include access to maternal health care, doulas, community health workers, stable housing, paid family and medical leave and economic security.
Wisconsin has long known about this disparity. We need sustained commitment to change it.
Would you support policies to improve access to early and consistent prenatal care for Black mothers and others who struggle to access these services?
I would expand access to early and consistent prenatal care through Medicaid. I also support greater access to care through paid family and medical leave, transportation, telehealth, group prenatal care and postpartum home visits.
In 2026, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a bill later signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers to extend the period of time Medicaid covers postpartum care for mothers. Do you support expanding or further modifying Wisconsin’s Medicaid program to improve maternal and infant health?
Yes. However, maternal health begins long before pregnancy. Chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and mental health needs often go untreated for years, driving poor birth outcomes and maternal mortality. Expanding health care coverage through a public option is foundational for improving outcomes.
Wisconsin must strengthen maternal health benefits throughout pregnancy and the postpartum year. I support coverage for doulas, community health workers, dental health, nutrition, postpartum home visits and mental health and substance use screening and treatment. Coverage must translate into actual care, requiring stronger reimbursement and provider participation — especially in rural and underserved communities.
Would you support or propose policy to improve access to maternal mental health services, including screening and treatment for postpartum depression and other complications?
Maternal mental health must be treated as a core part of prenatal and postpartum care. I would expand access to routine screening, timely referral and treatment for postpartum depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and other complications. Medicaid and private insurance should cover these services, including telehealth, home-based support and care delivered through doulas and community health workers. Wisconsin should also expand successful community-based efforts such as the First Breath perinatal care pilot and improve coordination, so families are not left to navigate complex systems on their own.
Do you support initiatives to recruit, train and retain a more diverse maternal and infant health workforce?
A maternal and infant health workforce that reflects the communities it serves can strengthen trust, communication and continuity of care. I would build on the Governor’s Task Force on the Healthcare Workforce recommendations by expanding education and apprenticeship pathways, scholarships and loan repayment, clinical placements in underserved communities, and support for community-based doula and community health worker careers. Recruitment must be paired with fair compensation, supportive workplaces and clear advancement opportunities so Wisconsin can retain the people it trains.
What role should hospitals and health systems play in reducing racial disparities in maternal and infant health outcomes? Would you support statewide quality improvement initiatives or reporting requirements?
Hospitals and health systems should be accountable partners in eliminating racial disparities. They can leverage existing health assessment and improvement-planning processes to identify needs and improve population health. Wisconsin should strengthen this infrastructure so inequities are not hidden within statewide averages.
This requires consistent public reporting of maternal and infant health outcomes by race and geography, strong alignment between local and state efforts, and measurable goals. In addition, hospitals should partner directly with communities to set priorities and design solutions.
Ultimately, quality improvement must be measured by change. When assessments reveal racial disparities, institutions must shift resources to improve outcomes.
Should state government address non-medical factors such as housing stability, nutrition, transportation, environmental exposures and economic opportunity that affect infant and maternal health?
Housing, income, transportation, environmental conditions, food security, paid leave, and child care are maternal and infant health issues because they shape the conditions in which people experience pregnancy, recover from childbirth and raise their children.
I support coordinated investments in affordable housing, nutrition, transportation, environmental protections, paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and economic security. If we are serious about improving maternal and infant health, we have to invest not only in health care, but in the conditions that make health possible.
Wisconsin does not have an infant death review board as it does for maternal deaths. Do you support creating such a board?
Wisconsin should establish an infant death review system that complements the existing maternal mortality review process. Many states establish a local process, which is a national best practice. Regardless, the process should examine medical and non-medical contributing factors, identify preventable patterns, protect family privacy and issue regular public recommendations. The goal should be learning and prevention — not blame — and the board should include clinicians, public health professionals, community representatives, and people with lived experience.
If elected, would you support specific funding priorities in a state budget to reduce Black infant mortality?
My budget priorities include expanding health coverage, doula and community health worker reimbursement, nurse home visiting, maternal mental health services, prenatal care access, telehealth, paid family leave, and grants for community-led birth equity programs.
Reducing Black infant mortality requires us to be intentional about racial disparities, but these investments also improve outcomes for all Wisconsin families.
Would you support state funding for services such as community health workers or access to doulas care?
Community health workers and doulas provide trusted, culturally responsive support before, during and after birth. I would fund these services through Medicaid reimbursement and sustainable state grants that reflect the true cost of providing these services. Funding should include family-supporting compensation, benefits and training for these workers — not require workers or community organizations to subsidize essential health care through underpaid or uncompensated labor.
Families should be able to choose CHW and doula support without cost or geography becoming a barrier, and the people providing support should be able to build sustainable careers doing this work.
Would you be willing to set measurable goals during your term to reduce Black infant mortality and improve birth outcomes? How would the public know whether your policies are working?
I would establish clear statewide goals to improve maternal and infant health outcomes for all Wisconsin families, with specific goals for reducing Black infant mortality and narrowing persistent racial disparities in birth outcomes.
Those goals should include interim benchmarks developed in partnership with DHS, local health departments, health systems, tribal nations, community organizations, and families. The state should publish an annual dashboard reporting infant mortality, preterm birth, low birth weight, prenatal care access, postpartum follow-up, and other key measures by race and geography.
The public should see where outcomes are improving, where disparities persist and how state investments are performing.
Are there any other state policies or additional funding you believe would improve access to maternal care and decrease infant mortality disparities?
Improving maternal care also requires investments in the conditions that shape health before and after birth. I would support policies that strengthen housing stability, food security, transportation, environmental health, paid leave, child care, and early education. I would also expand access to telehealth and community-based care so rural families and families facing transportation or provider shortages can receive consistent support.
Ultimately, reducing infant mortality requires both a strong health care system and policies that give families the resources and stability necessary to be healthy.
Describe an issue on which you would be willing to work across party lines to improve maternal and infant health.
I would work across party lines to create a statewide infant death review system and expand evidence-based home visiting, doula care and rural maternal health services. These are practical steps that can improve care, identify preventable causes of infant death and give policymakers better information about where resources are needed. Maternal and infant health should be an area where legislators can set politics aside and focus on results for families.
Explain your overall vision for ensuring that every baby born in Wisconsin has an equal opportunity for a healthy start in life, regardless of race or ZIP code.
Every baby born in Wisconsin should have an equal opportunity for a healthy start — but that work begins long before a baby is born.
Healthy pregnancies are shaped across the life course: by whether people can access health care before pregnancy, whether families have stable housing and economic security, whether parents can take paid time to recover and care for a newborn, and whether communities have trusted providers and resources close to home.
My vision is a Wisconsin that improves maternal and infant health for everyone while being intentional about eliminating the racial and geographic disparities that have persisted for far too long. Those goals are not in competition. Many of the investments that can help close the Black infant mortality gap … can strengthen families across our state, including rural communities facing significant health care shortages.
Families and communities should help shape these solutions and government should be accountable for results. We should publicly measure whether outcomes are improving, whether disparities are closing and whether our investments are reaching the people who need them most.
A healthy start should not depend on a family’s race, income, employer or ZIP code. Wisconsin has both the responsibility and the ability to build the conditions in which every family can thrive.
This story is part of the Cap Times seriesDeadly Divide, investigating Wisconsin’s ongoing Black infant mortality crisis. Erin McGroarty reported this story as a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2026 National Fellow.
On the night her daughter was born, Masompe Chisenga named her baby Ayah, which means miracle.
Ayah’s life began far too early. Born at just 22 weeks and 3 days and weighing less than a pound, the newborn fit in her mother’s palm.
The first 10 months of Ayah’s life would be measured in the quiet hum of a neonatal intensive care unit, the beep of medical machinery, the whir of supplemental oxygen and the prayers of her mother and father.
That Ayah is now 3 1/2 years old is a testament to her name.
It’s also a testament, her mother says, to the groundbreaking care she received at American Family Children’s Hospital and UnityPoint Health-Meriter in Madison through a program called Small Baby Care, designed to save the tiniest infants born as early as five months into a pregnancy.
‘Lost for words’
Chisenga never expected to deliver her daughter so early. She carried her first pregnancy to 39 weeks, delivering Ayah’s older brother, Munshya, through cesarean because he was breech, when a baby is situated feet-first in the uterus instead of the typical head-down presentation.
In Ayah’s case, “everyone was just lost for words because I was only five months pregnant,” Chisenga said. “I was lost and hopeless because at that point I had never heard of any possibility of babies being born that early.”
Ayah Chisenga is pictured in her incubator holding her mother’s finger while receiving care in American Family Children’s Hospital’s Level IV NICU. She was transferred there from UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital on March 3, 2023. (Courtesy of Masompe Chisenga)
Doctors came to speak with Chisenga in her hospital room after it was realized she was fully dilated and delivery was inevitable. They explained two options for how to proceed: Chisenga could deliver her daughter and wait for the baby to die, or the doctors could intervene, provide advanced resuscitative care and try to save Ayah. Even with the second option, there would be no guarantee the little girl would survive or, if she did live, ever be able to walk or talk.
“At that moment, they were asking what I wanted to do, and I had no answer,” she said.
Chisenga spoke with her husband. The two decided they wanted the medical team to try to save their daughter’s life.
After 28 hours of labor, Chisenga delivered Ayah. The tiny child weighed 15.8 ounces, less than one-seventh the average size of a full-term newborn girl.
In the maternity ward at UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital, a team of neonatologists, nurses, advanced practitioners and specialists were waiting to give her a fighting chance.
“When Ayah was born, I was only allowed to see her for a second, and then they had to take her away and start the process of putting in a breathing tube to get her stabilized,” Chisenga said. “She was very tiny and she was very fragile.”
Ayah was quickly whisked away to the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. Chisenga said she felt like she couldn’t breathe wondering whether her child would survive her first day and night.
“For those 24 hours, we waited,” she said. “It was very difficult.”
A nurse helped Chisenga into a wheelchair and brought her next to her daughter’s incubator. The box was full of tubes and wires. Beneath it all, Ayah was fighting for her life.
It would be 21 days before Chisenga could hold her daughter.
Premature newborns born as early as Ayah are often placed in incubators with an eye covering because their retinas are too underdeveloped to safely be exposed to the therapeutic blue light in neonatal intensive care units. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
‘Beacon of hope’
Babies born this early are so tiny and fragile that doctors and other providers have to handle them with the utmost care because every aspect of their body, even their skin, is underdeveloped.
They can’t breathe on their own. They can’t nurse. It isn’t even safe for them to open their eyes because their retinas are too sensitive for the intense therapeutic lights installed in incubators.
Prematurity is considered any delivery before 37 weeks gestation. A delivery between 33 and 37 weeks is considered late preterm, 29-33 weeks is considered moderately preterm, and extremely preterm is any baby born at 28 weeks or earlier.
In 2024, one in 10 babies in the United States were born preterm, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. For Black infants, that number is closer to one in six. In Wisconsin, about 9.3% of white infants were born preterm in 2024. Among Black infants, 15.6% were born preterm.
Preterm-related causes of death account for more than 35% of all infant deaths in the United States. For white infants, the percentage is lower, around 15%. The percentage of Black infants in the U.S. whose death can be attributed to being born too early and two small is nearly three times that.
At the center of Ayah’s care team was Dr. Claudette Onyelobi, a UW Health Kids neonatologist, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the director of Small Baby Care at American Family Children’s Hospital and UnityPoint Health-Meriter.
“It breaks my heart,” Onyelobi said of the fact that she will statistically see more Black families in her NICU than those of any other race.
In a perfect world, she said, Black babies would not face such stark disparities in mortality and preterm birth. But until those risks can be eliminated, Onyelobi will work to save the ones who came too soon.
Onyelobi clearly remembers the moment she chose her specialty in neonatology, and it haunts her to this day.
Dr. Claudette Onyelobi, shown here at UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital, is a UW Health Kids neonatologist, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the director of Small Baby Care at American Family Children’s Hospital and UnityPoint Health-Meriter. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Nearing the end of her clinical training in 2018, Onyelobi provided care for a family in Wisconsin who delivered their baby at 22 weeks. The hospital in which Onyelobi was practicing didn’t have the medical capabilities to provide life-saving interventions for a baby that small.
Onyelobi’s only option was to deliver the infant, wrap the baby in a blanket and advise the family that they would need to say goodbye.
“I held it together for as long as I could stay in that room, and then I stepped out of the room, and I cried all the way to my call room, and then I cried some more the rest of that night, and I cried a little bit more next week, and the week after that,” Onyelobi said. “I said to myself, ‘I am never in my life going to do that again.’”
A lot of doctors have these key moments, typically earlier in their career, when a particular case hits them especially hard and serves as inspiration for years to come.
“That was the personal experience for me. Maybe it’s not my own child, maybe it’s not a sister or a brother or this person who’s connected to my family, but that was enough for me,” Onyelobi said. “For those families who need me, I will be that beacon of hope.”
This was eight years ago. Since then, a lot has changed.
American Family Children’s Hospital opened its Level IV NICU in 2014, the most advanced ranking a neonatal intensive care unit can receive. Since 2018, Onyelobi has created, along with a team of other specialists, one of the most advanced neonatal programs in the country.
Neonatology is still considered a relatively new field of medicine, minted in the 1960s and ’70s. There are only about 5,000 neonatologists in the United States. By comparison, more than 34,000 cardiologists are practicing in the U.S.
One of a few
Just 850 neonatal programs in the country have capabilities to care for infants as young as 22 weeks gestation. Beyond capacity, these NICUs need specially trained staff and specialized equipment designed for the smallest of newborns: Breathing tubes the size of a coffee straw. A stethoscope the size of a quarter.
The collaborative program between UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter is one of only a handful in the country that has all of the factors needed to care for the tiniest premature infants: the capacity, equipment and specially trained staff.
The Small Baby Care program by American Family Children’s Hospital and UnityPoint Health-Meriter is one of only a handful in the country with the capabilities, specialized equipment and specially trained staff to care for premature infants as early as 22 weeks. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Premature babies born in the maternity ward at Meriter will typically be treated in the hospital’s 42-bed Level III NICU until they are stable enough to transfer to American Family Children’s Hospital’s 26-bed Level IV unit — one of only two Level IV NICUs in Wisconsin.
“We’ve had people from the University of Iowa and different places come and show us how it’s done, so that we can then hone our skill and figure it out,” Onyelobi said.
Babies born this early require extreme medical interventions before delivery even starts.
As soon as obstetricians realize they can no longer delay birth, the providers start giving the mom medications like steroids, magnesium sulfate and antibiotics to help improve the infant’s chances of survival.
These interventions have become part of the standard practice over only the last two or three decades, Onyelobi explained.
In the early 1990s, the medical field developed the ability to inject surfactant into a preterm baby’s lungs to mimic a type of protein that coats the inside of our lungs and helps us breathe.
Infants who are born this early have not naturally developed this lung coating yet, so the injections have been a game changer in helping extremely preterm infants breathe with still underdeveloped lungs.
These advancements, and the fact she was able to receive them in Madison, are part of why Ayah lived when so many babies born this early do not.
Ayah Chisenga leaps across her Fitchburg living room assisted by her father, Munshya, as her mother, Masompe, watches. When Ayah was first born, doctors were unsure if she would ever be able to walk. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Ayah was born on the edges of viability, and it took a village for her to survive, Onyelobi recalled.
At this point of development, every breath and every hour make a difference.
The little girl spent 48 days in the NICU at Meriter before she was transferred to American Family Children’s Hospital, where she spent another 7 1/2 months.
Especially at the beginning of her life, many moments were touch and go.
Chisenga remembers times when she would receive a call from the hospital, letting her know her daughter had taken a turn and she needed to come right away, potentially to say goodbye.
“The first time I met Dr. Onyelobi at Meriter was a very difficult day,” Chisenga said. “I remember going in that day after getting a call saying I needed to go, and things weren’t looking good. And when I walked in, there were a few nurses and Dr. Onyelobi. She was there trying to figure out what would help Ayah’s situation stabilize because it was hard for her to breathe.”
Masompe Chisenga had to wait 21 days before she could hold her daughter, Ayah, after she was born at 22 weeks and 3 days. (Courtesy of Masompe Chisenga)
Chisenga began to cry, preparing to lose her daughter. Onyelobi comforted her, Chisenga said, explained the situation and began using a breathing bag to help Ayah’s oxygen levels increase.
“I cried so much,” Chisenga said.
When she held Ayah for the first time, 21 days after giving birth, Chisenga said she was surrounded by doctors, specialists and nurses in case something went wrong. She couldn’t be alone with her daughter because of Ayah’s critical condition.
Chisenga would visit her daughter often, speaking to Ayah through the protective box of her incubator.
“I was telling her that no matter the circumstances, we loved her. We loved her so much,” Chisenga said. “We wanted her to be here, and we were happy that she was staying strong for us. No matter the circumstances, love was waiting for her at home. And she was strong and she was mighty.”
‘A good goodbye’
When Chisenga and her husband brought Ayah home, she still required supplemental oxygen and an oxygen monitor. The equipment was so sensitive the alarm would sound if Ayah moved her leg.
Chisenga said she was always on edge, grateful to have her daughter home with her, her husband and Ayah’s older brother, who was 2 at the time. But Chisenga said she was constantly terrified something would go wrong.
Masompe Chisenga holds her daughter, Ayah, in their Fitchburg home in August. Ayah is the longest surviving infant of Dr. Onyelobi’s tiny baby program. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Now, as a 3-year-old, Ayah dances and skips around her living room. Even as a newborn, the little girl was eager to move.
“She kept wiggling, and the machines kept going off,” Chisenga said of when her daughter was brought home from the NICU.
Ayah required supplemental oxygen until she was 2 years old. Now, she loves to sing.
Doctors were unsure if Ayah would ever walk. Now, she loves to dance.
“I couldn’t be more proud,” Chisenga said as she watched her daughter make silly faces.
Ayah is the longest surviving infant of Onyelobi’s tiny baby program. She went home from the hospital in December 2023. These are the most humbling moments of Onyelobi’s career, seeing the smallest patients graduate from her specialized care.
“It’s a tearful, tearful, highly charged, emotional moment,” Onyelobi said. “It’s a good goodbye.”
Erin McGroarty is a health and policy reporter for the Cap Times in Madison. She can be reached atemcgroarty@captimes.com.
Two board members resigned Tuesday and United Way and the Milwaukee Area Labor Council pulled future support from the Social Development Commission, dealing another blow to the anti-poverty agency as it faces a $3.5 million estimated net deficit and considers filing for bankruptcy.
SDC leadership attempted to address the deepening crisis during a Tuesday press conference, revealing the agency currently has just $2,770 in cash left as it tries to chart a path to restart services after a two-year shutdown.
Despite the organization’s current challenges, SDC leadership sketched a path to restart services and highlighted an opportunity to apply for an IRS program at the NAACP Milwaukee Branch, 2745 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, on Tuesday.
SDC leaders plan to work to reestablish the Social Development Foundation, a separate 501(c)(3) fundraising nonprofit, which could accept unrestricted private funding while the organization works to rebuild trust with the community and government funders, according to Jorge Franco, chair of the SDC Board of Commissioners and interim CEO.
“It’s really a complicated situation, but the good news is we are now in a position to begin the process to restore,” Franco said.
Franco was reelected as board chair at a hectic Sept. 23 meeting, with Commissioner Spencer Coggs elected as vice chair and treasurer and Commissioner Peter Fetzer elected as secretary.
Plans to address debt
Before the press conference, SDC shared documents that revisit its founding in 1963 as an intergovernmental commission on poverty and decades serving as an anti-poverty and community action agency that offered social services ranging from career and educational programs to food, housing, senior and youth services.
The documents also mentioned the weakening of internal financial controls that contributed to the agency not being able to pay employees and eventually shutting down in April 2024.
“We had some unfortunate circumstances happen, but that is never enough to stop fighting for the people that we serve,” said Diane Robinson, executive director and chief operating officer for SDC.
SDC tried to reopen in a limited capacity in December 2024, but wasn’t able to restart services. Now, the agency is facing a preliminary 2026 net deficit of just under $3.5 million and has about $2,770 in cash, according to SDC documents.
“I believe SDC must repay every dollar it owes to whoever it owes it to,” Franco said.
The board is considering filing for bankruptcy or taking other actions to address its debt.
“Yes, we’re looking at bankruptcy alternatives, but all of that can run in parallel as we navigate and receive, assuming we have proper management and those things, and we’re working on those things now and bringing that to the table,” said Franco.
Jorge Franco, interim CEO of the Social Development Commission, speaks during an SDC press conference at the NAACP Milwaukee Branch on Oct. 13, 2026. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
Board resignations
Ahead of the press conference on Tuesday, Commissioners Pam Fendt and Richard Diaz submitted resignations to the board.
According to a letter that Amy Lindner, president and CEO of United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County, sent to Franco and others Tuesday, Fendt resigned immediately and the organization will not be nominating any new member due to “serious and ongoing concerns with the management and governance of SDC.”
“Equally importantly, we also have seen no meaningful progress in the past two years to secure funding that would allow SDC to provide services of value to the community,” the letter stated.
Pam Fendt, center, resigned from the Social Development Commission board on Tuesday. (Meredith Melland / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
Fendt, president of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, was initially appointed to serve its seat on the board in 2025. She switched appointments to serve on behalf of the United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County later that year to allow Diaz to join the board as the labor council’s representative.
Diaz sent his resignation to members of the board via email on Tuesday afternoon. Fendt confirmed his resignation in an emailed press statement sent on behalf of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council.
Concerns cited by Diaz included the decision-making ability granted to Franco as both the board chair and CEO, the board not responding to community concerns and a lack of strategic vision or plan.
Diaz said his reason for joining the board was to see SDC restore services.
“I will continue to believe that it is possible to restore SDC services but based on the facts and the tendencies of existing leadership, I find it inextricably unfathomable to consider that to be more than a belief,” he wrote.
In response to a reporter’s question on the resignations, Franco said he continues to serve at the request of SDC commissioners who believe in him and his ability to turn things around for SDC.
He said he is not concerned about appointing agencies not filling seats and predicted that United Way would appoint a representative and fund SDC again some time in the future.
“I’m happy to navigate that and work through that and it ain’t my first rodeo in this kind of situation,” he said.
Restoring tax services
A volunteer for the Social Development Commission’s tax preparation program meets with two individuals. The program helped prepare 11,853 federal and state returns in 2016. (Courtesy of SDC)
SDC leadership met with IRS officials and was invited to reapply for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, or VITA, program, according to Franco. SDC used to run Milwaukee’s largest VITA program, which helps underserved and low-to-moderate-income individuals file income tax returns for free and eligible households to access the Earned Income Tax Credit, Franco said.
Any application would be subject to IRS review, and SDC would not accept funding until an “appropriate structure” to manage the program would be in place, according to a memo circulated before the press conference.
The IRS did not respond to a request for comment on SDC.
Also discussed was the possibility of revisiting a proposal for a revolving credit facility of up to $15 million from Wings Credit Union, which could help SDC address the funding gap when waiting on reimbursement-based grants, according to Franco.
Franco said that this option could work with government grant or private sector funding and that the lender is still interested after board members voted in December not to advance it at the time.
“I think we have a commission now with board members who are on the commission who are prepared to march and to move forward with that,” Franco said.
Board to meet Thursday
The board will meet virtually at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15. Included on the agenda is a presentation from law firm Foley & Lardner about bankruptcy restructuring alternatives, including pathways under Chapters 7, 9 and 11.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership betweenCatchLight LocalandReport for America.
Adam Paul, who owns Vintage Rose Bakery & Sandwich Shop in west De Pere with his wife, says health care is the biggest financial stress he faces.
He struggles with mental health, and his wife has a thyroid condition. For the last three months, Paul said they’ve been negotiating with their insurance provider to try to get an MRI covered for his wife’s condition.
“Fighting with the insurance company, and owning a business at the same time, to get things covered is a nightmare,” Paul said. “It’s a constant fight of, ‘OK what is my health worth?’”
As a business owner, he said he “would love” to offer his employees insurance, but his company is just “way too small” for him to make it work financially.
Paul and other Brown County community members spoke at an affordability roundtable in De Pere last month, moderated by former Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler.
Paul wasn’t the only one at the roundtable who spoke about health care costs being a major source of financial stress.
Inflation and cost of living rank as the top issue among Wisconsin voters, according to a September Marquette Law School Poll. Health insurance was the third highest ranking issue among voters and outranked data centers, abortion, schools or crime.
Candidates running for Wisconsin governor, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Democratic Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, both say they want to lower health care costs and make care more accessible. But they’re offering different views on how to do that.
Wisconsin hospital prices among highest in nation as ACA coverage declines
The biggest increase among essential costs came from hospital services, which increased by 274%, the report found. Median household incomes in Wisconsin increased by an estimated 90% over the same period.
Dan Sacks, a professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, said health care, in general, is expensive — accounting for around 18% of the nation’s gross domestic product.
He said Wisconsin’s hospital prices are among the highest in the nation, as the health care sector has become “dominated by a relatively small number of very important health systems.”
He said those who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace are seeing higher costs after pandemic-era subsidies ended at the start of the year. He said the subsidies helped keep ACA premiums down.
Sacks said tens of thousands fewer Wisconsinites enrolled in ACA coverage this year than last year, and people are generally “paying more out of pocket for their health care.”
Beyond the ACA marketplace, Medicaid work requirements included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are set to begin at the start of 2027, which would affect those enrolled in BadgerCare, Sacks said.
“In Wisconsin, the work requirements will apply only to childless adult BadgerCare members,” Sacks said.
Crowley, Tiffany differ on the role government should play
While both candidates say they want to lower health care costs and expand access to care, Tiffany and Crowley differ on the role government should play in achieving those goals.
Crowley’s health care proposal calls for opening up BadgerCare enrollment to any household that wants it, making premiums based on income and giving targeted subsidies to small businesses, single parents, college students, farmers and gig workers.
The plan also proposes making BadgerCare comprehensive to include medical, dental, vision and mental health care.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, left, and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany. The Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates have opposing plans for tackling rising health care costs. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch and Zoey Elwood / Wisconsin Watch)
“It’s about creating BadgerCare as an alternative to for-profit insurance, giving our veterans, our entrepreneurs, our students, our child care workers, anybody, the ability to pay into a system that’s going to be cheaper and is going to work well for them, so they don’t fall through the cracks,” Crowley told WPR.
Meanwhile, Tiffany’s health care proposal calls for requiring hospitals and insurance companies to provide upfront prices to patients, allowing primary care patients to pay their doctor directly through a subscription model and allowing the Wisconsin Farm Bureau to offer health plans to members.
The plan also calls for increased oversight of pharmacy benefit managers, which he says contribute to higher prescription drug costs.
“We’re going to create a system that makes health care more affordable in Wisconsin and brings greater resources to the table to make sure that we have top-notch health care,” Tiffany said. “We are going to make sure that all health care providers provide maximum transparency.”
Crowley has been critical of Tiffany for his vote in favor of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its Medicaid spending cuts. Tiffany has defended the bill for providing funding for rural health care and said he supported a federal rule that could bring additional Medicaid funding to the state.
WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is aresource list for trauma responsesfrom the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
A 2022 federal report on federal involvement in Indian boarding schools sent shockwaves through Native communities across the country, including Milwaukee where the history was all but lost.
“There was a collective and audible reaction,” said Mark Denning, who is Oneida, Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee. “I had never ever heard of a boarding school … in this community.”
Just three miles northwest of downtown Milwaukee, a Catholic-run reformatory school called Good Shepherd Industrial School had served as a federally funded Indian boarding school.
The House of the Good Shepherd, also known as the Good Shepherd Industrial School, served as an Indian boarding school from 1884 to 1890. The school was located three miles northwest of downtown Milwaukee before the area became the Wauwatosa suburb. (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee archives)
Denning and other Indigenous leaders and allies began work with Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to find out about Good Shepherd. The federal government funded the school from 1884 to 1890 as part of its larger project to assimilate Indigenous children into non-Native culture.
The researchers made a disturbing finding: The school owned a plot in the historic Calvary Cemetery in Milwaukee, the city’s oldest Catholic cemetery. The plot is dedicated to the “Indian girls” of Good Shepherd, but a majority of graves are unmarked or possess non-descriptive markers, making it difficult to give the girls their names back.
Now, an ICT investigation has revealed the graves of 14 students who died while attending Good Shepherd from 1884 to 1891. Those students — all girls — are buried in Calvary Cemetery. The ICT research further reveals that at least 11 of the 14 deceased students came from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and, through cemetery records, Milwaukee County death certificates and boarding school correspondence, ICT has been able to identify the names of the 14 students.
Good Shepherd Industrial School deaths1884-1891
Students buried in Milwaukee’s Calvary Cemetery ‘Indians of Good Shepherd’ plot
Angeline/Angela Lafornoise, “French-Indian,” age 16, died July, 24, 1884.
Alphonsine LeDoux (Alphouse Ledeux), “Indian,” age 14, died March 16, 1885.
Rosalie Gladu, “Half-Breed,” age 9, died May 3, 1885.
Ellen Laventure, “Indian,” age 13, died April 15, 1886.
Marie Jane Morris, “Indian,” age 13, died April 28, 1886.
Rosa Zuis, “White,” age 7, died June 4, 1886.
Mary Clementine Gladu, “White/Indian,” age 20, died Sept. 18, 1886.
Madleine Wilkey, “Indian,” age 16, died Sept. 27, 1886.
Justine Gladu, “Indian,” age 20, died May 3, 1887.
Ernestine (Erstine) Gladu, “Indian,” age 20, died May 3, 1887.
Matilda Smith, “Indian,” age 16, died June 8, 1887.
Virginia Plante, “Indian,” age 14, died July 18, 1888.
Maggie Nolan, “White,” age 14, died Aug. 1, 1888.
Mary A. Spearry (Sperry), “race unknown,” age 20, died July 1891.
Letters written between school officials and the Bureau of Indian Affairs mention the deaths of only nine girls, three of whom were unnamed; however, cemetery records show 14 burials from Good Shepherd during this time period. The exact burial locations of several girls are unknown but are noted as being in the cemetery.
“Maybe one day someone will come here, (and) there will be a historic marker,” Denning said.
The Interior Department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report released in 2022 painted a picture of a troubled era in U.S. history. The report detailed a federal Indian boarding school system that initially consisted of 408 schools across 37 states or then territories. The report determined that the “schools accounted for over 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian child deaths” and that “the Department expects the number of recorded deaths to increase.”
A plot dedicated to the “Indian Girls” of Good Shepherd in Milwaukee’s Calvary Cemetery contains the graves of girls who died while attending the boarding school. (Amelia Schafer / ICT)
“Calling them schools is not accurate, they’re like concentration camps,” said Averie Anderson, Oneida and Menominee and a participant in the Milwaukee effort to uncover the city’s boarding school history.
Students at Good Shepherd were made to work an average of 4.5 hours per day, according to a 1917 investigation into the school. Girls were subjected to an “industrial education,” which included working for the greater community doing such tasks as laundering families’ clothing and bedding.
Handling contaminated linens could have exposed the girls to diseases like influenza, diphtheria or smallpox, Denning said.
“Is there anyone interested in making these things right?” Denning asked. “Because in making these things right we can help make our own life right and we become aware of what’s happening to us.”
Good Shepherd was funded by the federal government for six years but remained open as a “reform” school for local youth until roughly 1968. Often, those admitted were girls whose parents could not care for them. The school was also a correctional center. Girls who had committed a crime would be admitted to the school, usually released at age 21.
Occasionally, European immigrant children also were sent to the school to learn to speak English. After the federal government ended its contract with the school in 1890, the school continued to operate as a correctional center. In addition to its payment from the federal government, Milwaukee County funded the school — specifically for its adjudication and orphanage programs.
“The House of the Good Shepherd isn’t just the story of Native people,” Denning said. “There were Polish immigrants, there were Ukrainian, Russian, Greek kids being sent to this school. … They’re buried here too.”
The Calvary Cemetery off of Bluemound Road in Milwaukee is the city’s oldest Catholic cemetery. It’s also where students of the Good Shepherd Industrial School were buried. (Amelia Schafer / ICT)
The first death
All Indigenous students in attendance from 1884 to 1890 came from the Turtle Mountain Reservation roughly 900 miles northwest of Milwaukee, situated on the border of North Dakota and Canada. The girls, many of whom are referred to as “half-breeds” in school documents, were Anishinaabe and Métis.
Despite initial correspondence letters claiming students were in good health upon arrival, the first death occurred on July 23, 1884, shortly after girls arrived at the school. Correspondence records from nuns to the Bureau of Indian Affairs describe the girl’s sister was ill as well and expected to die not long after. After the initial death, students continued to die of diseases like consumption, brain fever and “lung paralysis.”
“They arrived in Milwaukee in January (1884), I think the high of 14 degrees Fahrenheit,” said historian Benjamin Newman. “They arrived, I think, at 3:40 in the morning. No one had made arrangements for them to come. They weren’t expected for whatever reason, according to the newspaper reports.”
The youngest identified student death during this period is of a 7-year-old. Students, on average, ranged from ages 12 to 20. Letters sent between nuns, other school officials and the Bureau of Indian Affairs document at least one instance of an infant being removed from a single mother on the Turtle Mountain reservation and brought to Good Shepherd in Milwaukee to be placed in an orphanage.
One nun attributed student deaths to the transition to “civilized life,” remarking in a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs: “Perhaps the change from the free life of the forest to civilization was too much for them. Sleeping in beds, sitting on chairs, wearing clothes, eating like white people — schoolbooks and study soon told on their health.”
Another nun noted in a letter that the school struggled to account for the rapid spread of disease among students: “A physician is almost in constant attendance and exerts all his skill to save them but their symptoms are peculiar and the complex prostration occurs almost instantly,” she wrote.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs first granted the school a contract in 1884 to educate 80 Indian girls. Along with fruitless efforts to recruit from the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, the church asked Father John F. Malo, a Catholic priest in Turtle Mountain, to send girls from North Dakota. The first group of 27 girls arrived in the early months of 1884.
According to correspondence records from the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, from 1884 to 1889 the school’s student body was exclusively composed of girls from the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Following the end of the contract, girls were relocated to boarding schools in Minnesota.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs initially promised Good Shepherd payments of $41.75 per student per semester, an equivalent of roughly $1,375.41 today, but later increased the amount per student to $167 per student per semester in 1885 — approximately $5,767.18 in today’s money.
The offer of high amounts of money in exchange for housing and educating Indian students may have been what drew Good Shepherd to working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the first place, Newman said.
“(Prior to the contract), there was one year where their expenses basically were a complete wash against their income and so they needed money,” Newman said. “And so they thought, ‘OK, let’s see if we can get some Native girls and get the U.S. government to give us some more money for having them here.’”
Following the killing of Métis rights activist Louis Riel in 1885, an influx of Métis people fled Canada to the United States. Many arrived at Turtle Mountain. Not long after, more girls poured into the Good Shepherd school.
Attempts to recruit students from Wisconsin tribes
Toward the end of the 1880s, school leaders repeatedly tried to recruit students from northern Wisconsin tribes to no avail and reportedly spent a significant amount of money on empty recruitment trips, Newman said. The school attempted twice to be reimbursed by the United States Congress, but the bills stalled out.
“That was a continuing thread throughout: the school putting effort in trying to get that money recovered,” Newman said.
Throughout its six years as an Indian boarding school, dozens of parents wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs asking their girls be sent home. In one instance, ICT identified a parent repeatedly requesting the return of his daughter. The girl is buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery, according to cemetery records. It’s unclear if the family was informed.
ICT was unable to reach Turtle Mountain leaders for comment.
“There’s lots of unknowns,” Newman said. “There’s so much more, even about this six-year time period” that needs to be explained.
Newman said in his research he’s been unable to find an answer as to why the government severed its contract with the school in 1890.
According to newspaper reports from the Milwaukee Journal, girls regularly ran away from the school but were often caught and recommitted. These reports don’t specifically note any instances of Indigenous children running away.
One report from Aug. 22, 1884, advertises a picnic to be held by the school: “One of the attractions will be the presence of the fifty Indian girls, lately placed by the government at the school.”
“This is a history of Milwaukee, not just a history of Natives in Milwaukee or Turtle Mountain,” Newman said. “(This school) was in existence for 80 years. This is a story of Milwaukee, and Native stories are also stories of Milwaukee.”
ICT is an independent, nonprofit multimedia news organization covering Indigenous issues and communities. ICT is supported by foundations, donor contributions and corporate sponsorships.
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A federal judge ruled Sept. 21 that the Trump administration did not give the required notice and public comment period when it released a controversial new rule in 2025.
The rule would have required state officials to check the immigration status of anyone who uses federally funded adult education classes, Head Start programs, community health centers, and more.
The rule excluded undocumented immigrants and several categories of immigrants with legal status from accessing federally funded services.
Wisconsin was among the states that sued to block the rule, arguing the measure would require them to “dramatically restructure their social safety nets and render them inaccessible to countless of the States’ most vulnerable residents.”
An official who runs a group of Wisconsin community health centers told Wisconsin Watch he will continue to watch this case.
A federal judge has thrown out a controversial rule that would have required states to check the immigration status of anyone seeking to use federally funded adult education, Head Start, community health centers and other programs.
The government did not give the required notice and public comment period when it released the rule last year, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy wrote in a Sept. 21 ruling.
The ruling means millions of Wisconsinites — immigrant and native-born — won’t have to jump through hoops to prove their legal status before attending classes, seeing a doctor or receiving assistance at a food pantry.
Federal agencies overhauled the rule in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump that dramatically reinterpreted a 1996 welfare law that had long barred many categories of immigrants from cash assistance and Medicaid. For three decades, the federal government has deemed that that law — the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — does not apply to social safety net programs open to everyone, including a variety of educational, health and community services.
Calling that exemption too broad, the Trump administration declared that nearly all federally funded programs would be available only to U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, refugees and people granted asylum or certain other humanitarian statuses.
The new rule excluded undocumented immigrants and several categories of immigrants with legal status. Those ineligible included people with Temporary Protected Status, student or work visas and U visas for survivors of serious crimes, as well as people with pending asylum or U visa applications.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 20 other state attorneys general quickly sued to block the new rule. The states argued that checking the immigration status of every participant in federally funded services would create unreasonable burdens for program staff and would discourage eligible people from seeking services.
“For the first time, millions of people are facing a new demand before they can access the Nation’s most essential programs: ‘show me your papers,’” the states wrote in a July 2025 complaint.
The states argued that they would “suffer continued, irreparable harm if forced to dramatically restructure their social safety nets and render them inaccessible to countless of the States’ most vulnerable residents.” They accused the administration of violating a law that requires the federal government to give notice and seek public comment before releasing a new rule.
The lawsuit put the rule on hold in those 21 states, first because of a voluntary agreement and later because of a temporary injunction.
Now the judge has issued a final decision finding the rule violated the notice-and-comment requirement. Her ruling this week blocks the federal government from implementing or enforcing the new rule, but it doesn’t prohibit it from trying again. Federal agencies could issue a new rule if they comply with the notice and comment requirements, McElroy wrote.
Sabin Sidney, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education, called the ruling “an unfortunate betrayal of hardworking, American taxpayers.”
“This lawsuit demonstrates again that Democrats will adamantly defend federal taxpayer dollars supporting illegal aliens,” Sidney said, though the rule would also have excluded various groups of authorized immigrants.
Asked whether the agency planned to appeal or issue a new rule, Sidney referred Wisconsin Watch to the U.S. Department of Justice, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The rule, if it takes effect, could bar immigrants from receiving health care at the nation’s more than 17,000 community health center clinics, despite the fact that federal law requires those clinics to accept all local residents. One in seven people across the country use those clinics, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. In rural areas, it’s one in three.
Uncertainty surrounding the rule has already interfered with medical care, said Dr. Ken Loving, CEO of Access Community Health Centers, which provides medical, dental and mental health care at five southwest Wisconsin clinics. Many patients may not know the specifics of the case, Loving said, but they know politicians are trying to restrict access to care.
“I think what does (register) is the drumbeat of questions about whether they’re going to be able to access care in the longer term. … It undermines trust in the system at large,” Loving said.
Layton Clinic is shown on May 9, 2018, in Milwaukee. Wisconsin has 16 federally qualified community health centers serving patients at 217 sites. Rules the Trump administration sought to implement would have barred certain immigrants from such services, but a federal judge recently threw the rules out. (Andrea Waxman / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
“We try to focus on the health care we’re delivering to people, and we wind up having to spend a lot of time and effort just reassuring people that we’re there for them.”
In Wisconsin and the other states that sued, the rule has been on hold for more than a year while the lawsuit played out. But many other states have already adopted the restrictions, said Jacob Hofstetter, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute who is tracking the lawsuit and its implications for adult education students and teachers.
Many immigrants take classes to improve their English, build job skills or earn a high school equivalency. In some cases, these classes receive federal funding, which would have made them subject to the restrictions. A staff member at one adult education program — in a state that implemented the new rule — told Hofstetter the program had kicked out a third of its students to comply.
The rule also created a “huge implementation burden” for adult education providers, who would now have to check — and understand — the specific immigration status of every student, Hofstetter said.
“This isn’t just, ‘Do you have legal status or do you not have legal status?’” Hofstetter said, noting that programs, many of which are already stretching their resources to serve students, would need to develop expertise in immigration law.
Under the rule, all students must provide proof that they qualify — not just immigrants. Hofstetter said he talked with some providers who’d been forced to turn away U.S.-born students who lacked the paperwork to prove their citizenship or just didn’t want to jump through another hurdle.
“(Staff) knew they were eligible to participate, but because they didn’t have that documentation, or they were unable to participate in that extra administrative step, they had to exclude those students as well,” Hofstetter said.
The new rule, if implemented, would make it harder for immigrants to learn English and obtain the skills employers need, Hofstetter and colleague Margie McHugh wrote in a January article, calling those “widely supported goals that the administration itself has publicly endorsed.”
Worries remain
For now, Loving said, he and his colleagues at community health centers nationwide will keep watching this and other ongoing court cases that could discourage patients from seeking health care when they need it.
So too will staff at Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges, which would have to check the immigration status of all adult education students and some career training students if the administration reintroduces the restrictions.
“As the legal process is likely still ongoing and the decision may be appealed, it may be premature for us to speculate on any potential future actions or changes,” said Katy Pettersen, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Technical College System.
Hofstetter agrees. While the ruling offers some “relief,” he said, the Trump administration has consistently sought to create a hostile environment for immigrants as part of its wider push to limit new immigration and deport millions already here.
“I don’t expect this to be a settled issue at all, especially since this has been such a priority for the administration,” Hofstetter said.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership withOpen Campus. Email her atnyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Wisconsin home health agencies and nursing homes have abandoned plans to hire overseas workers after federal authorities suspended nearly all refugee programs and terminated Temporary Protected Status for people from 13 countries.
Immigrants make up 30% of direct care workers nationwide, including nursing assistants, personal care aides and home health aides, according to KFF.
In-home and assisted living agencies, including one in the Fox Cities, had to stop plans years in the making to hire international workers. Some also lost staff who had Temporary Protected Status.
Organizations that don’t have enough caregivers have to turn people away, which means more people aren’t able to live in their homes or find care in their communities, industry leaders say.
A bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers passed legislation in April to make it easier for immigrants, specifically DACA recipients, to work in long-term care or health care.
Americans are getting older. In 2025, nearly 19% of the U.S. population was over 65, and the majority of them will need long-term care.
Some home health agencies and nursing homes in Wisconsin have had to give up on plans started years ago to hire overseas workers after President Donald Trump’s administration suspended nearly all refugee programs. The administration also terminated Temporary Protected Status for people from 13 countries, which industry leaders say is weakening an already struggling workforce that helps care for the nation’s older adults and disabled population.
“We have basically cut off or severely limited every pipeline that we have for bringing in, for welcoming foreign-born workers, many of whom end up working in our sector in aging services. … We don’t have a sort of ready supply of U.S.-born individuals who are clamoring to work in aging services, and that’s not a new issue,” said LeadingAge CEO Katie Smith Sloan.
The workforce issue affects member agencies of LeadingAge, a national network of nonprofit nursing homes, home health and other organizations that serve older adults. Sloan said when long-term care facilities have to turn people away, that puts extra burdens on hospitals and family members to fill care gaps.
“We’re seeing home health agencies just not able to take new clients. We’ve seen nursing homes that have closed beds and closed wings,” Sloan said.
According to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, 30% of all direct care workers nationwide are immigrants. These workers include nursing assistants, personal care aides and home health aides who provide people with disabilities and older adults assistance with daily living or medical care.
Long-term care is important for people like Myranda Gereau, who lives in Sheboygan. She is quadriplegic, has a tracheostomy and needs 24/7 care. At 30 years old, she’s struggled for years to find nurses to provide in-home care, constantly worrying about her nurses’ schedule and whether she will be able to continue living independently.
“This is literally my life we’re talking about,” Gereau said. “This isn’t ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t come in. I have to take off.’ That’s not how health care works. There are people’s lives that are needing care, and then when you take that caregiver out of the equation, those people suffer.”
Robin Wolzenburg is the current director of operations at Koru Health, which operates multiple senior living communities across Wisconsin. In her previous role at LeadingAge Wisconsin, she worked with resettlement agencies to place refugees in nursing home positions.
Wolzenburg’s efforts stopped in January 2025 when the Trump administration suspended refugee programs. Officials implemented the policy change because the U.S. was not able to support new refugees without “compromis(ing) the availability of resources for Americans,” according to a White House statement.
“We saw just a marked halt in refugees coming in. It didn’t seem like it was a trickle – it just seemed like it stopped,” Wolzenburg said.
Staffing issues for long-term care are so severe that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to make it easier for immigrants to get long-term care jobs. State Sen. Jesse James, R-Thorp; Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay; and Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, D-Milwaukee, co-authored legislation that passed in April allowing DACA recipients to obtain professional licenses in nursing and other fields.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects home health aide jobs to grow by 847,000 over the next 10 years — the most of any job sector in the country. However, the median salary for home health and personal care aides was $35,800 in 2025, making it hard to attract workers.
“We don’t have domestic workers. I mean, we just don’t,” Wolzenburg said. “The market is so tight, and the competition is so tight, and caregiving is a tough job, it really is. You’re caring for the most vulnerable people in our population.”
For organizations that provide long-term care, not having enough workers means more people aren’t able to continue living at home or have to find care in a community even farther away. Wolzenburg said many assisted living facilities have had to limit admissions.
“You have a resident or an elderly person who is looking to come and reside in their own community, where they’ve maybe been in for the last 50, 60 years of their life, maybe longer,” Wolzenburg said. “That assisted living or nursing home in that community may or may not be able to meet their needs because they don’t have enough staff.”
Recruiting overseas workers is simply a smart business strategy, Wolzenburg said, and a necessary one.
“Obviously we want to support newcomers no matter what, but we also don’t have the domestic staff and the luxury of not engaging this population,” Wolzenburg said.
Multi-year hiring strategies overturned
Kate Battiato, vice president of media and community impact for LeadingAge Wisconsin, helps serve nonprofit long-term care providers across the state. Some members invested significantly in recruiting international staff, she said. One CEO of a nursing home in Sparta invested over $100,000 into building five apartments for new overseas workers. When immigration policy changed and visas became difficult to procure, he had to pivot. Instead, he used the housing for current workers.
“International recruitment is a multi-year strategy, and it doesn’t happen overnight,” Battiato said. “One election can change the strategy that has been built over years. … It makes their already difficult challenges recruiting and retaining workers more difficult.”
Still, leaders are able to use innovative strategies to retain current workers and attract more domestic employees. Battiato said her members are used to thinking on their feet and quickly developing new strategies to address staffing gaps.
“They’ve actually seen a lot of success in recruiting and retaining workers from their local community using that same workforce strategy of worker housing that was originally developed for international workers,” Battiato said.
Valley VNA Senior Care in Neenah, a nonprofit that provides both in-home and assisted living services, has not only lost out on international workers it planned to hire, but also staff who were under Temporary Protected Status. HR Coordinator Cheryl Ehlers said losing those employees fed into the turnover the organization was already experiencing.
“We did have some staff that unfortunately had to go back,” Ehlers said. “We lost them as staff members because they lost their protected status, and they are always welcome to come back to us if they’re able to return to the United States.”
Temporary Protected Status applies to immigrants from specifically designated countries that have been deemed unsafe due to a crisis, such as war or natural disaster. TPS allows them to live and work in the U.S. temporarily.
The Trump administration has terminated 14 TPS programs, affecting people from 13 countries. Nearly 350,000 Haitian immigrants lost TPS on Aug. 4. An estimated 53,000 TPS holders worked in health care in 2024, according to data from KFF.
In a press release, the Trump administration reaffirmed that the Temporary Protected Status program was always meant to be temporary and that Haitians could pursue legal status through other means. The Supreme Court backed the terminations of TPS for Haitians and Syrians in a June ruling.
Ehlers, who has worked at Valley VNA for over two decades, said the organization had also been trying to hire 15-20 workers from overseas for at least the last five years, but ultimately stopped hearing from the partner agency it was working with.
Haitian caregivers in Wisconsin lose immigration status
Marc Christopher, an immigration attorney who represents some of the hundreds of Haitian immigrants in central Wisconsin, said many of them work in home health care and nursing. Haitians in Wisconsin are losing their work permits and immigration status and are facing deportation.
“It’s a lose-lose-lose for our community,” Christopher said. “Number one, the employers that are employing people to provide the care, they’re losing valuable labor, people who are helping. For the people that they’re taking care of … they’re getting good quality care. And then obviously, it’s a lose for my clients, who are in a desperate situation because they’re now being told that they have to go back.”
The country is still considered unsafe due to gang violence and humanitarian crises. The U.S. Department of State issued a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory in July. According to a 2025 press release, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem determined conditions had improved enough for Haitians to return.
Christopher is in the process of helping clients apply for asylum, which takes years. He stressed that most Haitians came to the U.S. legally under Temporary Protected Status. For the time being, many Haitians are weighing their options.
“So now they have to make that decision,” Christopher said. “Do they file for asylum, or do they simply go back, or do they live in this perilous state where they don’t have any status? … And that’s what affects our community. … Their kids go to school with my kids. They are working in our community.”
Zabi Sahibzada is the refugee resettlement director for Jewish Social Services of Madison. With no one new coming in, he’s trying to focus on supporting the refugees and immigrants who are already here. Three full-time and one part-time caseworker manage more than 500 individuals in addition to those who knock on their doors every day.
Out of his clients who are in the workforce, Sahibzada estimates 30% lost their jobs in the medical sector. They now need help with food, rental assistance, medical services and legal services, and JSS has limited funding.
“Some of our clients who used to work in those health care providers and the places like health care facilities, and some even providing transportation to the health care facilities, they have been losing their jobs,” Sahibzada said. “They have lost their driving licenses. They have lost their eligibility status.”
When a direct care worker loses their job, it can also mean a deeply personal relationship is “shattered,” Sloan of LeadingAge said.
“You’ve been there for four years and have had the same caregiver who knows everything about you, knows your birthday, knows what you like to eat for breakfast, knows what time you like to go to bed, knows what movies you watch … suddenly, that person is ripped away from you, which is what has happened recently with TPS,” Sloan said. “You’ve really lost an important part of your life.”
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James Gray, Estelle Moncada and their three children have been homeless for the past five years.
Federal data shows that 561 Wisconsin families with children were homeless in 2025, but because of the way homelessness is counted, the figure could be much higher.
They sleep in their vehicle at Safe Place Parking hosted by Wise Women Gathering Place in Green Bay.
Annette Rivera also uses Safe Place Parking and told Wisconsin Watch what it was like to park elsewhere when the safe parking lot was closed.
Despite the challenges they’ve faced, Gray, Moncada and Rivera maintain hope that their situations will turn around, and they’ll find stable housing.
Like any other family, James Gray and Estelle Moncada love to play with their kids at the park. Their twin girls, Maewahniw and Mataeqsak, are 5 years old and chase each other around, falling down in the grass laughing with their 3-year-old brother, Mahwaew.
But the park isn’t just a place they visit — it’s also their home.
The family spends most days hopping between parks, sleeping on a mattress in their van at night. Their five years of homelessness have taken them to hotels, shelters and parking lots around rural northeast Wisconsin, northern Michigan and finally Green Bay, where they hope to stay while their kids go to Starr Elementary School.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 2025 over 5,200 people in Wisconsin experienced homelessness, which has risen 16% over the past five years. Of those, nearly 1,900 were people in families with children – accounting for 561 families.
Because of the way homelessness is counted, that number could actually be much higher. Volunteers have to search for unsheltered people on a single night in January and confirm each person is homeless to add them to the point in time count. The process means it’s often hard to see the “hidden homeless” population living in their vehicles.
The count indirectly ties to the amount of federal funding each region receives for homeless support services — which means there simply aren’t enough resources for homelessness service organizations to provide for the entire homeless population. People like Gray and Moncada have spent years on the waitlist for housing programs meant to help homeless families.
Adding to funding uncertainty, the Trump administration announced major changes to federal homelessness grants and an overhaul of the Head Start early childhood education program for low-income families, where Gray and Moncada sent their twin daughters and enrolled their son this year.
Trying to find housing, work while raising children
The family became homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic, around the time when their twins were born. When the anti-poverty nonprofit Newcap opened a shelter in Shawano, they were one of the first families accepted and stayed there for almost two years. Gray and Moncada said a Newcap employee made false promises about securing them a rental apartment that never came through.
Navigating a system with limited resources while taking care of young children can force families to make hard decisions. They eventually ended up at Abundant Life Mission, a shelter in Menominee, Michigan, near the Wisconsin border, but Gray said he left because he didn’t want the kids to interact with people staying there who struggled with addiction.
That meant going back to living in their car and waiting to be pulled from the waitlist for housing programs. A system called Coordinated Entry prioritizes and matches people with housing resources based on their level of need.
“You feel hopeless, you know what I mean?” Gray said.
Estelle Moncada, left, and James Gray, right, pose for a photo with their children Maewahniw, Mataeqsak and Mahwaew in Green Bay, Wis., on Sept. 6, 2026. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Newcap called once a month to ask where the family slept the previous night, part of the process of Coordinated Entry, which the organization led for 10 northeast Wisconsin counties before officials filed for bankruptcy this year. Newcap staff did not contact Gray to tell him the nonprofit closed, even though all of his mail had been going to the Newcap office in Green Bay.
Every weekday for a year, Gray and Moncada drove their daughters to and from the Oneida Nation’s Three Sisters location for Head Start, no matter where they had slept the previous night.
“I think it’s hard for people to understand that I’m over here taking care of three kids, you know what I mean?” he said. “If I had known I’d be taking care of three kids at this age, I would have done some things a little different in my past, too.”
Both Moncada and Gray have to balance the struggles of raising three children without stable housing and securing the employment needed to financially support them. Through the Oneida Nation and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Gray earned a traffic control certificate and began working for ANASA Traffic Control Services. But the job required him to drive long distances without reimbursement, knowing his kids needed the car to sleep at night.
“They would never assign me a job in Green Bay,” Gray said. “It was always Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Milwaukee or in Sturgeon Bay, and I’d say, ‘I can’t go to these places, I don’t have gas.’”
So Gray would get marked down for calling in to work, and the next day, he’d be asked to work again in a different city. He was eventually fired in April.
“It’s like, nothing has changed since yesterday. I still have no gas … But I didn’t tell them my situation, that my family needed my car, because I was embarrassed to tell them,” he said.
James Gray, right, stands alongside his kids while talking to homeless outreach case coordinators for the city of Green Bay. The family spent nearly two years living in Newcap’s Shawano shelter. They say a Newcap employee made false promises about securing them a rental apartment that never came through. Newcap filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Searching for a new job was hard since he couldn’t find people to look after the kids so he could go to a job interview. Moncada was working at Burger King at the time.
“I’m worried about them during the day: where they’re going, if they have gas, if they have food. It’s such a struggle, and it’s a lot of stress on him,” Moncada said.
After a few months of searching, Gray recently got a job as a forklift operator in Appleton. The family is trying to work out how they’ll balance Gray commuting to Appleton for third shift while still sending the kids to Starr Elementary School and Green Bay’s Head Start program.
“It’s so hard to have that stability with employment when you don’t have a stable place to live,” Moncada said. “You don’t have gas to go to work the next day because you’re out riding around because you got nowhere to go.”
Safe Place Parking offers ‘peace of mind’
Programs like Safe Place Parking, hosted by Wise Women Gathering Place, provide a potential solution — a reliable place for people living in their cars to park at night without fear of being woken up and asked to leave. Gray and Moncada park there almost every night.
Beverly Scow is the executive director of Wise Women Gathering Place, a nonprofit that provides Native American culturally specific services related to domestic violence and historical trauma. Even though they only account for 1.1% of the U.S. population, Native Americans make up 3.8% of the unsheltered homeless population.
“Part of our resilience is as Native Americans, there was a lot of harm done to our communities, our people, and we survived,” Scow said. “And some of the survival patterns were unhealthy, and some of them were beautiful, right? The culture helped us keep strong and healthy, and so we’ve got a mix of those that have echoed forward.”
Annette Rivera poses for a portrait next to her car. Rivera parked at the YMCA at night before she found Safe Place Parking. Police came to her car twice in the middle of the night at the YMCA. “Once you’re in that situation, you don’t sleep 100%,” she said. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
The organization originally created Safe Place Parking in response to unhoused people not being able to stay with friends or family during COVID-era social distancing.
“We knew about the hidden homeless who were couch surfing, and most landlord guest policies are up to two weeks,” Scow said. “People would stay under the radar and couch surf between friends and family (for) about two weeks, which totally collided with our understanding of COVID transmission at the time.”
Scow soon realized there was a legitimate need for Safe Place Parking to continue for the many people who live out of their cars. The organization now provides portable toilets, electrical outlets, Wi-Fi, heated blankets in the winter and fans in the summer for up to 46 cars each night.
“There’s a lot of people who are living in their cars and deal with the anxiety of being shooed off a residential street or shooed off a business parking lot, and at Safe Parking, they could have peace of mind to know I belong here, this is my place where I can get a restful night’s sleep,” Scow said.
Last year, Scow said she found out Wise Women’s insurance wouldn’t cover the Safe Place Parking program. The organization had to close the parking lot for four months while searching for an insurance company that would cover the scope of the parking lot for the homeless.
Eventually, Scow found one, but it was five times the price of what Wise Women had been paying. To make things worse, the organization lost two major grants while the parking lot was closed. So the community raised $60,000 in individual donations so the parking lot could reopen in December 2025.
“We saw how important it was to the parkers,” Scow said. “They were so appreciative … and it was such a gap. There’s no one else doing it, so it was important to us to keep it going.”
Glow in the dark stars and moons adorn the roof of Annette Rivera’s car. Rivera sleeps in her car and parks at Wise Women Gathering Place’s Safe Place Parking. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Annette Rivera can attest to that. She lost her housing in 2024 while Safe Place Parking was temporarily closed. She worked out an arrangement to park at the YMCA at night, but said police came to her car twice in the middle of the night.
“Once you’re in that situation, you don’t sleep 100%,” she said. “You’ve got to sleep with one eye open and one closed, if anything.”
She stopped taking her nighttime medicine so she would be alert. Rivera still wakes up every hour or two at night to adjust her sleeping position in the cramped car.
“It’s uncomfortable,” she said. “You’re not sleeping stretched out. I sleep (in) like a fetus position or an L. Especially at a certain age, it hurts.”
She’s been using Safe Parking for two years now. At 57 years old, she doesn’t meet the age requirement for most subsidized housing for older adults.
Holding out hope
Still, Rivera is grateful for Safe Place Parking and sees her situation as temporary.
“God is good,” she said. “It could be worse.”
Rivera can also relate to Moncada and Gray’s challenges in raising young children while grappling with the daily realities of sleeping in a car. She spends her days watching her three grandchildren while her daughter works as a dental assistant. At Safe Place Parking, Rivera feels for the parents she sees and once spoke to Moncada.
Annette Rivera sits on the couch at her daughter’s apartment in Green Bay, Wis., on Sept. 3, 2026. Rivera watches her grandchildren while her daughter is at work. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
“I was wondering, hoping, praying,” Rivera said. “I told her, I said, ‘I really hope you find a place for the kids.’”
Moncada said she tries to give the kids the best life she can. They play with kites, go swimming, play baseball and forage for mushrooms. Along the way, she tries to teach them about the natural world.
“They’re really, really into bugs,” she said. “So, if we go somewhere, they’re over there lifting up rocks and stuff, trying to find whatever millipedes, centipedes, everything … they’re so fascinated by everything, and curious to learn about so many things.”
Moncada, a member of the Oneida Nation, dreams of one day owning land on the reservation and building a house. She thought about advocating for herself through the General Tribal Council, but she worries about speaking in front of thousands of others who might need help more than her.
Estelle Moncada said she dreams about the day when the family will have a house of their own. “I can almost feel the happiness in me when I think about it. That’s a good thing, and I don’t want anything to ever take that away,” she said. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
“That’s all I want, it’s all I dream about,” Moncada said. “I imagine what it would be like if we did have our house finally, and how that life would be, if our relationship would be better, or how happy our kids would be, what they would be doing, where they would put things, you know?”
She feels hopeful that one day, it’ll happen. In the meantime, she wants to be there for her kids while she and Gray work toward getting their own place and not having to rely on anyone.
“I can imagine us getting there. I have a whole vision of it, and I can almost feel the happiness in me when I think about it,” she said. “That’s a good thing, and I don’t want anything to ever take that away.”
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This story is part of the Cap Times seriesDeadly Divide, investigating Wisconsin’s ongoing Black infant mortality crisis. The reporting is supported through a National Fellowship from the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
Click here to read highlights from the story
Wisconsin’s Black infant mortality rate remains more than twice the rate for white infants. Nearly 850 Black babies died before their first birthdays from 2015 through 2024.
Five women in the Wisconsin Legislative Black Caucus call the crisis deeply personal, citing their own experiences with premature births, frightening pregnancies and unequal treatment in health care.
Black Caucus lawmakers last session introduced a seven-bill Birth Equity Act addressing doula care, maternal mental health, dental care, postpartum support and other needs — but none of the bills received a committee hearing before the Republican-controlled Legislature adjourned.
Republicans who control the Legislature have declined to advance similar legislation for years.
Black Caucus lawmakers say reducing Black infant deaths requires policy changes and greater trust in the medical system, including culturally competent care.
For decades, Wisconsin’s Black infant mortality crisis has been measured in painful numbers: babies who die before their first birthdays, families left grieving and an enormous racial disparity that never relents.
Wisconsin regularly ranks among the worst in the nation when it comes to the rate at which Black babies die before reaching age 1. In 2024, the most recent year for which the Wisconsin Department of Health Services has publicized data, the state had an infant mortality rate of 12.5 deaths for every 1,000 live births among Black babies. For white babies, that rate was 4.8.
Between 2015 and 2024, nearly 850 Black babies died in Wisconsin before turning 1, according to state data. Over the first half of that decade, nearly 25% of the deaths of Black infants were caused by being born into this world too early and too small to survive.
But for the five women in the Wisconsin Legislative Black Caucus who have pushed awareness of the issue year after year, the crisis is not abstract or statistical. It is personal.
Rep. Margaret Arney, from left, Rep. Sequanna Taylor, Sen. Dora Drake and Rep. Shelia Stubbs are among members of the Wisconsin Legislature’s Black Caucus. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Wisconsin’s notorious peril for Black pregnancies is a fear and a pain they have known in their own bodies, and one they have returned to the Capitol session after session determined to change.
One legislator delivered her daughter nearly eight weeks early. Another, state Rep. Margaret Arney of Wauwatosa, was born prematurely alongside her twin. State Rep. Sequanna Taylor of Milwaukee was told she was unlikely to carry her pregnancy to term, but not why. And this year, one of the lawmakers carried that same fear throughout her first pregnancy.
“Being a senator that knows all the data I think has made it more nerve-wracking,” said Sen. Dora Drake, D-Milwaukee, while holding her pregnant belly during a listening session with the Cap Times in July. Drake delivered her baby without complications in early September.
Wisconsin continues to face one of the nation’s highest rates of Black infant mortality in the nation, a crisis these five women say cannot be separated from the lived experiences of the families and babies behind the numbers.
But session after session, they say they have run into resistance from Republican leaders who have declined to give any one of their proposals even a committee hearing.
“We encountered nothing but struggles in this building,” said Sen. LaTonya Johnson, D-Milwaukee.
Sen. LaTonya Johnson, D-Milwaukee, said she made the decision to have only one child because her first pregnancy was so traumatizing. Johnson delivered her daughter about 8 weeks early. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Last spring, Rep. Shelia Stubbs, D-Madison, worked with members of the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness in Madison to develop the latest version of the Birth Equity Act — a package of seven bills aimed at improving birth outcomes and connecting expecting and new mothers with resources that increase their chances of carrying healthy pregnancies to term and managing the postpartum period with greater support.
The proposals were based on what the foundation has heard from community members about what would help Black mothers, babies and families the most.
“These bills came directly from Black women,” Stubbs said.
Assembly Bill 1082 would have created a sales tax exemption for breastfeeding equipment.
Assembly Bill 1083 would have barred the state from seeking recovery or reimbursement of birth expenses from a new mom covered by the state’s Medicaid program.
Assembly Bill 1084 would have ensured the Medicaid program covers services by a dentist or dental therapist and stipulated that pregnant patients should be able to receive timely dental care during pregnancy.
Assembly Bill 1085 would have required Medicaid plans to cover care provided by a doula before, during and after delivery.
Assembly Bill 1086 would have required Medicaid to cover maternal mental health screenings and required the state’s health department to develop — in consultation with advocates and providers within the Black community — a set of standards to ensure cultural competency in maternal mental health screening practices.
Assembly Bill 1087 would have allowed for a pregnant person to enroll in a health insurance plan outside of a standard enrollment period after becoming pregnant to ensure prenatal care is covered by a health plan.
Assembly Bill 1088 would have required hospitals to provide a postpartum home visit to a new mom and baby, if requested, within the first few weeks after giving birth. The bill also would have required health insurance plans to cover these visits. The visits could be conducted by a doula, midwife, nurse-midwife or other licensed health care provider who is certified to provide postpartum care.
But none of the bills introduced last February received a public hearing before the Republican-controlled Legislature adjourned its session early, Stubbs said.
That included bills assigned to the committees she said were best suited to consider them, like the Assembly Committee of Health, Aging and Long-Term Care where she holds a seat.
The proposals were aimed at shrinking disparities and improving maternal and infant health in Wisconsin through a variety of approaches ranging from insurance-covered doula care to ensuring pregnant women get adequate dental care.
“Of all of the bills we introduced, absolutely none of them received a hearing, which is very shameful (and) unacceptable in the state of Wisconsin,” Stubbs said. “So even serving on a committee that’s most appropriate to have these bills, we still couldn’t get these bill hearings.”
Republican Rep. Clint Moses, who chairs the Assembly health committee and holds gatekeeping power over which bills receive hearings, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Committee chairs often decide which bills receive hearings in line with party leadership priorities.
For Drake, the lack of movement comes down to a simple conclusion.
“It’s not a priority for them, honestly, and that’s really the bottom line,” she said.
A crisis measured in lives
Wisconsin’s Black infant mortality crisis has persisted for generations. And the women pushing for change say the disparities cannot be explained by income or individual behavior.
Rep. Margaret Arney, D-Wauwatosa, said this fight against the state’s high rate of Black infant mortality is personal because she and her twin sister were both delivered prematurely. Premature birth and low birth weight are the leading cause of death for Black infants in Wisconsin. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Arney, a Democrat from Wauwatosa, knows that personally.
“This is a generational issue,” Arney said. “I am a twin. My twin sister and I were born prematurely. Our lives were at risk.”
Her mother was college-educated, she said, but that did not erase the risks associated with being a Black mother in America.
“It’s more than just social class,” Arney said.
Johnson, the senator from Milwaukee, said she has encountered resistance to policies specifically designed to address racial disparities based on an argument that helping Black families reduce disproportionate harm is discrimination itself.
“A lot of the feeling in this building is that if something is targeted specifically, then it’s somehow discriminatory,” said Johnson, the lawmaker who delivered her daughter two months early.
But, she said, the nature of the crisis demands a targeted response.
“It’s not discriminatory that it’s kids who look like us that are dying, but it’s discriminatory because we want to fix it?” Johnson said.
The lawmakers pointed to policies that have passed as examples of what can happen when the Legislature works together.
Johnson cited Act 102, signed by Gov. Tony Evers earlier this year, which extended the period of time Medicaid covers postpartum services. About 76% of Black women who give birth in Wisconsin are on Medicaid, making this law particularly important to fight to save Black babies, she said.
“That bill will disproportionately impact Black women, which in this case is a good thing,” Johnson said. “That will be one piece of legislation that will start to uncover the core of what’s really taking place.”
But the lawmakers say broader changes — including greater access to doulas and culturally competent care — are still needed.
“Several of us were working on trying to have that coverage provided, because the research shows that having doulas and midwives helps mitigate some of those harmful factors,” Drake said.
Having that kind of support was important to her personally, she said, because “that was something that I really wanted to ensure I had someone I could trust.”
Sen. Dora Drake, D-Milwaukee, delivered a healthy baby in early September. Drake, pictured here in August in Madison, said the dismal data surrounding Black infant mortality haunted her mind throughout her pregnancy. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
When the statistics become your own
Before Johnson’s daughter was born — a few days shy of 32 weeks — a midwife recognized that Johnson and her pregnancy could be in danger.
“My midwife went to the doctor and said ‘Look, she’s high risk. She needs another level of care other than what I can provide,’ and I didn’t get it,” Johnson said.
Johnson spent two weeks in the hospital before her daughter was born, receiving steroid shots to help develop her baby’s lungs, she said.
Her daughter was born on June 3 and went home on June 22, Johnson’s birthday.
Johnson quickly returned to work, without giving herself time to recover from giving birth because she felt driven to make sure she could pay the bills as a single mother.
“So when (my daughter) got home, she had a place to come home to,” Johnson said.
But she later learned something about her pregnancy that she said doctors had not told her at the time: She had contracted an infection that caused premature delivery.
“There was things I didn’t realize about my own pregnancy until I got a copy of the medical records,” Johnson said. “My experience was so horrible. I remember saying I would never have another baby.”
Rep. Sequanna Taylor, a member of the Wisconsin Legislative Black Caucus, is pictured at The Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Her daughter survived and is now in her 20s.
“The fact that my daughter made it to her first birthday was a luxury that a lot of these Black babies are not afforded,” Johnson said.
Rep. Taylor’s experience was different, but it left her with many of the same questions and a similar, lingering pain.
During her pregnancy with her youngest daughter, Taylor said, her doctor told her she was unlikely to carry her baby to term. He never explained why.
“They were so cold,” she said. “I know as doctors they can’t be emotional because they deal with so many people. But to tell me ‘There’s nothing you can do to help. This baby won’t go to term. Go home. If you start bleeding or something, come back…’’’
The interaction left Taylor feeling unable to connect to her pregnancy because she was so convinced she would lose it.
Taylor, who is from Milwaukee, did carry her daughter to term. But after delivery she was rushed to emergency surgery because she couldn’t successfully deliver her placenta, a complication that can lead to serious infection.
Taylor now wonders whether her medical team failed to adequately screen her for complications because they already assumed her pregnancy would fail.
The fear of not being heard
For the lawmakers, the problem is not only access to care. It is whether Black women are believed, listened to and treated with dignity when they seek it.
“There’s this notion of who gets to have access to health care,” Drake said, adding that she has experienced that dynamic herself.
Two years ago, she went to a hospital in Milwaukee with a broken arm. When she told the staff she had state insurance — the coverage provided to her as a Wisconsin legislator — the hospital assumed she meant Medicaid.
During Stubbs’ pregnancy, a nurse mistakenly gave her the test results of another Black patient.
“It wasn’t stressful carrying my child,” Stubbs said. “It was stressful going to the doctor.”
Arney said she has seen the same pattern play out over generations.
Years ago, she participated in a focus group of Black women discussing their experiences giving birth. Arney said she was fortunate. Her sister, who is a doctor, was there. She had a doula, a midwife, an obstetrician and her husband supporting her.
Nearly every other woman in the group, Arney said, described a traumatic birth experience.
“Different years. Different times. This is what I’m talking about with the generational thing,” Arney said. “It’s like these kinds of things are not moving. This is not budging. This needs attention. It needs focus and it needs urgency.”
A crisis of trust
The lawmakers say those experiences have contributed to a broader lack of trust between Black women and the medical system.
“People can go through history on how hospitals and medical professions have used Black women’s bodies for experimentation,” Drake said. “This is not hidden. This is known. This is documented.”
One of the more egregious examples of this is by 19th-century physician James Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology” who developed techniques in the field by performing dozens of experimental surgeries without anesthesia on three enslaved women without their consent. The women — Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey — have been memorialized in the Mothers of Gynecology sculpture in Montgomery, Alabama.
That pain haunts the medical profession and is a traumatic history providers must intentionally work to move beyond, reestablishing trust among Black women, the lawmakers said.
This work, Arney said, must go beyond individual providers.
“I know there’s some health systems that are trying to take this on, but I hate to say it’s baked into our culture that there’s this callousness towards Black women,” Arney said.
That distrust can make pregnancy itself more frightening, regardless of the resources you have sought for yourself. The data and statistics surrounding Black birth outcomes in Wisconsin have remained in the back of Drake’s mind throughout her pregnancy. Despite the fact that she is a college-educated professional social worker and a member of the Wisconsin Senate. “Those are still the realities we have in our state,” she said.
Rep. Shelia Stubbs, D-Madison, has proposed legislation every session for the past seven years to address Wisconsin’s Black infant and maternal health crisis. None of her bills has received a committee hearing. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Inside the Capitol
The women of Wisconsin’s Legislative Black Caucus say the political resistance to their proposals is part of the same struggle.
Stubbs said her white Democratic colleagues have been supportive, often signing on as co-sponsors to her legislative proposals and allowing the Black Caucus to lead on issues they view as particularly tied to the Black community.
That support matters, she said, because the Black lawmakers bring lived experience that their white colleagues don’t have in the same way.
“It’s helpful, because nobody knows our struggle the way that we do, and they’re not going to understand,” Stubbs said.
But there is a limit to simply standing behind the Black Caucus, she said. It’s not enough to simply sign onto legislative proposals or attend press conferences during Black History Month or in June, when Juneteenth falls.
“Sometimes it’s harmful to just be like ‘You got it,’ you know?,” Stubbs said of the type of support she gets from other Democrats.
Stubbs said she has also had conversations with white lawmakers who choose not to believe the evidence showing racial disparities in health outcomes.
“In that building, we have many of our colleagues that don’t believe in diversity, equity or inclusion,” Stubbs said. “We have a federal government that doesn’t believe in that. So we’re fighting already systems that don’t believe in us.”
Some lawmakers, she said, see the Black Caucus’ efforts as blowing an issue out of proportion.
“They don’t want to believe the data,” Stubbs said. “They think it’s us coming one more time with another inequity, but it’s a fact, and so it is our responsibility as a state to address this.”
The five legislators say they have heard about the pain and trauma of this crisis from constituents. They have lived it themselves; in premature births, frightening pregnancies, traumatic deliveries and the persistent pain of being made to feel less than.
That’s why the fight is much more than a political one, they said.
The stakes are measured in whether a baby gets to come home.
“We have these stories,” Stubbs said, “and we are telling them because we want to save the next life.”
Erin McGroarty is a health and policy reporter for the Cap Times in Madison. She can be reached atemcgroarty@captimes.com.
But one alcohol-related danger receives far less attention — and it doesn’t end when someone hands over the car keys: walking while intoxicated.
Police reported suspected alcohol use among nearly 1 in 5 pedestrians killed in Wisconsin crashes between 2017 and 2025. Because pedestrians are not routinely tested, researchers say the true share may be higher.
The pattern is not unique to Wisconsin. Nationwide in 2024, 27% of pedestrians killed in traffic crashes were alcohol-impaired, compared with 15% of drivers involved in fatal pedestrian crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The figures do not make the danger of walking drunk comparable to driving drunk: An impaired driver controls a fast-moving vehicle and endangers others. But they underscore the risks intoxicated pedestrians face.
“We always hear somebody talking about having a safe plan home, have one sober driver. Maybe you should have a sober walker if you’re walking home,” said Vera Elle, a researcher at Wellbrook Recovery, a Brookfield-based alcohol and substance recovery rehabilitation center. She and her colleague Shimmy Stregosky wrote a series of reports on the topic and brought the issue to Wisconsin Watch’s attention.
Alcohol-related pedestrian crashes fall from 2019 peak
The number of annual crashes involving drunk pedestrians dropped from a 2019 peak of 126 to 101 in 2025. Annual deaths in those crashes plunged from 15 to five during the same period.
That trend coincided with lower reported binge drinking, defined as four or more drinks for women and five or more for men on a single occasion, said Maureen Busalacchi, director of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
She cautioned that the data cannot establish that changing drinking habits caused fewer pedestrian crashes. Traffic volume, remote work and vehicle speeds also affect crash frequency.
“The use of alcohol is going down, and then you start to see changes in perceived health effects. So more people are starting to see it as bad for health than they have in the past,” Busalacchi said.
Nationally, Gallup found that 54% of adults reported consuming alcohol in 2025, a record low in its polling. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 who considered moderate drinking harmful rose from 34% in 2018 to 66% in 2025.
In Wisconsin, the state’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System estimates a similar trend: The share of adults reporting binge drinking fell from 21.9% in 2019 to 19.1% in 2024.
Alcohol-related crashes span age groups
From 2017 through 2025, 16 pedestrians ages 35 to 39 were killed in Wisconsin crashes in which police suspected they consumed alcohol, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of Wisconsin Department of Transportation data.
That was the highest death toll of any five-year age group. Pedestrians ages 30 to 34 had the second-highest total, with 11 deaths, followed by those ages 25 to 29 and 50 to 54, with 10 each. Overall, 78 of the 96 pedestrians killed were ages 20 to 59.
Across crashes of all injury severity, pedestrians in their 20s accounted for the most cases involving suspected alcohol use. The total was highest among those ages 20 to 24, followed by those ages 25 to 29. But the numbers remained relatively high across most age groups from 30 to 59. Most pedestrians in those crashes suffered injuries.
The data showed a stark difference in injury severity: 44.6% of pedestrians suspected of alcohol use were seriously or fatally injured, compared with 21.1% of those without suspected alcohol use.
However, the connection does not establish that alcohol alone caused the difference. Nor can the data show how much more likely an intoxicated person is to be struck because no reliable count exists of how many intoxicated and sober people walk Wisconsin’s roads.
The figures are also likely to understate how many pedestrians involved in crashes had been drinking, said Richard Blomberg, vice president of the research firm Dunlap Research.
His research found that police generally identified alcohol use reliably when they checked the “had been drinking” box on crash reports. But an unchecked box did not mean a pedestrian was sober because police were less likely to document alcohol use when signs were unclear.
Research shows alcohol’s role in pedestrian crashes
Adults who had been drinking, especially those doing so excessively, were heavily overrepresented among pedestrians struck by vehicles, Blomberg found in a study he designed in the 1970s. About half of the adult pedestrian victims had been drinking, and nearly one-quarter had a blood alcohol level of 0.20% or higher.
Blomberg also compared crash victims with a random sample of pedestrians walking on the street near the crash sites. The researchers assembled three control groups. Some pedestrians were sampled at the same locations, days and times as previous crashes, while others were sampled at 112 randomly selected locations across New Orleans. The comparisons allowed Blomberg to estimate the extent to which alcohol was overrepresented among crash victims.
Blomberg also found alcohol-involved victims were disproportionately middle-aged men and more likely to have arrest records. Their crashes clustered at night and on weekends.
Blomberg cautioned that findings in one city did not represent the entire country, even if New Orleans was reasonably similar to other urban areas. Almost half a century later, he found the same demographic overrepresented in an analysis of crash data from five states from 2007 to 2017.
Later studies examined a related but different question: whether alcohol was associated with more severe injuries once a pedestrian was struck. In a study published in 1995, Dr. James Williams of Memorial Medical Center in Savannah, Georgia, reviewed autopsies of 223 pedestrian fatalities. He found that alcohol-involved pedestrians were more likely to suffer more severe injuries than sober pedestrians when struck by vehicles. Because the study included only fatalities, it did not measure whether intoxicated pedestrians were more likely to die after being struck.
A Florida analysis published a year later, however, found that pedestrians classified by police as under the influence had four to five times the adjusted odds of dying from a collision as pedestrians not classified as such. Rebecca Miles-Doan, the analysis’ author, cautioned that the finding might overestimate the association because police tend to conduct more intensive investigations into fatal cases.
Using more recent data from 2011 to 2016, University of Tennessee researchers found that alcohol was identified in about 7% of Tennessee pedestrian crashes but in 22% of pedestrian fatalities. The researchers pointed to limitations of their study: Few crashes had BAC readings, and alcohol classifications relied heavily on police judgment.
Experts point to public health solutions
Unlike impaired driving, walking while intoxicated generally is not a crime in Wisconsin. The Legislature eliminated the crime of public intoxication in 1973, which critics said created a “revolving door” through the criminal justice system for lower-income people and did little to improve rehabilitation — and sometimes worsened it.
Experts interviewed for this story also do not view criminalization as a principal solution.
Poster and flyer from Baltimore’s Walk Smart program, circa 2000. Reproduced in a U.S. Department of Transportation report; original phone number redacted.
Cities elsewhere have experimented with less punitive measures to improve safety. Baltimore launched the “Walk Smart Baltimore” campaign at the turn of the century. Blomberg participated as a researcher.
The campaign tested measures that did not depend entirely on intoxicated pedestrians making safe decisions. The city distributed reflective hats and used television, radio, billboards and flyers to warn pedestrians of dangers.
The evaluation reported fewer pedestrian crashes in the target area, although Blomberg said the program required resources that made it difficult for other communities to replicate.
“We can wrap them in cotton and potentially keep them from being injured in a crash or in a fall, but the health effects of that excess alcohol use are still there,” Blomberg said. “If we solve the underlying alcohol problem, everything else goes away.”
Addressing excessive alcohol use is the long-term goal, Blomberg said, but communities should not wait to reduce immediate risks through other efforts including safer vehicle designs, separating pedestrians from traffic or other measures.
If a street redesign, safer ride home or other intervention reduces alcohol-involved pedestrian crashes by even 5% or 10%, he said, “then of course we should do it.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Reading Time: 6minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
Wisconsin Watch spoke to three small business owners who put their businesses on hold to serve the community after the July 27 tornado.
Destiny Antuna of Fox Valley Meal Prep, Lora Glasel of the Recyclist Bicycle Co. and Shane Rosenow of Rosenow Customs talked about the support they found throughout the Fox Cities.
They also shared how they will continue to support relief efforts even as they turn their attention back to their businesses.
For a few weeks, countless donations piled up on Destiny Antuna’s shop floor.
Stacks of canned food, water bottles, Band-Aids, toilet paper, paper plates, work gloves, dog food and boxes of diapers made it almost impossible to walk through the store. Her business in Kaukauna, Fox Valley Meal Prep, usually sells handmade meal kits. But last month, it became a hub for delivering care packages to neighboring Appleton, Neenah and Menasha.
Ever since the July 27 tornado that damaged homes and businesses in the Fox Cities, community support has poured in. Classified as an EF3, the tornado caused an estimated $8.2 million in damages to over 2,300 structures. With 84 structures destroyed and 412 majorly damaged, many residents were left without shelter, transportation or basic needs.
Emersyn Banda, a 20-year-old Menasha resident, described the experience of the tornado as life-altering.
“I remember instantly just crying when I had seen it, because I mean, houses were completely down. All of our trees are down. All of the power lines, people looking lost,” she said. “It looked like a nuke had hit our town. It was just in shambles. Everyone was on the phone trying to contact people.”
In the chaos, community members’ overwhelming desire to help often came without knowing where to direct their efforts. That’s where small business leaders stepped in, putting their daily operations on hold and organizing large-scale efforts to direct volunteers and donation requests. Now, they’re navigating how to continue helping while keeping their businesses afloat.
Meeting the needs of tornado victims in real time
Antuna was in Menasha during the tornado, completing renovations on a new location she had planned a grand opening for in the next week. She had to shelter in place during the storm.
“Luckily, we’re kind of tucked into a corner, so there wasn’t any major damage,” Antuna said. “It was just a lot of debris hitting that corner, but renovations were, for the most part, done there Monday while we were there, and we were hoping to do a soft opening that Sunday.”
About an hour later, she immediately drove home to Kaukauna and made a post on Instagram letting people know she was accepting donations to distribute. A loyal customer in Menasha let Antuna turn his lawn into a hot food station and take requests for donations.
Homes and local businesses in Menasha, Wis., are seen on Aug. 10, 2026, two weeks after an EF3 tornado left widespread destruction. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
“It was very shell-shocking to walk around and see some houses be totally fine and some others where it’s just their personal belongings just everywhere,” Antuna said. “Like, I have a little kid, that could have easily been like all of my kids’ toys.”
Antuna and other business owners started going door to door with wagons, which she said was vital in getting the most up-to-date requests from affected residents.
“I felt like everybody on the outside, in terms of help, was almost a day or two behind,” she said. “So by the time you would get people water, the next day there’s businesses trying to drop off pallets of water, but everybody already has enough water.”
Lora Glasel, co-owner of Recyclist Bicycle Co. in Kaukauna, went door to door delivering food with Antuna. She soon realized that fixing up and donating used bikes would be helpful for people whose transportation had been destroyed.
“After the requests started rolling in for either people whose cars or bicycles or their kids’ bicycles were destroyed, we did not have enough bikes to accommodate the need,” Glasel said. “So we put a little bit of a call out to our community, and we’ve gotten a good amount of donations that over the next couple weeks we’ll be able to tune up and safety-check, and subsequently then deliver back to the affected area.”
Lora Glasel, co-owner of Recyclist Bicycle Co., in Kaukauna, Wis. Glasel organized a team of volunteers to fix and donate used bicycles to people affected by the tornado. (Courtesy of Lora Glasel)
She delivered over 70 bikes to residents who needed a reliable way to work or even just to relax after a stressful day. Glasel hopes to turn it into a long-term program to help families in need, regardless of whether they were affected by the tornado.
“To bring, maybe for some families, just a little semblance of normalcy of just being able to take their family on a bike ride in a time where their life is not normal at all is also pretty impactful,” she said.
In addition to fulfilling specific donation requests for families, Antuna began using the Kaukauna store as a home base to create general care packages with essential household items and food. She used social media to call out for drivers to fill up their cars with 20-plus bags and drop them off one by one on people’s porches in the hardest-hit areas.
“I will say, it definitely took over my life for the first week after (the tornado) … I do think the store got kind of neglected for the first week, so now we’re slowly trying to get back to a little bit of normalcy,” she said.
Antuna, who also runs Bad Batch Fitness in Little Chute, struggled to find a sustainable way to run her businesses long term while coordinating the influx of donations coming in, requests from affected residents and volunteer schedules.
“Once we started to gather a lot of volunteers and have people reach out, it made it a lot easier to delegate things and be able to give a little bit more focus to the businesses,” she said. “It’s definitely been a hard push and pull because if I could have everything run as normal and also be there, I absolutely would.”
As Antuna moves into the next phase, Fox Valley Meal Prep is no longer accepting donations other than gift cards for gas and groceries. Her plan for the remainder of the year is to have a “meal match week” every month, donating a meal to families in need for every one purchased in-store.
Donations for tornado victims pile up at Fox Valley Meal Prep in Kaukauna, Wis., on Aug. 10, 2026. Owner Destiny Antuna said she still plans to collect gas and grocery gift cards for people affected by the tornado, as well as donate meals. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Contractors volunteer to clear tons of debris, protect houses
Cleaning up the widespread destruction from July’s tornado took a legion of volunteers working tirelessly to clear streets and repair homes. Shane Rosenow, owner of the exterior remodeling company Rosenow Customs in Neenah, became an unofficial leader of the cleanup efforts.
Rosenow said it all started with a post he made on Facebook with the office phone number and an offer to help with yard cleanup, tarping and assessing damage.
Shane Rosenow of Rosenow Customs in Neenah, Wis., takes a selfie while volunteering to clean up storm damage in Menasha, Wis. Rosenow organized relief efforts among local contractors. (Courtesy of Shane Rosenow)
“My phone just started ringing,” Rosenow said. “I had a band of I want to say 12 to 18 contractors that reached out and said, ‘Hey, let’s help. Let’s do this.’ And it was everything from people in the same trade that I do right now to people with heavy machinery, landscapers (and) home mold remediation people.”
For the next two weeks, he devoted all of his time to the efforts, sleeping only a few hours each night and putting normal business operations on the back burner. He estimates they protected up to 200 homes by clearing fallen trees and setting up tarps. His team of contractors loaded and dumped over 190 tons of debris.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. Pictures don’t even do it justice,” he said. “I get emotional on this because Neenah’s my hometown, and Menasha’s like a sister town to us, and it’s going to take years, years (to rebuild).”
Restoring the St. Mary Catholic Cemetery sticks out to him as the biggest miracle. He started with a small group on the Friday after the tornado, but soon, a bus drove by with about 50 volunteers from the faith-based group Risen Men. After a few hours of careful work, the cemetery curator came by.
“He goes, ‘You guys, in three hours, have done more work here than five of us in the church have done all week. What made you come here?’” Rosenow said. “And I said, ‘God, you know, he just told us, go.’”
A look at St. Mary Catholic Cemetery in Menasha, Wis., which Shane Rosenow and a group of volunteers worked to clean up after the tornado. (Courtesy of Shane Rosenow)
He also had a colleague create two Facebook groups, one for volunteers and one for donations, so Rosenow wouldn’t have to keep fielding texts and emails himself. That way, people could make a post with what they needed — for example, two or three people to help clean up their yard — and other community members could message them directly to coordinate help.
“The goal behind that was to kind of divide and conquer and allow us to still go back to work, but still do some good in the community,” Rosenow said. “And it’s worked.”
Progress after such a large disaster isn’t always linear. Rosenow’s efforts were set back by a recent storm that blew the tarps off people’s roofs, meaning some homeowners had to start from scratch. The other contractors also needed to get back to work after the first two weeks, he said.
“Some of these guys, it’s just them,” Rosenow said. “And they’re like, ‘We don’t have any money, and we’re spending hundreds of dollars a day on fuel and maintenance on our vehicles and our equipment.’ So I said, ‘Get back to work. We will regroup.’”
Even though he’s started being recognized as a local celebrity, he rejects that label and says nothing would be possible without God and the other community members who devoted their time.
“It’s not me. If it wasn’t for the people that stepped up behind me, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now,” Rosenow said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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