The top reported proficiency rate is 41% in Math. The lowest is 19% in Social studies.
Original Research by School Decision on Stellar Collegiate Charter School
Stellar Collegiate Charter School serves children from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade in Milwaukee’s near-south side. It is part of the Carmen High School of Science and Technology Inc., a charter network whose high school programs recently merged into a single Southgate campus. The school building is on a residential block near South 10th Street, a few miles from downtown Milwaukee.
The student body is small for a full K-5 enrollment in a city this size. The most striking characteristic of the school’s composition is that nearly every student qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a rate that places the school among those serving a very high concentration of families with low incomes. Racially and ethnically, the enrollment is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with a much smaller share of Black students and a thin scattering of other groups. This is a school where the adult staff, charter network, and curriculum serve a population that is both economically and linguistically diverse in ways the raw demographics only begin to suggest; state data on English learner and special education counts were not available in the source material.
On the Wisconsin Forward state assessments, the school’s results show a pattern that deserves careful attention from a prospective family. In third-grade math, a majority of students scored at the proficient level or above, which is a genuine bright spot. By fourth grade, that figure dropped sharply, and in fifth grade it fell again to a level just above the lowest cohort. In English language arts, the pattern is steeper and more consistent: by fifth grade, fewer than one in five students scored proficient. In fourth-grade science and social studies, the proficiency rates were similarly low. Taken together, the school’s overall proficiency across all tested subjects and grades sits below the midpoint among district-serving schools in Milwaukee County. A parent may want to ask the school directly how it addresses literacy development in the upper elementary grades and what interventions it provides for students who are not yet reading at grade level.
There is no information in the state data about the school’s approach to discipline, staffing ratios, or chronic absenteeism, so a parent considering enrollment should ask those questions of the school directly. Because the school only serves through fifth grade, there is no graduation rate to report.
The housing context for families living near the school is typical for Milwaukee’s south side. Home values in the 53215 zip code are well below the statewide and national medians, and rents are likewise modest relative to the region. That affordability is a central fact of the neighborhood. Milwaukee itself is Wisconsin’s largest city, a former manufacturing hub on Lake Michigan with a handful of Fortune 500 headquarters and a deeply mixed urban fabric. Its population has declined over several decades, and it remains one of the most racially segregated major cities in the country. The economic context of the zip code, paired with the school’s high poverty rate, tells a family that this is a place where the school is one of several city resources working to serve a community with substantial need.
Stellar Collegiate is a small charter elementary in a high-poverty Milwaukee neighborhood. Its third-grade math results are a clear strength, and its overall state test performance in the upper grades trails the county median by a noticeable margin. A family weighing this school would want to understand how the school’s approach to teaching reading and math changes as children move from primary to intermediate grades, and whether the school provides services for students who need extra academic support.
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