MILWAUKEE – As it turns out, Milwaukee Public Schools will not be able to prevent the expansion of the popular St. Marcus Lutheran School after all.

The school has purchased a much-needed second building, where on Thursday it will break ground on a major expansion project that will allow it to accommodate many more students, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

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St. Marcus is an academically successful private school that serves a mostly low-income, African-American student base. It has been looking for more space for several years, to accommodate hundreds of students on its waiting list.

The problem has been a lack of available expansion space in the area. One ideal option was for St. Marcus to purchase one of many vacant buildings owned by Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), which has been losing a lot of students in recent years and has approximately two dozen empty schools.

St. Marcus has made numerous attempts to purchase two different vacant MPS buildings, but the district has consistently refused to complete a transaction.

The reason is that MPS doesn’t want competition for students.

St. Marcus is one of many private schools in the area that participates in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, an initiative that allows lower-income parents to use state dollars in the form of vouchers to pay tuition at private schools.

Thousands of parents have taken advantage of that opportunity, mostly to escape the failing academic environment at MPS.

Since 2009, MPS enrollment has dropped by 11 percent while voucher program enrollment has increased by 33 percent (to nearly 30,000 students) and charter school enrollment has jumped 175 percent, according to the WILL report.

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The problem for MPS is that it loses a percentage of state money for every student that leaves and enrolls in a voucher or charter school.

So MPS officials have been stubborn about selling empty buildings to other schools, particularly those in the voucher program, depriving many students the opportunity to receive better instruction, and forcing Milwaukee taxpayers to maintain several dozen empty buildings.

As school board President Michael Bonds has been quoted as saying, selling school buildings to choice schools would be like like “asking the Coca-Cola Company to turn over its facilities to Pepsi so Pepsi can expand and compete with the Coca-Cola Company.”

In December 2012, St. Marcus officials sent a letter to MPS expressing interest in purchasing the vacant Malcolm X Academy school building.

A city official responded that “city policy does not contemplate the sale of city controlled real estate for use by private schools affiliated with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program,” according to a report published by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Two years later St. Marcus officials offered $1 million for the building, but instead MPS entered into an agreement with a new corporation called 2760 Holdings LLC to convert it into a community center. Under the agreement, MPS would have been allowed to lease a portion of the building with an option to buy.

But somehow the deal fell through, and instead of making $1 million from the sale of the building to St. Marcus, the city had to pay “over $500,000 to 2760 Holdings LLC as a condition of ending the agreement,” the WILL report said.

The Malcolm X building, which has been vacant since 2007, remains so today. Taxpayers have forked out more than $200,000 on maintenance for the unused structure since 2012, according to the report.

In 2014, St. Marcus officials tried to purchase the vacant Lee school building from MPS for its appraised value of $1.4 million, according to the report, but negotiations ended when Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett demanded that St. Marcus pay an extra $1.3 million as a “school choice tax.”

MPS and city officials may have hoped to block expansion and growth at St. Marcus, but now it’s obvious they have failed.

Last year St. Marcus completed the purchase of a building at the 2215 W. Palmer, formerly known as the Centro Educational Aurora Weier Center.

The school took possession of the building in 2014 and began serving about 100 students at the site.

On Thursday St. Marcus officials will break ground on a 40,000-square-foot expansion at its new site. The new addition will include classrooms, art and music rooms, a library, playground space and more, and will allow St. Marcus to boost total enrollment from 860 to 1,120, according to a report from BizTimes.com.

Even with the new space, St. Marcus officials doubt that they will even have enough space to accommodate their entire waiting list.

“Frankly, I don’t believe that’s possible,” school Superintendent Henry Tyson told BizTimes.com. “I don’t think we can build or open schools quickly enough to meet the demand because the bigger you get, the more parents that are out there advocating for the school and telling the story.”