• Category 1

    Selected in 2025

  • Grades: k - 12
    School Setting: urban
    Town Population: 550,000
    Student Enrollment: 2,000
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 0.1%
    White/Caucasian: 0%
    Hispanic: 2.1%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
    Asian: 96.5%
    Native American: 0%
    Other: 1.3%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:20
    % Reduced Lunch: 89%
    % ELL Learners: 18.6%
    Founded: 2004
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Dr. Chris Her-Xiong
  • CONTACT:
    4601 N 84th St,
    Milwaukee, WI 53225
    414-418-3418
    kearney.brendan@myhapa.org
Hmong American Peace Academy
Milwaukee, WI
1. What key actions or strategies have been most instrumental to your school’s success?
Developed a Portrait of a HAPA Graduate, in alignment with our longstanding Mission, and took the time to include voice from all stakeholders in identifying our collective values. Our Strategic Academic Plan, and Frameworks for Teaching, Instructional Coaching, and Professional Development are all rooted in this ‘Why’ for our work.

Defined our ‘Big 3’ Instructional Focus Areas, with minimal yearly change. Focal areas reflect our unique student population (High % ELL and ED). Last cycle's focal areas: ‘Scholar Talk in the Classroom,’ ‘Critical Reading Strategies’, and ‘Differentiated Instruction with a Focus on English Language Learners.’

Meaningfully invested in the resources teachers and staff need to accomplish our goals, including new curriculum, intervention materials, additional MLL, SWD, and support staff, and class-size reduction at grades K-5.

Continued cycles of feedback for teachers, from principals, instructional coaches, and senior leadership.



2. What significant challenges did your school face during your improvement efforts, and how did you address them?
Attracting and retaining high quality staff, post-pandemic. Extensive staff surveys and listening sessions led to paid teacher leader positions to inform our leadership team on how decisions impact teachers, reductions in staff calendar days and daily minutes, increased compensation, especially for teachers, and hiring of additional support staff. Last year's teacher retention rate climbed to 96% and 97% of teachers indicated that they would recommend working at HAPA to a colleague or friend.

Post-COVID chronic absenteeism. Despite daily K-12 attendance over 95% we continued to see high numbers of chronically absent scholars in the 2-3 years after our return to in-person school. The addition of our student services staff mentioned above, the development of our MTSS model, and aligned messaging to families around the impact of absenteeism on scholar learning allowed us to cut our rate of chronic absenteeism in half by the end of the 24-25 school year.



3. How did professional development contribute to your school’s improvement efforts?
All PD is focused on our 'Big 3' Instructional Focus Areas. Beginning-of-year teacher trainings, professional development days, instructional coaching cycles, evaluation cycles, leadership team walkthroughs, divisional level staff meetings, and PLC work are all designed to build mastery in these few, high-leverage areas.

Work with external vendors ands experts, in particular for the service of ELLs, and trainings for Instructional Coaches, has supplemented our in-house PD.

PD planning is data driven, reflecting a range of standardized assessment data throughout the school year, assessments inherent to our curriculum, assessments created by teachers, as well as extensive classroom observation data. Our Framework for High Quality Professional Development is focused on three domains: Alignment and Purpose, Design and Execution, and most importantly, Application and Follow Through, as most of the growth we hope to see from a PD happens over time in PLCs and classrooms afterward.

4. In what ways did family and/or community partnerships support your school’s success?
HAPA Families make possible our high rate of scholar attendance, high turnout at Parent-Teacher Conferences, and extraordinary rate of parent participation at HAPA community events. Family input was invaluable in creating our Portrait of a HAPA Graduate and Strategic Plan.

Many community partners help to bridge the significant per-pupil funding gap between our school and others. Grants and donations make it possible for many of our programs to exist, including the dual-enrollment coursework offered in our high school, where scholars have gone from earning 100 credits per year to 2000 over a three year period, at no cost to scholars and families.

Partners offer internships, site visits, job shadowing, and ACT Prep courses - resources that are routinely available to scholars elsewhere with more advantages. This programming helps our scholars to connect the hard work they are doing in school with the long-term personal and professional goals it may help them to accomplish.
5. How has ESEA funding (e.g., Title I, II, III) been strategically used to support student achievement?
Title funding is instrumental to the growth we have seen in our scholars’ learning outcomes. Title I funding largely sustains our Instructional Coaching staff allocation, and our Teaching Framework and Strategic Goals simply would not come to fruition without our Instructional Coaches. Title III funds have allowed us to acquire many of the intervention materials and supplementary resources that our teachers need in order to differentiate for scholars, and especially English Language Learners.
6. What advice would you give to a school just beginning its improvement journey?
We started by gathering and analyzing every piece of data, over multiple years, to measure whether scholar outcomes reflect the school’s strategic goals. It is worth the time to do so comprehensively, and to have all staff process the data and what it means for their work. Most importantly, take the time to gather input from ALL stakeholders on what they want from their scholars’ education, and what resources would help the school to get there. Assessment and survey data has been instructive, but listening face-to-face has often given us the most insight, and the process itself has had a major impact on staff morale and job satisfaction. Our caveat is that school leaders should only ask their community members what they want if they are prepared to take it to heart without prejudice, and allocate support and resources accordingly. We take every opportunity we can to remind our community members when have heard their voices, and made specific changes in response to their needs.
Stats
  • Category 1

    Selected in 2025

  • Grades: k - 12
    School Setting: urban
    Town Population: 550,000
    Student Enrollment: 2,000
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 0.1%
    White/Caucasian: 0%
    Hispanic: 2.1%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
    Asian: 96.5%
    Native American: 0%
    Other: 1.3%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:20
    % Reduced Lunch: 89%
    % ELL Learners: 18.6%
    Founded: 2004
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Dr. Chris Her-Xiong
  • CONTACT:
    4601 N 84th St,
    Milwaukee, WI 53225
    414-418-3418
    kearney.brendan@myhapa.org