Parents, students and staff from Milwaukee French Immersion School gathered Monday, Oct. 12, outside Milwaukee Public Schools’ central office to oppose a staffing change that would merge three K4 classrooms into two and eliminate one teaching position at the school. Under the plan, the two K4 classes would average about 20 students each, according to an email from Superintendent Brenda Cassellius described by parents. The teacher whose position is reduced would move to third grade, replacing teacher Alexandre Sablonniere, who could lose his job at the school. Sablonniere, who moved from France to Milwaukee eight years ago, first worked at the school as a paraprofessional and has taught third grade for four years. He said the school has become a place where he can share his background with students, including through a correspondence project between his class and a class in France. Milwaukee French Immersion School serves students from K4 through fifth grade. The district says its K4 enrollment is too low to sustain three classrooms: the classes currently average 14 students apiece. MPS guidelines call for 20 students per class with a teacher and a paraprofessional. A district spokesperson said the K4 rooms also have paraprofessionals, providing roughly one adult for every 10 children under the new arrangement. Emily Jalabert, a parent of three students at the school, helped organize the protest. She said the district had told the school in the spring to hire two teachers, making the change especially difficult for families who had expected staffing to remain stable. Her children have settled into the school, Jalabert said, and she worries that shifting classes and staff will unsettle them. She also said larger groups are particularly challenging for young children learning in a language that may be new to them. The staffing decision comes as MPS adjusts to lower-than-expected enrollment across the district. The district budgeted for 60,277 students this school year, down from 63,943 last year. Preliminary figures for the third Friday of the 2026-27 school year showed 58,333 students — nearly 1,800 fewer than projected, Cassellius told the School Board in September. MPS says it is moving about 55 teachers from schools and classrooms with lower enrollment in an effort to address vacancies elsewhere. The district reviews enrollment each year and can transfer teachers between schools or grade levels, spokesperson Kevin O’Connor said. At French Immersion, however, the change is not primarily due to the school missing its overall enrollment target, O’Connor said. The school’s third-Friday count was 12 below its projection of 396 students; the K4 classroom sizes are the reason for the consolidation, he said. Jalabert said her son’s K4 class had 26 students last year and described the setting as chaotic. She said some families left, adding that families cannot enroll children at the school after first grade. That makes retaining families in the early grades especially important, she said. The school’s French-language instruction and its community of French families are central to why parents want to keep their children enrolled, Jalabert said. She acknowledged the district’s need to balance its budget but questioned whether larger K4 classes are the right place to make adjustments.