Dr. Megan Butler - New MS Principal 

The middle school years of a student’s life are full of change and growth. Dr. Megan Butler, who will be the new principal of South Milwaukee Middle School starting July 1st, loves it. 

“Middle schoolers are fun because when they start as sixth graders, they’re still so young to me. I enjoy watching them grow and blossom as they become eighth graders and discover themselves before moving on to high school,” she said. “It’s great to see them grow and mature.” 

Butler has served as assistant superintendent of the Oak Creek Franklin School District since 2024, but has decided she wants to be back in the hallways of a middle school. 

“I just missed being around middle schoolers and the chaos of everyday middle school life,” she said with a chuckle. 

What drew her to South Milwaukee, and the middle school specifically, is the space and attention given to ensuring students get the support they need when they need it. In educational parlance, that’s called Multi-Level Systems of Support or MLSSI. 

“It’s meeting every student where they are at with their academic needs,” Butler said. “It might be phonics or fluency, or numeracy. Students get specific interventions.” 

To earn her PhD in educational leadership and policy analysis at UW-Madison, Butler wrote her dissertation on MLSS, and saw strong results when she implemented it in her roles  in Oak Creek Franklin School District – first as principal of West Middle School, and then as assistant superintendent. 

“I attribute a lot of our growth to that system,” she said. 

Butler, a mother of three children under 10, is originally from Kewaskum. In addition to her work in Oak Creek, she has also held administrative positions in Chicago Public Schools and has classroom experience from her time in St. Charles, Illinois, and Cambridge, Wisconsin. 

Her path to those classrooms wasn’t immediately clear, she said. 

Originally, she went to UW-Madison to be a medical doctor. 

“When I decided not to do that, I thought maybe being a teacher would be the next route,” she said. 

She decided to specialize in Family and Consumer Science for her teaching degree. That specialization prepares students exploring fields such as nursing, hospitality, or child development. 

Butler focused on child development, specifically on teaching students to become teachers. She spent a lot of time with students, observing classrooms and watching veteran teachers work. 

“That, in a way, set me up to be a school principal,” she said. 

 Butler plans to spend July and August becoming acclimated to the middle school community. “I need to spend a lot of time getting a lay of the land,” she said, to understand how the middle school works. 

The first day of school in September will be her first day of school, too. 

“You’re everywhere on day one,” she said. “I won’t exactly know all of the routines yet, and I’ll be doing my best to figure out where everyone is supposed to go,” she laughed. 

She said she has hope, though, that students, parents, caregivers, and teachers will return to a warm and welcoming school. 

“We’re going to spend a lot of time together. I hope this is a happy place for everyone. I want to make sure we can have a lot of fun together while we’re doing this work.”