Michigan School Finances (Update)

Detroit Free Press Editorial

Someone has to lead Michigan’s schools away from financial brink

   In the absence of leadership, crisis gets managed through chaos and random, flailing exertion.

   And so it will go with Michigan public school financing, until someone (Gov. Rick Snyder is the obvious choice) steps up.

   Last week saw two important turns in the ongoing saga of crumbling school districts and mismanaged opportunity.

   Two lawmakers (one a Democrat, the other a Republican) introduced a bill that would dissolve school districts that run out of money and send their students to neighboring schools.

   A day later, state Superintendent Mike Flanagan announced that 55 of Michigan’s 549 school districts, or nearly 10%, are expected to run deficits this fiscal year.

   Both happenings point to the same issue: Increasingly, the state’s funding formula for schools, combined with the heavy overhead of so many districts and ballooning legacy costs, is being outed as inadequate to maintain the system as it is configured.

   We’ve seen Buena Vista schools, near Saginaw, run out of money and leave kids in the lurch for two weeks before administrators could come up with an acceptable deficit-elimination plan. Pontiac schools seem close to the brink as well, and an emergency manager is likely headed to that district.

   But it goes much further. This isn’t just about inner-city districts with declining populations; places like Pinckney and Bangor are also in trouble, and the trend is spreading quickly.

   What Michigan needs is a big re-think — a solution that addresses the root, rather than the symptomatic, problems . Fewer school districts would be a start. Even among states like ours, where hyper-local governance is ingrained in legal and cultural tradition, our one district for every 2,600 students is more dramatic than Ohio (one for every 3,000 students) and Indiana (one for every 3,500 students).

   And in Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn tried last year to initiate school district consolidations to save $100 million annually; the state has 868 districts for a little more than 2 million students.Gov. Snyder has already begun aggressively attacking the funding shortfalls for retirement costs in school districts, but there may be more (like refinancing the unfunded portion statewide) that could be done. And the formula we use now for funding public schools is 20 years old. It predates not only the 2008 economic crash, but also the nosedive Michigan took in 2002. There’s no question that an update is overdue.

   Reps. Bill Rogers, a Republican from Brighton, and David Rutledge, a Democrat from Ypsilanti, get partial credit for a package of bills they introduced that will permit Flanagan to shutter districts when they reach the point of closing down because they’ve run out of money, or because they fail to produce deficit-elimination plans.

   But it’s a desperate quick-fix.

   Flanagan told the Legislature last week that he’d support a proposal to reduce the number of districts to 83 — one for each county. But even he acknowledged that was likely a pipe dream, given the deep affection Michigan citizens have with local governance. State Sen. John Pappageorge, R-Troy, said he’d like Flanagan to come up with a proposal to pitch to legislators, all the same. Of course, Papageorge believes his county, Oakland, is too big to have just one school district.

   See what’s missing here? A big voice from a political or thought leader directing the conversation and the ideas.

   Michigan needs someone

   — and I say the role falls by default to Gov. Snyder — to drive the change we need for public school finance. We need someone who can convene stakeholders around the problem, produce a set of solutions and push to get them enacted.

   So far, Snyder hasn’t warmed to that responsibility. (I say he’s balking at it with regard to other local government finance, too; cities and villages face many of the same problems as school districts.) But even if Snyder doesn’t, someone else should, before the wave of insolvent school districts crests and even the most frantic last-minute fixes won’t work.

   Lead. Someone needs to lead — and get us away from emergency-mode, half-thought-out solutions.