Educational Leadership Mistakes & Skunk Works Group (Consequences)

State shouldn’t punish the kids for the school district’s mistakes

NANCY KAFFER

   It’s hard to make sense out of the situation in the Buena Vista School District, which doesn’t expect to make its payroll this month.

   The Michigan Department of Education froze state aid to the tiny district near Saginaw — which serves about 400 students — when it discovered that the district had continued to accept $580,000 a year for a juvenile detention education program it had stopped operating.

   The state stopped making payments to the district, in an effort to recoup the money the district had wrongly accepted.

   The district’s teachers decided to work without pay this week, in hopes that the state and the district come to some agreement, a gesture that was rejected by the school board because state law requires employers to pay employees for performing work. (However, the district says staffers can volunteer, with the understanding that they will not be compensated for their time.)

   Can I note that all of this is crazy?

   The district was clearly wrong to continue accepting money to which it was no longer entitled. But withholding those funds doesn’t punish the district administrators — OK, technically, it does, because they’re not getting paid — but the people hurt the most are the students.

   Seniors may not graduate, and I don’t see how any student misses a month of school and successfully advances to the next grade. This is altering-the-course-of-your-life stuff here.

   The district was reportedly operating with a $1-million deficit. Though no action has been taken on this front, it’s a pretty sure thing that an emergency manager will be appointed in the district. That’s probably a good thing considering that even once this financial train wreck is resolved, the district’s deficit will have grown by $580,000.

   The state Education Department should restore aid to the district immediately and find another way for the district to repay the money it improperly accepted — stretching those payments over years, not months, would make a lot of sense.

   In the big picture, this is a perfect example of why consolidating governmental entities makes sense. A school district for 400, located near a much larger district, makes no sense. And, as the folks in Buena Vista are learning, it’s not financiallysustainable.  Gov  . Rick Sndyer has encouraged local governments to share services through his Economic Vitality Incentive Program. That’s great, but consolidation of districts would be better. Michigan has 549 local school districts serving fewer than 1.5 million students. Some cities — like Saginaw — are home to small populations and multiple districts, a horribly inefficient way to do things.

   What the governor hasn’t done is address the need for reforming the state’s school-funding mechanism. The way the state pays for public schools changed drastically when Proposal A passed in 1994 — spurred by the closure, 10 weeks early, of the Kalkaska School District in 1993 — but Michigan’s financial picture has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.

   Maybe Buena Vista will be the catalyst for a new discussion about how to better fund public schools.

   The state “skunk works” group — Snyder has distanced himself from the group, which included several high-level state employees — developed a plan that is unacceptable. Lowering the cost per-pupil through a backdoor voucher system and an overreliance on online education — still largely untested — isn’t true reform.

   As a governor who is strongly committed to attracting and retaining business to Michigan, Snyder should consider how appealing businesses will find a state with an unstable educational system.

   It’s time to revisit school funding — and not in a way that shortchanges children.

   Contact Nancy Kaffer: 313-222-6585 or nkaffer@freepress.com