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 BRIAN
DICKERSON: Coming Soon To a District Near You...
by Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press, February 2, 2005
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Detroit is a
special case. We all know that, wherever we live in Michigan.
So late last year, when Detroit Public Schools CEO Ken Burnley
revealed that the hand basket in which the state's largest
school district had been headed to hell for as long as anyone
could remember was about to make landfall, the sense of
inevitability was statewide.
What did you expect? Detroiters said. This is Detroit, where the
absentee landlords appointed to run our schools have been
mismanaging them for years.
What did you expect? Michiganders north of Eight Mile Road
echoed. That's Detroit, where the only parents who give a damn
left the public schools long ago.
But what if Detroit isn't a special case? What if the same
factors that have pushed the state's largest school district to
the brink of bankruptcy are about to engulf the rest of
Michigan's 1.5 million schoolchildren?
An ominous report
That's the unmistakable message of a report released recently by
the state Senate Fiscal Agency. The report, lost in the soap
opera surrounding last week's forced resignation of state
Superintendent Tom Watkins, says that enrollments have dwindled
in more than half of Michigan's 553 school districts over the
last decade, despite an 8-percent increase in the school-age
population.
Because schools lose a minimum of $6,700 in state aid each time
a desk goes unfilled, many districts are losing revenue faster
than they can pare costs. Sixteen are already on a deficit watch
list reserved for districts that fail their statutory duty to
produce a balanced budget.
"These are the ones who've already walked off the cliff," Tom
White, executive director of Michigan School Business Officials,
told the Free Press last month, and there is "a line of school
districts behind them."
According to the Senate Fiscal Agency report, most shrinking
districts have lost more money than they can save by
proportional reductions in the number of classes and teachers.
DPS and the Lansing Public Schools are just two of the districts
that envision multiple school closures in the 2005-06 school
year.
In the same boat
The fact that so many kinds of school districts -- urban and
rural, black and white, large and small -- are in trouble ought
to occasion a thorough reexamination of Proposal A, the
decade-old school financing revolution that capped property
taxes and linked state aid to enrollments. But neither
Michigan's Democratic governor nor its Republican legislative
leaders have shown any taste for one.
Republicans say shrinking enrollments, while forcing painful
cuts in many districts, suggest that many charter schools have
successfully positioned themselves as viable alternatives to
traditional public schools. The Senate Fiscal Agency report says
almost two-thirds of the 126,000 students added to Michigan's
school-age population over the last decade attend charter
schools.
But for most public school students, the opportunity to get a
quality education in an era of declining enrollments will depend
on the ingenuity state leaders show in paring noninstructional
spending in areas like retirement costs and health benefits --
as Watkins noted shortly before he was shown the door.
Providing adequate funding for every public school matters
because, without some semblance of educational equality, the
ownership society President George W. Bush envisions is just
another name for economic apartheid.
And in an era of dwindling school enrollments, every Michigan
schoolkid is a citizen of Detroit.
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