Support Leland School -- Vote!

Tomorrow, May 6th, we have the opportunity to vote YES on two millage renewals to support Leland School.

The first is our regular renewal of the 18 mil tax on non-homestead properties. We pass this every year, and it is a provision of Proposal A that if we don't pass this, we won't get enough state funds to have school next year.

The second is a bond proposal to replenish our bus fleet and maintain our technology package. We are asking voters to approve .25 mils, which works out to $37.50 per year on a $150,000 home.

After writing those last two posts about Proposal A, it's nice to be able to talk about a simple way to support our excellent school. Polls will be open from 7 AM to 8 PM at your local township polling place.

More on School Equity

There was a long story in the Leelanau Enterprise this week about Leland School's band program and the hard decision not to grant tenure to our band teacher. Tonight I had a long conversation with a school board member as we waited for kids at choir. She confirmed what I had suspected, that the decision came down to a matter of money. Keeping the band teacher on, even part time, would have meant cutting an elementary teacher. We talked of keeping band as a pay-to-play activity or somehow drawing on talented members of the community to provide some sort of band experience. But a full-time tenured band teacher is not something that our school can afford.

As I explained last post, Leland School would be in a different position if we had been spending a little more money in 1994. We would have the option of asking the voters to approve millages for operations, for payroll, utilities, and bus fuel, the biggest hunks of a school's budget and the fastest rising portion of everybody's costs.

But Wait! There's More! If your school was one of those spending more than $6500 per student in 1994, your school gets special "20j money" straight from the state of Michigan because....well... just because.

Leland School's business manager, Sandy Potts, described the situation in a March 2008 paper. Here are some highlights:

PROPOSAL “A” AND SECTION 20j
The promise of Proposal “A” was that both property tax levies and educational dollars for K-12 schools would be equalized throughout the state. The formula created would, over time, narrow the gap between the highest funded and lowest funded K-12 school districts.

Language in Section 380.1211 of the State School Code, as revised, limited the increase in per pupil funding for each district to the lesser of the rate of inflation or the amount determined by the legislature in each year’s budget. This meant that those schools with very high per pupil funding would get enough to cover inflation but the lower paid schools would gradually be given more to bring the funding levels closer together. The gap between the highest and lowest school districts’ per-pupil funding began at $7,532 in 1994 and narrowed to $5,454 in 2000 under this formula.

In 2000, the increase to the Student Foundation Grant Allowance was $238 per pupil but the inflation rate was relatively low at 1.6%. This meant that the schools at the highest end of the funding range would have received less than $238 per pupil. (Remember that these schools were already receiving as much as $5,424 more per pupil than the lowest paid schools.) This was not satisfactory to the schools at the highest end of the scale and therefore the legislature was convinced to add Section 20j of the State Aid Fund which allows them to receive the full foundation increase. This was a direct, purposeful, political change in opposition to the intent of Proposal “A” as passed by the voters of the State of Michigan.

Section 20j payments average $251 per pupil and are given to the 51 highest paid schools in the state. The total paid out under Section 20j has averaged $54,000,000 annually for the last five years, for a total of $270,000,000 paid to the 51 wealthiest districts in the state...

...The 20j schools will insist that they can’t survive without the 20j payments but even you if remove the 20j payments, these schools will still receive a minimum of $1,118 and as much as $5,135 more per pupil than the base foundation grant which is the amount with which than half of Michigan’s schools must operate their programs.

In fiscal year 2000, to qualify for the original 20j monies, a school must have had a base grant of $6500 or greater. Since that time a hold-harmless base grant has been set each year and those above that amount receive the extra monies based on the above mentioned calculation. Fifty one districts qualified in the first year. However, only 50 districts qualified in 2000 based on their foundation grant allowance and only 45 districts qualified in years 2002-2008. Yet each year, all 51 of the original schools have been given 20j payments. To date, the 20j payments made to unqualified schools from 2000-2008 is approximately $84,250,000; money that should have been used elsewhere.

Dan Hanrahan, Director of the State Aid and School Finance Office, states that the legislature has never given him direction to change the funding formula for the 20j schools even though the base grant for those schools has been changed each year. Thus all 51 schools on the original list, whether they meet the new 20j base amount or not, continue to receive additional funding for each of their students.

I can't figure out what the moral of the story is. Schools that always had more money still get more money. The rules are so complicated that I can barely find out what they all are, let alone explain them to you. The Director of the School Aid Fund can't even give a good answer as to why some schools get more.

I keep thinking about last fall when the State of Michigan almost shut down because they couldn't come up with a balanced budget. My brother called some friends in Lansing and asked what the legislators were discussing. His friends said, "Oh the legislators aren't talking, they're just sitting around. The lobbyists are meeting and when they come up with a compromise, they'll tell the legislators what to do."

Meanwhile, there goes the band teacher.

Why I Don't Like Ballot Initiatives

Graphic from the Citizens for Equity site

In 1995, Michigan voters passed Proposal A, an initiative to lessen the reliance on property taxes as the primary funding source for Michigan's schools, and to provide more stable and more equitable funding of all students throughout the state.

I campaigned for Proposal A, even though my own district, Leland Public Schools, would become a “donor district”, with our property taxes contributing more to the state fund than we got back in school aid. We had a ringside seat when Kalkaska Pubic School ended its school year in April because voters wouldn’t agree to another millage and they ran out of money. It was clear to me that my kids would be much better off living in a state where everyone had access to quality public education, not just the kids in certain districts. The ballot language of Proposal A was pretty straightforward:

A proposal to increase the state sales and use tax rates from 4% to 6%, limit annual increases in property tax assessments, exempt school operating millages from uniform taxation requirement and require 3/4 vote of Legislature to exceed statutorily established school operating millage rates. The proposed constitutional amendment would:

1. Limit annual assessment increase for each property parcel to 5% or inflation rate, whichever is less. When property is sold or transferred, adjust assessment to current value.

2. Increase the sales/use tax. Dedicate additional revenue to schools.

3. Exempt school operating millages from uniform taxation requirement.

4. Require 3/4 vote of Legislature to exceed school operating millage rates.

5. Activate laws raising additional school revenues through taxation including partial restoration of property tax.

6. Nullify alternative laws raising school revenues through taxation, including an increase income tax, personal exemption increase, and partial restoration of property taxes.

Should this proposal be adopted? Yes___ No__.

Everyone would pay slightly higher sales tax, real estate taxes would be more uniform and be insulated from rising too quickly, schools would have a stable source of funding, and school aid would be more evenly distributed.

Proposal A should have worked. It could have worked. But, even as folks like me were campaigning for the idea of equitable funding for Michigan schools, at the expense of our own districts, there were certain districts who were quietly arguing that all that equity was fine for others, just not them.

Sometime around the vote on Proposal A, a little known piece of legislation, the Public Act 283 of 1994, gave the 51 highest funded districts of Michigan the right to ask their homestead taxpayers for “hold-harmless millages” that let them opt out of the equalizing effects of Proposal A. These millages are levied on homestead property first, and the districts are not allowed to levy an amount that would increase their per-pupil spending faster than the rate of inflation. 51 districts (out of about 500) "qualified" for this privilege by spending $6500 or more per student in 1994.

Although it was contrary to the promise of Proposal A, there is nothing inherently wrong with giving communities the choice to support their local districts above the average level. There is something wrong about giving the privilege to some districts and not others. The $6500 cutoff was arbitrary, and some people have described it as rewarding districts who were not so frugal with taxpayer's money.

There was something going on in the background at the time of Proposal A.

Prior to the implementation of Proposal A in 1995, the State of Michigan and public school districts shared in the financing of the employers’ shares of contributions to Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System (MPSERS) for public school districts. Those contributions, expressed as a percentage of active employee payrolls, prefunded the actuarial costs of the defined benefit plan provided to public school employees plus the costs of health benefits for retirees on a pay-as-you-go basis. After Proposal A was approved, full responsibility for financing the employers’ contributions passed to the school districts.*

At first glance it seems that the yearly increases in the per-student grant, which keep up with inflation for the most part, ought to be sufficient to keep schools properly funded. In reality, the annual increase is overshadowed by spiraling retirement and health care costs, leaving less each year to actually educate kids.

How did this happen? There was no mention of pension or health care funding in the Proposal A ballot language. And even after Proposal A passed, the stock market was paying off so the schools' contributions were not that onerous. Would we knowingly have approved a system that worked great in good economic times but fell apart when times got tough?

For years, I could get nowhere talking to my state legislators about school funding. legislation by ballot initiative was the perfect cover for them. They would just say "We can't do anything about that, it's an amendment to the state constitution." even though they were happy to pass all sorts of exemptions to the taxes that were supposed to support the school aid fund.

Last Saturday there was a woman standing in front of the Post Office collecting signatures for the Health Care for Michigan ballot iniative. I asked her "Why a ballot initiative?" and she said, "So the legislature can't mess it up." I signed her petition, but I'm really hoping we can elect some state legislators with brains and backbones.

*Quote from the Citizen's Research Council of Michigan's 2004 report, Financing Michigan Retired Teacher Pension and Health Care Benefits)

Vetal Elementary

I've been watching for news about Vetal Elementary, in the Detroit Public School system, for the past two years, ever since daughter Shelagh joined the America Reads program and started tutoring Vetal second graders in reading. Twice a week, she would join four other students in a University of Michigan car and drive to the school on the west side of Detroit to work with kindersgarteners and third graders. The program helped her find her place at UM and connected her to kids and adults, connections that had been lacking her experience of big classes and dorm living.

But her accounts of life at Vetal were uneven. She said the school had "spirit" despite the surroundings. She was loved the murals in the halls, not so much the locked doors and metal detectors. Many kids came to school dressed, fed and ready to learn, but many others didn't show up for days or weeks at a time, and when they did come back their excuses were things like "My mom didn't feel like getting up." Most of the kids were being raised by single mothers, most were poor, some had firsthand stories of shootings and murders. At one point, the school had no more pencils for the kids to use; the University of Michigan students took up a collection and brought a slew of pencils with them.

Shelagh described teachers who were "awesome," who were making sense and establishing order and teaching despite the neighborhood's chaos and poverty. Her favorite third grade teacher, Mr. Mullane, impressed her in the way he never raised his voice, "He didn't need to," she said, "but he wasn't a softy, he always kept order." He treated all of the kids respectfully, and did whatever it took to make learning happen. He played the guitar and sang to his class, composed songs about history, recorded them on his own time, and all the kids learned their history when they learned the songs.

She also described teachers who were barely there, who spent class time talking on the phone, and hollered at the kids who dared interrupt her conversations. There was a mean kindergarten teacher, hated by her students, who didn't show up and didn't even call on more than one occasion, leaving the class in the care of an aide who was only authorized to let the kids watch TV.

I wanted to write and share these stories as soon as I heard them, as they are an important part of my ongoing look at Michigan school funding. But I didn't tell those stories because I didn't want to give the Detroit bashers or public school bashers any more to work with. I was hoping that other Detroit schools were better than Vetal, but what if they weren't? I was rooting for Vetal Elementary, a school I've never visited, throughout it all.

Today's Detroit Free Press reports that Vetal Elementary, and four high schools, will be "restructured:"

Current administrators will be reassigned to different buildings -- they will not return to their current school. Teachers being transferred away from the schools will have the opportunity to reapply to return.

Principals' contracts end at the end of the school year. If the district wants to keep them, then officials will offer them another contract.

The Turn Around School plan coincides with the governor's small schools initiative. Gov. Jennifer Granholm has asked the Legislature to endorse a plan to create the 21st Century Schools Fund, which would allow schools that enroll more than 800 students and miss federal standards for two years or more to create small high schools of about 400 students.

Shelagh didn't qualify for work study this year, but she is still following the situation at Vetal. "I wish I was graduating this year, I'd apply for a job there." We will be watching to see what happens next.

I wrote a piece on small schools a while back. Here is a Free Press article about the governor's initiative, and the Governor's web page on the Small Schools initiative.

Selling our Schools to Pay the Bills

Michigan's slow-moving school funding crisis tends to get lost in the shuffle amid the bad news about the Big Three, the threatened state shutdowns, and the "one-state recession". Most people think like the lady down the road who told me "As long as the bus shows up every morning to take the kids to school, I just figure our school is doing alright."

It's hard to think beyond the local. Even if my kids' school and your kids' school seem to be doing fine, that doesn't mean the system isn't messed up. An article in today's Lansing State Journal, New proposal would solve school funding woes describes the biggest problem, in terms of dollars facing Michigan's school districts:

A 2004 report from the non-partisan Citizens Research Council found "unfunded pension and health liabilities" for Michigan school employees now amount to around $19.3 billion.

In this case, a "liability" means money legally owed to pensioners who have retired, confident their pensions would take care of them after their years of service. "Unfunded" means just that. There are no assets on the books allocated to cover the $19.3 billion in pension and health care liabilities promised by the system.

School districts make annual contributions to cover pension and health care obligations for their employees, both active and retired. These contributions today consume around 23 percent of all local school budgets. And they're rising fast. Estimates by Citizens Research Council economists predict their contribution rate will increase to around 32 percent in about a decade.

And that means that school districts, already hit hard by inflation and the funding rigidities imposed by Proposal A, risk being eaten alive by their fixed costs. Even then, what the school districts are paying in isn't going to be enough to cover their obligations.

The author doesn't mention the historical basis for this problem, that former governor Engler decided that the pension fund did not need to be fully funded, and then drained that account to make his tax cuts possible. No use crying over spilt milk, I guess. And of course those health care costs are crippling this and a lot of other pension funds, just like health care costs are crippling a host of other governments and industries.

Likewise, he doesn't mention that one of the fine-print side effects of Proposal A was to raise the local districts' portion of retirement costs from 5% to 100%. The author moves right along to the great new solution: sell our school buildings!

Take all the school buildings and real estate in the entire school system. Sell them to, say, a real estate trust. Lease back the buildings needed for school purposes. Take the excess and use it to fund the unfunded pension and health care liability.

Bingo! You've resolved the problem by, in the language of the accountants, "securitizing the asset value."

.....Naturally, the schools will have to pay rent on the buildings they've leased. If the trust needs to get a 5 percent return on its $30 billion investment to buy the buildings, that's $1.5 billion a year.

But consider that the real estate trust would without doubt manage and maintain the buildings far more efficiently than school districts do. Department of Education figures for 2006 show a $1.8 billion cost for building operations and maintenance.

Could that be halved?

Possibly. What seems certain is that the figure could be greatly reduced. So even without counting building maintenance savings, there's enough money to provide a return for investors in the trust.

The article plows on from that point, with the implicit assumption that local school districts are poor money managers and with the requisite vague example of mismanaged costs.

Frankly, it's hard for me to pay attention at that point. I can only remember those many evenings I spent at our Leland Public School working on the School Facilities Committee in the late 1990's, trying to decide what sort of building project we needed, and where we would build it. I was one of thirty-some volunteers engaged in this process, a lot for this small community. Our committee was only the second generation in a process that took three different attempts to pass a construction millage. What eventually emerged was a compact, versatile building located in the village and used by everyone from early-morning weightlifters to the evening senior citizens group. The building itself came in well under budget, partly due to lucky timing in the construction cycle. Our school is a centerpiece for the community, and it sits on a choice piece of land, to boot. Sell it? To a Real Estate Trust?

Handing control of school funds over to the state has been a losing proposition for our school district. We send boatloads of money to Lansing, we are refunded a mediocre amount, and then are asked to cover more and more in fixed costs. It's hard enough dealing with the State of Michigan, now we are supposed to sell our building and deal with a landlord as well?

What a mess. I don't have the answers, but I know that if the rural areas don't pay attention, we are going to have to swallow someone else's solution.

More on Small Schools

I posted a reply to Jack Lessenberry's column putting some blame for the School Aid Fund deficit on small schools. Many of the arguments against rural school consolidation are also applicable to the current discussion about closing schools in Detroit, so I'll run it again here:

It seems that big schools, like big cars, is an idea that we keep buying even though its time has come and gone.

The big push for school consolidation started in the late 1950’s, as part of the push for better education that was sparked by the launch of Sputnik. It made sense then. Gas was less than 10 cents a gallon. New roads and interstates were being built everywhere. Education was seen as a content based commodity, so it was important to get students physically close to good libraries and teachers who had the specialized educations that were beyond the reach of smaller schools. Nobody worried about crime in schools. No one had even heard of sprawl.

Today we face a different world. In the age of the internet, memorization of acts, or housing facts in libraries, is less important. Students and teachers must become lifelong learners, adept at evaluating a constant flow of competing information. Employability depends on being adept at embracing new technologies at a record pace, on emotional intelligence and team working skills, on good work habits and a highly developed sense of personal responsibility.

In the 1990’s, the Search Institute’s research produced a list of 40 Developmental Assets essential to raising successful young people. Those of us who live in small school communities were not surprised to find that small schools have always provided many of these assets. Kids do better in intact communities.

But aren’t small schools an expensive luxury? The people at The Small Schools Project don’t think so. They cite studies that look, not just at the cost of running buses, paying staff, and keeping the lights on, but at the cost of producing an actual graduate. As schools get bigger, the dropout rate increases. Studies in both New York City and Nebraska show that the economy of scale in the larger schools disappears when measured in cost per graduate.

It makes sense to evaluate schools this way. You wouldn’t measure the efficiency of an auto plant by how many cars they tried to make; you’d want to know how many actually ran. And putting a half-built car on the scrap heap costs nothing compared to setting a high school dropout loose on the streets. If we were to factor in the societal costs of high school dropouts, small schools would win hands down.

In Michigan, consolidation is not the answer to our school funding problems. Some of our biggest districts are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and some of our smaller districts are winning awards for efficiency. Talk of consolidation only diverts attention from our real problems: the erosion of Proposal A’s tax foundation, the escalating cost of health and retiree benefits, and the overall inequity in funding.

Schools of Choice

The Petoskey News-Review ran a story this week on how "Schools of Choice', a policy now 10 years old has played out in the Charlevoix-Petoskey area.

At work this week I talked to two different coworkers about school choice. Both were furious with their current schools. One was trying to move their kids from Northport to Suttons Bay, the other was trying to move their kids from Suttons Bay to Northport. In both cases there were communication issues between the school and the parents, but I wondered if the fact that they could vote with their feet gave these families an alternative to demanding that their current school improve. Both families felt that their concerns were ignored until they threatened to switch schools.

The other big school funding news in Leelanau is the headline in the Enterprise that Glen Lake may become, like Northport, an out-of-formula school.

Since adoption of Proposal A, most school districts have relied on a state per-pupil foundation allowance, generated from a statewide 6-mill property tax levy for education. The foundation allowance, multiplied by the number of students, represents the lion’s share of revenue to most school districts. These schools are referred to as “in formula."

However, when the district’s non-homestead tax revenue is greater than what the district would receive “in formula,” it is designated as “out of formula."

If the district can convince the state Department of Education that they are out-of-formula, then Glen Lake would rely on property taxes instead of per-pupil grants for their funding. They could even change designations on a yearly basis, depending on the interplay of student counts and property values.

In Praise of the Small School

The article in today's Detroit Free Press about Michigan's micro schools gave me a different perspective on the size of our local Leland school district. I've been thinking about Leland Public School a lot this week, first after reading Jack Lessenberry's recent essay blaming Michigan's growing school funding crisis on too many "hopelessly tiny school districts," and then later after looking over Time magazine's December 18 issue about remaking education in America.

Leland School measures up Time magazine's criteria quite well. Kids not only learn technology, but they live technology, taking home laptops, designing websites, blogging in their English assignments, even broadcasting this year's mock election over the internet. They are working in teams, from elementary school on up, learning to "git 'er done" even if they end up teamed with someone they'd rather avoid. They are learning to think critically and to do their own research, working towards the school's goal of producing life-long learners. Although an improved international outlook has not been a stated goal, we managed to graduate the most worldly class ever last year: of 42 graduates, there were 3 exchange students, two recent immigrants from India, one returning exchange student, and two who had designed their own international treks.

All of this is happening in the context of a small community that sounds a lot like the "micro schools" described in the Free Press article:

One upside to that, said student Kayla Gust, is fewer students means fewer cliques. Everyone is invited to the parties and nobody is ignored at school.

"You basically know everyone and you all get along," she said. "You have your friends, but you talk to everyone."

I have always liked that aspect of our smaller school community; my kids have always felt responsible for and connected to their community in ways that just can't happen in a larger school. They also know that in this small-town they can't get away with being sneaky. If I don't catch them, some other mom will and I'll hear about it anyway.

But is this all worth the money? Aren't small schools less efficient? The Small Schools Project doesn't think so. Liz first spoke to me of this research last year, when she was writing a paper on charter schools. It seems that if you look at the cost of producing a graduate (as opposed to the cost of making the payroll and keeping the lights on), small schools are much more cost efficient because more kids graduate.

If you were trying to evaluate the efficiency of an auto plant, you would be interested in how many working cars it was able to produce. You wouldn't count the ones that got thrown off the line because of defects. "Defective" work in a school is much more costly because we can't just toss non-graduates on the scrap heap. Dropouts are much more likely to suffer from all sorts of costly problems, from jail time to poor health to unplanned pregnancy.

The Dollars and Sense: The Cost Effectiveness of Small Schools (pdf) paper puts it this way:

School size is arguably more important than either racial makeup or class size, according to at least one analysis. The Report Card on American Education (2001) noted that higher outcomes on standardized tests, such as the SAT and the ACT, as well as higher rates of graduation, may be connected more with school size than with race (LeFevre & Hederman, 2001, p. 3). The study also found that school size, not classroom size, was the key to student performance. Children performed better in schools where the principal knew their names.

In the 1990's, studies in both New York City and Nebraska showed that the so-called inefficiencies of smaller schools were greatly reduced when calculated on a cost-per-graduate basis. At 2006 transportation prices, we may have already outlived the era of ever larger schools.

Yet, here in Leelanau there is hardly a discussion about our schools, or school funding, that does not end in talk of further school consolidation. Never mind that we are entering an era of internet-based education and rising gas prices. Never mind that our county is long, narrow, and bisected by Lake Leelanau. Never mind that we already have kids on hour-long bus rides and that our schools, when they have remained in their communities, still function as the social backbones of those communities.

And never mind that in Michigan, size is just not relevant to our school funding problems. Some of our biggest school disctricts --Grand Rapids, Flint-- are the closest to bankruptcy court. Many of our smaller school districts are quite efficient, making good use of their staff, their students, and of their extensive community support.

An overview of Michigan's School Funding Woes

I keep a Google Search of "Michigan School Funding", and read a half dozen articles daily. Some of Michigan's schools are better off at the moment and some are in critical straights, but all are heading in the direction of financial ruin.

When I talk to people about public school funding, people tend to focus on a few well-publicized issues --teacher's benefits, waste in the system, shrinking class sizes-- without seeing the whole picture. I can't blame them. After all that studying, I still have a hard time putting the causes of our current crisis into perspective. So I was excited to read this article by James Rufus Koren, reporting on a presentation by Tom Clay:

Bleak picture painted of future school finances

— The former state deputy treasurer said Michigan’s budget problems are caused by a weak economy and a structural deficit.

By James Rufus Koren
Daily Telegram Staff Writer

ADRIAN — Tom Clay of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan painted a grim picture of the state budget and school funding Thursday night in a presentation to more than 150 people at the Lenawee Intermediate School District Vo-Tech center.

In his presentation, the former state deputy treasurer said Michigan’s budget problems — the worst since World War II, he said — are caused both by a weak economy and by a structural deficit.

A structural deficit occurs, he said, when the price to maintain current programs goes up faster than the state’s revenue can grow. He said it will take structural changes, not just a stronger economy, to fix the state’s budget and school funding.

“Superintendents and school boards and financial people in public schools and in local government are going to be confronted with situations year after year where there just isn’t enough money to continue to operate programs,” Clay said. “It’s going to take structural changes — some kind of structural changes in the spending and revenue sides of the budget — to heal this budget.”

State budget

On the spending side, steadily increasing costs for corrections and community health have been eating up money in the state’s general fund.In 2001, corrections and community health spending took up about 44 percent of the state’s general fund budget. In 2007, more than half of the general fund will pay for corrections and community health, which includes Medicaid.

“We can expect the general funds on Medicaid to grow three or four times as fast as revenue, and that’s a function of the cost of medical care going up much more rapidly,” Clay said. Corrections costs, he added, are expected grow about twice as fast as the state’s revenue.

On the revenue side of the state budget, Clay said Michigan’s tax system reflects the state’s economy from 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, taxing most goods while services go untaxed.“As far as the eye can see ... the revenue causes are going to continue unless we somehow change our revenue structure to make it more like the 21st century than the middle of the 20th century,” Clay said. “We have major revenue sources that just are simply not responsive to the economy of today.”

In the middle of the 20th century, Clay said, Michigan’s work force was divided evenly between providing goods and providing services. Today, the overwhelming majority — 80 percent — of the state’s jobs are service-oriented, he said.A combination of tax cuts over the past few years and the fact that few services are taxed in Michigan mean that the state collects a smaller percentage of taxes than it did in 1999, down to 6.7 percent from a peak of about 8 percent.

“That doesn’t sound like much, but you multiply 1.3 percentage points times $330 billion, that’s the bottom line. If the state had continued to collect a constant proportion of personal income, it would be collecting $4-plus billion more than it does,” Clay said.

Among the tax cuts figured into those figures, Clay said, is the recent cut of the Single Business Tax, which takes effect in 15 months and will mean $1.9 billion less in state revenue.

School funding

Clay said the state’s structural deficit both affects and exists within the state’s School Aid Fund, which makes up $12.8 billion of the state’s $41.2 billion budget.

This year, the state increased the school foundation grant — the amount of money schools get for each student and the lion’s share of every school’s operating budget — by $210. Meanwhile, the cost of running schools this year could go up, on average, by more than $400.

Schools will have to increase their contribution to retirement funds from 16.34 percent of payroll to 17.74 percent of payroll. That increase will cost about $80 per student, Clay said.

Tack on as much as $240 per student for contract-mandated “pay and step” raises for employees, at least $50 per student for increases in health insurance costs and another $50 for increases in fuel, utility and supply costs, and districts have more than $200 in additional expenses not covered by the increase in foundation grant, Clay said.

Looking at projections for the 2008 fiscal year, Clay said school costs will continue to increase faster than school revenues.

“Health insurance has been going up in double digits for the last several years. The statewide average now, health insurance is $1,200 per pupil,” Clay said, adding that health insurance costs are likely to continue growing by 4 percent or 5 percent per year — about $50 or $60 more per student.

State remedies

A structural deficit, Clay said, requires structural changes in terms of spending and revenues. He noted, though, that the largest changes would have to come at the state level.

One option to fix the state’s budget and school funding issues would be to raise taxes. Clay said if the state does not raise taxes, it will have to cut about 3 percent of spending from its budget every year for the foreseeable future.

Michigan is a low-to-average tax state, Clay said, and, “people are beginning to get concerned about whether we’re beginning to give up some important quality of life in the state in exchange for being a low-tax state.”

Clay was careful to say he is not advocating tax increases, but that the potential for more revenue from taxing services is "enormous.”

“Services alone that we don’t tax would yield about $8.8 billion in tax income,” he said, but added it might be a bad idea to tax some such as business-to-business services or health care services.

The state could also look further into pooling for health insurance or changing contribution rates for retirement funds, he said.State Rep. Dudley Spade, D-Tipton, who was at Thursday’s presentation, said he is against taxing services because such a change would be taking a “piecemeal” approach to a larger problem.

“What he’s really talking about is we have a structural deficit, and we need significant change to turn this around,” Spade said. “Going at it on a piecemeal basis has not worked in the past and it's not gonna work now.”

Another possible change to the education funding system is Proposition 5, which will be on November’s ballot. The proposition would amend the State School Aid Act of 1979 by providing funding guarantees for universities, community colleges and K-12 education and cap the amount of money schools must pay for employee retirement costs.

Under the proposition, school spending would increase every year by the rate of inflation, regardless of how well the economy is doing, Clay said, and schools would be protected from big increases in health care costs.

“For local districts,” Clay said, “it would represent a major windfall.”

The proposal would, however, mean budget cuts in other programs funded through the state’s general fund.

Local remedies

While Clay said local leaders and school districts have little control over the structural deficit in education funding, he said schools can try to cut their spending.

Part of that, he said, involves renegotiating contracts for salaries and benefits, and paying employees what the district can afford, not necessarily what employees need or deserve.

Another option is to look at cutting programs. He said for most school districts the goal has been to “maintain the classroom, a teacher and 25 or 30 smiling faces, and cutting in other areas — art, music, athletics.”

“There’s not a heck of a lot that can be done in the program area unless the whole model of how education is delivered is changed from what it’s been for decades — or centuries, I guess — and that’s a real-live person teaching real-live kids,” Clay said.

After Clay’s presentation, he led a short discussion with a panel of Lenawee County superintendents and board members.

Adrian Public Schools Superintendent Del Cochran said schools can save money by working with each other. He noted that Adrian runs the food service program for the Lenawee Intermediate School District and does bus maintenance for Hudson Area Schools and Madison School District.

“The more we can work cooperatively as school districts in this county, the more we can better save dollars and cents,” said Mark Wolfe, a member of the Tecumseh Board of Education and one of the panelists.

Panelists agreed schools will likely need to continue to find ways to save money.

After the presentation, Madison Superintendent Jim Hartley asked Clay, “I mean, how bad does it have to get?”

Clay responded, “It takes a train wreck.”

Make Michigan School Funding More Equal

Here is a guest columnist piece from yesterday's Detroit Free Press. Thank goodness inequity in school funding is finally getting some publicity.

Make district funding more equal
BY JEFF SMITH
May 22, 2006

Equal education for all children is one of America's defining principles. But that equality does not exist in Michigan's public schools. We need to make things right.

Consider that this year the state will pay my school district in northern Michigan about $7,000 to educate my daughter, while at the same time, Birmingham's school district, between state and local taxes, will have about $12,000 to educate a girl there. Multiplied from kindergarten through 12th grade, that difference would mean the girl in Birmingham receives a $156,000 education while my daughter receives a $91,000 education -- a $65,000 gap.

I can hardly imagine it -- $5,000 extra for every child in the school each year. My school could send every student to Europe for a month to study foreign languages -- no exaggeration. But of course, what we would do instead is pay down the $700,000 deficit our district faces this year because funding from the state doesn't cover our expenses.

I am a school board member in the Glen Lake district where my children attend. The northwest Lower Michigan district has 850 K-12 students. I have sat through one meeting after another looking at that $700,000 number in the spreadsheet cell labeled "deficit."

It's difficult to know what to do with a deficit that equals 10% of your entire budget, when we've already cut so much. We have laid off our middle school principal, cut our superintendent to half time and laid off the middle school science teacher and a couple of English teachers. We cut sociology and psychology; advance-placement chemistry will now be taught via Internet. We postponed buying new textbooks yet another year.

As for other districts up here, Kalkaska no longer has buses. Houghton Lake is essentially bankrupt. The superintendent in Suttons Bay collected pop cans to buy anatomy textbooks. The joke going around up here: "What's Birmingham doing, scaling back its polo program?"

I mention Birmingham, but of course there are many other districts that receive far more than we do. Southfield, which has the same number of students as Traverse City, collects $42 million more. Traverse City has a $2-million deficit and is closing schools.

Michigan's school funding is controlled by the Legislature and the Legislature is controlled by population centers. Rural Michigan is always outvoted when it comes to school funding.

And that's why I'm hoping the people of Michigan's wealthier school districts read this. The Legislature says there is no more money for schools. I can accept that; Michigan is in tough economic times. But Michigan will not succeed if a $65,000 disparity exists between one child's education and another's.

Here's the solution: Each year there is nearly $1 billion of what I call inequality dollars -- money spent in districts that exceeds the state's base funding. I'm asking you folks in those districts to tell your legislator that you are OK with giving up a portion of your inequality dollars to help all of Michigan's students receive a good education.

And let me be clear: I'm not asking that your district funding be cut to what we are forced to get by on. Heck no. I'm just asking that you give up enough so the children in my community and rural communities across Michigan can receive a quality core curriculum. For wealthy districts that feel they just can't do with a penny less, I offer my budget-cutting expertise free of charge.

Michigan's future shines brightest when all of its children are well educated. There is no legitimate argument against that. We must unify around the idea of equal education. Please send your legislator an e-mail today saying you support more equitable school funding for all of Michigan's children.

JEFF SMITH of Cedar is a trustee of the Glen Lake
Schools.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

Citizens for Equity

Michigan's Proposal A promised to provide adequate funding for Michigan's public schools in part by pooling property tax monies and redistributing it on a more equitable basis. Here in Leelanau, we were making something of a sacrifice by agreeing to this scheme. After all, some of our property values are among the highest in the state. But we had been pretty close witnesses to the Kalkaska school district's budget crisis. I remember thinking at the time that the kids whose schools closed halfway through the year for lack of funds were my kids' peers. I wasn't building a livable world for my kids if the folks they would live among were going to be only half educated.

I might have been less enthusiastic about Proposal A if I had known that certain school districts were already angling out of the funding equity that was one of the goals of Proposal A. Through a small loophole called "20j hold-harmless" millages, a number of districts from the politically powerful southeast area of Michigan retained the right to levy enhancement millages. According to Citizens For Equity:

Michigan's funding system continues to differentiate between students based on geographical location and provides substantially greater funding for certain areas in the state. This funding is based almost entirely on political power. Politically powerful districts in the Southeast portion of our state have benefited greatly from enhanced state funding while certain other districts have been forced to live with minimum funding levels. This differentiation in funding creates unequal educational opportunities and puts students from low funded districts at a disadvantage to their peers from higher funded areas.

Some downstate schools are collecting as much as $12,000 per student compared to the base funding of $6875. Our local districts lived without "raises" to the per pupil grant for many years, even as their fixed costs went up.

Citizens for Equity is a new lobbying group aiming to publicize and correct this inequity. They are planning a public information meeting on June 8th in Traverse City. You can find more information on their website here.

Anna and the MEAPS

This month public school students in grades 3-8 are taking MEAP tests. While I was cooking dinner last Friday, Anna sat in the kitchen and launched into a 10 minute monologue about how to take a MEAP test.

"You have to fill in the bubbles right. The test is in one book and the answers are in another book. You have to fill in the right page of the answer book. And the right part. If you start to fill in the wrong page, don't erase it. Just go over and start filling in answers again on the right page. Then when you're done you can go and erase the other part. Really erase it. You only get 50 minutes. I mean an hour, almost, 50 minutes."

"You have to fill the whole bubble in and you can't make any marks outside of the bubble or you'll be marked wrong. If I accidentally make a mark outside of the bubble, I erase the whole bubble and start over again. Or sometimes I rub the eraser around the whole bubble to get the ones that got out. If there's even just one mark outside the bubble they mark it wrong, even if you knew the right answer. I don't know why they're like that. I know they like neatness, but...." She trails off and starts in again: "It's marked by a machine. They think the machine is real smart. But I don't know."

It was all about the bubbles. She never mentioned any content, or even what subject she was being tested on, but she knew how to fill in bubbles.

A few years ago we got rid of the voting machines with the levers and the funny half-curtain that opens "cha-chunk" when you're done and pull the big red handle over. Now adults fill in bubbles to vote, but we get to put each answer on the same page right next to its question. Our answers are read by the machine right there at the fire hall, and if it can't read a ballot we get to take it back and fix it or even get a new one and start over.

If you hang around on election day for very long, you'll see people of all ages who have trouble with the mechanics of filling in bubbles. Small wonder. Dr. Mel Levine, a pediatrician who studies learning, describes the task of putting pencil to paper as a coordination of a series of skill:

When a student writes and forms letters, he makes use of his graphomotor abilities. These special writing skills involve the coordination and control of the muscles at the end of his fingers. Some muscles are used to make a pencil move up and down, others to make the pencil move left and right, others to move it in a circular motion, etc. Since writing letters requires a combination of these movements, different muscles are used to form different letters. Not surprisingly, when students write, some have trouble getting their muscles to move in the correct way. The student’s first steps in forming letters involve identifying the letter to be written, using memory to recall what that letter should look like, and making and holding a mental picture of the letter. The student then "sends" signals from her brain to the finger muscles required to move the pencil and to form the desired letter. Finally, the student forms the letter in the right place on the paper.... Writing requires students to remember several things simultaneously (forming letters and words, using correct grammar and punctuation, recalling the ideas they want to write, etc.). If a student has a hard time retrieving any of this information from long or short-term memory, the entire writing process will be more difficult.

Filling in bubbles is, of course, somewhat easier than writing, but still requires most of these skills.

While Richard and I were watching baseball last week, there was a play that involved picking up a grounder and making a split second decision to throw to first instead of trying to pick off the leading runner at third. As the announcers dissected the play, Richard said "You know what's wrong with these announcers"

"They talk too much?"

"They forget that at this level, it's all automatic. They're not thinking 'Can I make that throw? Should I try it?' They've done this so many times, its automatic." I can tell that he is thinking about Anna's Peewee baseball team, which he has helped coach for the last few years.

The team is a testament to the fact that learning is not linear. They have played together since T-ball, enthusiastically whacking the ball and trotting off towards third base. Last summer things finally seemed to be coming together for the kids. The were watching the ball, getting it under control, completing the throw to first base. Johnny as pitcher and Christian on first base were a particularly good combination.

Then one night Johnny was playing third with one man on second. Left field threw him the ball and he tagged the base, but the runner was called safe! Eating ice cream after the game, Richard explained that if it was not a force play, it was necessary to tag the runner before he reached the base. Johnny understood the concept and all seemed fine, but the next game and the game after that were awful. You could see the kids pick up the ball and then freeze, thinking about where to throw. Kids covering bases were looking to see where the runners were and then failing to catch the ball. The game was suddenly more complicated than just throwing to first or second.

Anyone looking for "Adequate Yearly Progress" with our team would have been quite
disappointed in those games. It's not the fault of the kids or the parents or the coaches. It's no fault at all, that's just what learning is like. Baseball, like anything else worth learning, is a game of many levels. You are going to have times when you don't seem to be learning anything. You are going to have times when trying to move to the next level makes you worse, instead of better, as you try make another part of the job "automatic". The kids that press on past the frustrating spots are the ones who are learning how to learn, who are going to succeed, no matter the subject.

Coaching through these periods is particularly frustrating. It is interesting to see my husband also moving to the next level, trying to figure out how to be a better coach. It supports my premise that people who volunteer with kids end up learning as much, or more, than the kids. The folks behind those MEAP tests should try a season or two of coaching PeeWee.

I'm not sure if filling in bubbles teaches perseverance. I'm pretty sure it's not the best way to teach anything important. I keep wondering why adults who are voting get to fill in bubbles next to the questions, while third and fourth graders have to fill in bubbles in an unwieldy answer book. A few years ago we could have said that we do it this way because voters are deciding important public policy and third graders are just being tested. Now we are using the results of these ridiculous prove-nothing tests to decide public policy, to fund or close entire schools.

The first day of MEAPs Anna had laryngitis and I started to tell her to go back to bed for a few hours. Liz reminded me that it was MEAPs, so I sent her on her way with the tongue in cheek admonishment to "Make money for your school." She is a trooper, playing every inning to the end, regardless of the score.

Catching up

We are still waiting for the state legislature to decide how much money our schools will get for their operating budgets this year. Meanwhile, the Grand Rapids School District is on the brink of receivership. One of the promises of proposal A was that our property tax funds would be pooled so that all public schools would have a secure source of funding. Humph. There has been an active discussion of school funding issues on leelanau.com. This discussion has directed my attention to a bit of history: it seems that in the early 1990's then-governor Engler decided to finance his tax-cut frenzy by taking money from the school pension fund. A judge later ruled this illegal, but not before then fund had been depleted, just in time to miss out on the bull market of the late 90's. Today, contributions to that pension fund is one of the fastest growing expenses for school districts, right up there with health insurance and gasoline.

A lesser known provision of Proposal A was to transfer 100% of the responsibility for funding the teachers pension fund to the local school districts. (Previously their share was 5%.) This is how people like my state senator can say that school districts are "getting much more money than before proposal A" and be technically correct. They get to divest themselves from responsibility from the mess, implying that if school administrators can't make ends meet with "much more money", they must be poor money managers.

This should not be a surprise. Public schools have been a battle ground for the reckless right wing. Indeed, their ultimate goal seems to be the end of the public school system and the ascendancy of religious education in its place. Because the American public rejects this ultimate goal, they must work towards it by engineering crisises like our current situation. If it took 10 years for policies of the early '90s to yield results, that's okay! Killing public schools is a long term goal.

And More Leland Naked Gardener

Mike Hartigan was hoping that the Naked Gardener controversy would just quietly fade away. Instead the story was picked up by the Detroit Free Press and was then picked up across the country.

Almost all of the people looking at my blog yesterday got here from web searches on Leland+naked+gardener. So here is a little background on the story.

First of all, Leland Public School is a great school. My oldest daughter, Shelagh, graduated from Leland this year (read her Valedictorian Speech here). Liz, my second daughter will graduate next year and Anna will start 4th grade. It is a small school, about 450 students total in grades K-12. Shelagh's graduating class was 28 kids. The school staff has very little turnover, in fact Mike Hartigan was the principal when Shelagh started kindergarten, and most of Anna's teachers were also Shelagh and Liz's teachers ten years before.

In a typical high school there are a handful of kids trying to claw their way to the top of the class. At Leland I see the kids at the top of the class constantly reaching down to pull the others up. This goes all the way back to 5th and 6th grade, where the kids are taught about learning styles and study strategies, strategies that were originally developed for the "learning disabled", but that can make studying more efficient for everyone. In middle school there were tons of group projects. These were sometimes much more work that just doing it alone, but the kids learned, eventually, how to work with other people, even the ones you don't really like. Not only does the school produce some stellar scholars, exceptional school-wide scores on standardized tests, but we have had a 0% dropout rate for many years.

But Leland Public School is in Michigan, and Michigan is starving its public schools. In 1992, Michigan voters agreed via Proposal A to move from local property tax based school funding to a system where portions of the state's income tax, property taxes, and a 2% hike in the state sales tax would be earmarked for the state's school aid fund, the source of all public schools' operating budgets. The system worked for a while, but as a tax-cutting fervor overtook the state government in the late 1990s, the underpinnings of the new school funding plan were seriously eroded.

Thanks to our amazing community support, Leland School has been able to largely insulate our student population from the effects of rising costs and inadequate state funding. But insulating the kids also means insulating the parents. I first wrote of this during our regional Odyssey of the Mind competition. As dry as school funding reading is, it is just as important, if not more so, than showing up at every school event to cheer our kids on.

I found our state legislators, the people who are actually responsible for making sure our schools are funded, to be just as oblivious. My first letter to my State Senator Michelle McManus went unacknowledged, as did a phone message that I left on her answering machine. My second letter also went unanswered until I confronted her at the 4th of July parade, where she was scheduled to march directly behind the "Naked Gardener" float. Finally I got a response, but it is a far cry from the commitment to action that I was hoping for.

Meanwhile the Naked Gardener Calendar had been featured on the front page of the Leelanau Enterprise, the first time most of us had heard of it. It turns out that nude calendars are a popular (and lucrative) fundraiser across the US and in England. The controversy around our calendar is centered on Mike Hartigan, our school superintendent, even though a current school board member and two former school board members also posed.

There have been a lot of letters to the editor about the calendar and a heated online discussion. The whole thing has been an eye opener for kids like my Shelagh, who attends church of her own volition and had never understood the reason for the separation of church and state. She had never before seen the ugly side of the vocal minority attempting to impose their narrow view of morality on rest of us.

It was the students who were most fervent in their support of Mr. Hartigan. They respect him as a good and honorable man, and they have a new respect for his humility and sense of humor. As uncomfortable as most teenagers are with their bodies, posing naked is a feat that they are in awe of. Taking the flak without complaint is also awesome. But the teens don't understand a good deal of the ruckus. They say: "It's only pornography if someone likes looking at it."

Still More Naked Gardener

The Naked Gardener Calendar continues to cause a stir. Sunday's
article in the Traverse City Record Eagle was well written and balanced. According to the article, the first printing of the calendar has sold out, 500 copies at 20 dollars each. Not so balanced was the rumor yesterday that the pastor of the Lutheran church was bringing a petition to the school board meeting demanding that Mike Hartigan be punished for appearing in the calendar.

Oddly enough, I was at the 4-H office when I heard about the petition, checking on the progress of Leelanau County 4-H's main fundraiser, a plat book that sells for $28. Our plat book is a series of maps that detail the property lines and who owns what throughout the county. It is used by people interested in real estate, hunters and fishermen, farmers, and the generally curious. It is expensive to produce and has generated some vociferous complaints from people who disagree with how their property lines are portrayed. We started selling our latest printing of 1000 in April and we had sold 538 of them as of yesterday. I will be very happy if we sell out in a year; selling out in a matter of weeks is unthinkable.

I had a 4-H board meeting last night, but Liz went to the school board meeting as our family's representative. She reports that the high school library was filled and that the most of the people there wore yellow nametags that read "I Support Mike", that were made by a member of the class of 2003 and distributed by his mom. When I dropped Liz off I saw all kinds of people walking into school. Most of the faculty was there, many students, parents, and graduates.

Two people spoke against the calendar, but most of the meeting was, in fact, a "kind tribute to our superintendent" as one mom told me later. Mike Hartigan did offer an apology to anyone who was offended by the calendar. The threatened petition never materialized. One of the people who spoke out against the calendar in the first comment session spoke about what a good job Mr. Hartigan was doing in the second comment session.

Liz was confused by that, but I understand perfectly. None of these people are bad people, and almost everyone supports public schools and expects them to be adequately funded. It is totally possible to come out to a school board meeting alarmed about a calendar and come back home even more alarmed to find out that the tax dollars you had thought were paying for your local school are disappearing to who knows where.

People around here are polite. Although they came to speak about the calendar, they stayed to hear about the four new textbooks that our district will purchased this year, about the addition of a JV soccer team, and about how our intermediate school district's fund balance is growing even as the individual school districts are coming up short. It is hard to vilify the school board as you see them in action, trying to use our limited resources make the best choices for our kids. The Naked Gardener produced one of the best attended school board meetings in history, and that may be its crowning achievement.

Letter to the Editor

To be honest, I didn't know what to think about the Naked Gardener Calendar when I first heard about it. I didn't want to think about our school superintendent in the buff any more than my kids did.

After a while I started to think about the big picture. The reckless Republicans would like to convince us that nothing is worse than having to pay taxes. We are engaged in a game of Chicken. First they cut taxes, citing "waste in government" then when the coffers run dry they start to cut funding for services that we love and depend on, trying to see how much they can get away with.

Schools have to be funded somehow. Which is worse, paying taxes or seeing your friends and neighbors posing nude in a calendar?

Anyway, here is my letter to the Leelanau Enterprise, which ran this week:

Michigan’s current school funding crisis mystifies me. After all, didn’t the voters approve Proposal A, agreeing to an increased sales tax and the non-homestead property tax so that Michigan’s public schools would have a secure funding base?

My search for the reasons for this crisis found two opposing theories. One, put forth by the people at http://www.restoreproposala.com/, outlines over 70 changes to the tax codes that underlie Proposal A. This puts the responsibility for restoring the School Aid Fund directly on the state legislature, whose actions precipitated the crisis.

The other camp, exemplified by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy president Lawrence W. Reed, claims the problem is school boards and school administrators and their “tired, old ways of business-as-usual.”

Last week’s Enterprise put the second theory to rest. First we have Glen Lake and Suttons Bay exploring the possibility of sharing a superintendent. This is not “business as usual”. Then we have Mike Hartigan willing to give the shirt off his back –heck, the trousers off his legs! —to make sure that his school is able to fund the extra things that make our school outstanding. This is not “business as usual” and Mike does not look “tired”.

Aren’t we “out of the box” yet? It is time for each of us to write our state legislators and tell them to stop making excuses and start working on a plan. Make Proposal A work the way it was envisioned, to adequately fund all of Michigan’s public schools.

(Lawrence W Reed’s quote can be verified at http://www.mackinac.org/article.asp?ID=7141. Thank you for considering my letter for publication.)

Susan Och
51 S French Road
Lake Leelanau, MI 49653
256-8876
ochouse@voyager.net<\blockquote>

Some Hope for the School Aid Fund

Anna at our home beach, down the road at Schneider Beach on Lake Leelanau.

One of the excuses for delaying action on Michigan's School funding is to blame the problem on the state's weak economy. The school aid fund is partially fed by sales tax revenues and when people spend less they contribute less in the way of sales taxes. However, acknowledging that a weak economy has helped get us here is not the same as saying it is the only thing that got us here, or that we need to wait to act until the economy improves.

Education jobs are jobs. People employed in schools in Michigan generally spend their paychecks in Michigan. Our state is more than willing to subsidize manufacturing jobs with tax breaks. If we have to lay teachers off to give those tax breaks, then the economy has not gained an inch but education has suffered. How much better would it be to pump tax money into education, reviving the economy in the short run and creating , in the long term, the sort of highly educated workforce that will attract the high tech industries of the future.

Another aspect of the emerging high tech economy is cause for some hope. Sales tax revenues have been falling in recent years because more business is being done through internet and mail order sales, where sales tax is not collected. Last week Michigan joined 17 other states in establishing a network for collection of sales tax on internet transactions. While there is no Silver Bullet for school aid reform , it is a hopeful step in the right direction.

Finally a Follow-up

The online mayhem about the Naked Gardener continues. Liz and I enjoyed joking about the watering can being "the wonder of the nude male body". Everytime the cat tried to drink out of it Liz would shreik "Mom, the cat is discovering the wonder of the male body!" and "Lily, you loose cat!", paraphrasing a line from Honk!

I finally got an answer from Michelle McManus. It is not very edifying. In fact the third paragraph contradicts the fourth paragraph (School funding stayed the same from 1995 to 1999 which is not the same as "a steady yearly increase"). Any way, here it is:

Dear Susan:

Thank you for contacting me recently concerning education funding in Michigan. I appreciated hearing from you again on this important issue.

As you know, the State of Michigan is once again facing a large budget shortfall. We in the Legislature will face many difficult decisions as we seek to balance the State’s budget and ensure we maintain a fiscally responsible state government. We must reach innovative solutions to deal with the situation. As you are aware, a significant portion of education funding comes from sales tax. Therefore, it is essential we improve Michigan's economy so more resources are available for education.

In facing a budget shortfall, there has been much discussion about the funding of Michigan schools. I have even heard it mis-stated that, "Education funding is at an all time low." In fact, education funding is at an all time high in our state. In Fiscal Year 1994-95, following the passage of Proposal A, education funding increased by 102.35%. Since that time we have seen a steady yearly increase in funding to schools in excess of inflation.

Section 20(j) was added to the State School Aid Act in 1999 and provided a supplemental payment to "out of formula" districts, those receiving higher than the base state foundation grant as a result of the provisions of Proposal A. In 1999, the state increased the base grant from $6,300 per student to $6,500 per student. Under the statute prior to the adoption of Section 20(j), those out of formula districts would receive no funding increase, thus 20(j) was introduced to address this situation.

While Proposal A has done much to increase funding for those districts that had the least, there is still much that can be done to reach a higher degree of equity between districts. None the less, I feel that Proposal A has proven itself to be a champion to Michigan Schools, despite any financial challenges we currently face.

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to visit www.senate.michigan.gov/gop/education for further information on education funding.

Once again, thank you for writing. If I can be of future assistance in any matter involving state government, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Michelle A. McManus
State Senator-35th District

She didn't promise to take a leadership role, or to do anything, for that matter.

I'm starting to see some hopeful signs on the school funding front, and I'll try to write sbout them in the next few days. Today I'm spending my last hour before work at the beach.

Fourth of July

George Firestone Grosvenor's descendants honor him with a float in Leland's 4th of July parade.

The fourth fell on a Monday this year, one of my regular days off. We had a poker tournamenton the weekend so I ended up working 12+ hour days on Saturday and Sunday. By Monday I was whipped, but I had a job to do. Every year in Leland's 4th of July parade our State Senator marches down the street accompanied by a truck bearing her campaign logo. Never mind that she's not running for anything. Never mind that she can't run for Senator again due to the very same term limit laws that got her into office. Every year she marches down the street making sure to stop and shake my hand.

If you've been reading my blog a while you've seen me send a couple of letters to my state senator about school funding. You've also heard me mention that she never has responded to my letters, not even a "thank you for your concern" form letter. I have refrained from mentioning the phone message, also unreturned, that I left on her answering machine during business hours. I have also not mentioned going to an open house with our school board president and trying to discuss the school funding crisis with her then. She refused to acknowledge that there was a problem, telling me that our schools were getting plenty of money, the school aid fund was flush, and that Proposal A hadn't been tweaked, etc. She even told me that the federal government was giving our school extra money to cover the cost of complying with No Child Left Behind (we don't). There was more "I'll get back to you" at the end of that encounter, but nothing ever came of it.

So I had a problem. How could I shake this woman's hand during the parade if she wouldn't even acknowledge my letters on any other day? Just refusing to shake her hand would seem petty. Disrupting the 4th of July parade would be satisfying, but probably not productive.

I settled on a plan. I would print out my latest letter and give it to her before the parade. While I was at it I printed out The End of the Rainbow , a New York Times op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman detailing how Ireland sparked an economic recovery by investing in education. One of the excuses to avoid talking about school funding has been that we have to wait for Michigan's economy to improve, as if good times are right around the corner. In reality, Michigan's auto industry will never be what it used to be and simply cutting taxes for the sake of cutting taxes has not attracted new industry to the state. Dell's president, explaining why he was attracted to Ireland said:

"What attracted us? [A] well-educated work force - and good universities close by. [Also,] Ireland has an industrial and tax policy which is consistently very supportive of businesses, independent of which political party is in power. I believe this is because there are enough people who remember the very bad times to de-politicize economic development. [Ireland also has] very good transportation and logistics and a good location - easy to move products to major markets in Europe quickly."

Finally, added Mr. Dell, "they're competitive, want to succeed, hungry and know how to win. ... Our factory is in Limerick, but we also have several thousand sales and technical people outside of Dublin. The talent in Ireland has proven to be a wonderful resource for us. ...

Taxes are a part of the equation, but an educated populace is a much bigger part. How to put the horse back in front of the cart and start talking about education first, i.e. now?

I would be easy to find my state senator, as the parade staging area is just north of my parents' condo, on a bunch of side streets that have float numbers permanently marked on the asphalt so that every knows where to wait. I found her truck, but she was off wandering so I took some time to talk to Dee Glass on the "Naked Gardener" float directly in front.

"Naked Gardener" is a brand new fundraiser for our school's educational gardens. Our school sits on a small plot of land but we have maximized what we have by planting various prnamental and educational gardens. The is a Michigan Bog garden outside of the science rooms and the lower elementary has been working on their own "Very Hungry Caterpillar" garden. The retaining wall outside of the Performing Arts Center is graced by a traditional perennial garden and the kids are prevented from running out into the street by a bed of roses outside the big double doors of the lower elemntary wing. There is no money in the school budget for this sort of thing; the gardens were planted and are maintained by a force of volunteers headed up by Dee Glass, who Liz characterizes as "Everyone's Grandma". Dee also heads up the fundraising for our school's gardens, holding bulb sales, a smelt dinner, and now producing a calendar.

I had first heard of the calendar in last week's Leelanau Enterprise. The timing was perfect. I had just read an editorial from The Mackinac Center for Public Policy blaming school finance problems not on lack of funding, but on school boards and school administrators.

As Mackinac Center President Lawrence W. Reed noted in his January speech "Michigan at the Crossroads": "In the schools, we don’t have a funding crisis so much as we have a management crisis. And it’s not Proposal A that needs to be tweaked. What needs to be changed are tired, old ways of business-as-usual."

Th front page of last week's Enterprise featured two articles about local school districts. The first one described an attempt by the Glen Lake and Suttons Bay school districts to see if it is feasible to share superintendents. Next to it was a picture of Leland's school superintendent, Mike Hartigan, wearing only a yellow raincoat and holding a strategically placed watering can.

The Naked Gardener Calendar is patterned after a famous British fundraiser where well-aged society women posed nude for a calendar to raise money for a cancer ward. Leland's calendar features area business owners, a winemaker, a charter boat captain, a film producer, the dog catcher, a county commissioner, and of course a landscape architect.

Mr Hartigan posing nude on the front page of the Enterprise! This was not "business as usual", and he didn't look particularly "tired", either. I said as much to Dee Glass as I waited by her float (A farm trailer completely draped with potted petunias and one of those naked cherub statues standing in the middle.) Dee gave me an unexpected hug as she explained that she had been taking a lot of flak about the calendar.

Finally I caught sight of my state senator. I buttonholed her in front of a busload of senior citizens waiting with the windows open and asked her why she didn't acknowledge my mail or return my call. She didn't have much to say, of course. I told her that while she was waiting to get going on this issue other people were putting forth bills that may work for downstate schools but did not suit the needs of her rural constituents. She said not to worry, because nothing will be actually passed before another legislative season goes by. I said, I DO worry, our schools need help now!

So she decided to give me her home phone number and we walked back to her truck, past Dee Glass's "Naked Gardener" float. Michelle sniffed and said "I don't know what to think about that!" I told her that some say the whole problem is school administrators who are afraid to "think out of the box", and that I was glad that MY school superintendent was willing to go beyond "business-as-usual". I also mentioned the efforts to share a superintendent between Suttons Bay and Glen Lake. She claimed to be "working closely" with them on that enterprise.

So I said goodbye and went to watch the parade.

The parade was great. Garrison Keillor said of Lake Wobegon's parade: "It goes around twice, once so you can watch and once so you can be in it. Everyone just trades places." Lelanders can't do that because we only have one bridge over the river so we take turns year by year. Anna couldn't decide whether to wear her OM shirt and sell water of wear her ball uniform an march in the parade. Her friend Will just did both. Two of the water selling kids took off without saying where they were going so I ended up walking the whole seven block parade route to find them. It was kind of my own parade, as I stopped to chat with half the people I know and a few I don't know. The real parade started with the Coast Guard helicopter and featured fire trucks, old cars, a Rosie the Riveter float, a giant fiberglass milk cow, a colonial family with minutemen, horses, a goat that kicked, and a tiny brass band. I finally got back to the condo and set up my lawn chair as the parade ended so I sat and watched everyone walk back home again.

Another Letter to Michelle McManus

I wrote another letter to State Senator Michelle McManus about the state of Michigan's school funding. I still haven't heard anything from her about my May 2 letter. She must still be doing research.

Here's today's letter. I sent it to her Senate email address and submitted it in her online comment form.

Dear Michelle,

Tuesday we saw parents and educators rally in Lansing in favor of correcting the inadequate funding of Michigan’s public school system.

It is high time. Our schools’ expenses go up constantly while the per pupil grant has remained flat for years. A survey by the Michigan School Business Officials reports that over half the public schools in Michigan expect to lay off staff during the coming year. 79% will need to dip into their fund balances to make it through the year.

I am glad to see school funding getting attention in Lansing. I would be happier yet to see you and your colleagues acknowledge that there is a problem and commit yourselves to working on a comprehensive solution that works for all of our schools.

When I talk to parents they are confused and frustrated. The voters approved Proposal A in order to give schools a stable and adequate source of funding. We agreed to a hike in the sales tax and we agreed to let property tax dollars flow out of our district in order to achieve to goal of adequate funding for Michigan’s public schools. The story of how we got to our current situation is complex, but it is fully explained on the website I referred you to back in April: www.RestoreProposalA.org.

Proposal A earmarks percentages of income taxes, property taxes and sales tax for the School Aid Fund. While the Legislature cannot change the wording of Proposal A, it has been careless in approving changes to the underlying tax laws that have left the School Aid Fund seriously underfunded.

The proposal put forth by the K-16 Coalition seeks to mandate adequate funding for public schools and universities, but it does not address the question of where the money should come from. You should also note that across the board annual increases will widen the gap between the best funded schools and the least funded schools. (This is particular galling in districts like Leland that already send out many more dollars in property taxes than we receive in school funding.) The proposal is a band-aid approach to a complex problem.

There are a number of more fair and more practical approaches. Certainly we need to look at minimizing the effect of health insurance and retirement costs in school budgets. Perhaps all school districts should be offered the same opportunities that the “20j hold harmless” districts get, to hold millages at the local level for enhancements to education. But I think the real work will be to roll back the tax cuts and tax exemptions that have done so much harm to the basic premise of Proposal A.

It is time to open a serious discussion on school funding. This problem cannot be blamed on the economy or school administrations. It requires leadership in the Legislature, and I think you could fill this role.

I am available to discuss this issue further, now that our seniors have graduated. Call me at home 231-256-8876, or email me at ochouse@voyager.net.


Susan Och

51 S French Road

Lake Leelanau, MI 49653

ochouse@voyager.net