Legislature’s K-12 Budget Still Falls Far Short of What Schools Need, Students Deserve
Educators expressed their frustrations today, the 73rd day of schools being forced to operate without a budget, with what they described as a status-quo budget being advanced by the legislature that won’t solve the funding crisis schools are facing.
“The legislature’s inacation has already forced schools to use an alarming amount of guesswork when hiring and budgeting their operations this year,” said Mark Greathead, TCA President & Superintendent of Woodhaven-Brownstown Schools. “To see the legislature now advancing a budget that won’t even provide an inflationary increase in funding for many schools, and doing so after diverting hundreds of millions of dollars out of K-12 school last December, only confirms that they still don’t understand the crisis schools are facing that years of legislative neglect has created.”
Numerous studies in recent years have cited the critical need to not only invest significant new resources into Michigan’s K-12 schools, but to eliminate Michigan’s outdated one-size-fits-all formula of distributing funding to schools. Governor Whitmer’s budget proposal called for shifting to a weighted funding formula, based on the recommendations of the non-partisan School Finance Research Collaborative, that would adequately fund the unique needs of every student.
Educators say the budget passed by the conference committee today wouldn’t do nearly enough to improve Michigan’s failing reading scores, expand badly needed special education programs or give Michigan’s students the opportunities they deserve.
“It’s frustrating as a parent and as an educator to watch our legislature continue to ignore the widely available studies that show exactly what actions we need to take to invest in our schools and our students again,” added Ken Gutman, TCA Secretary/Treasurer & Superintendent of Walled Lake Schools. “Any legislator that claims this budget is going to fix the growing problems in schools across Michigan either doesn’t understand the magnitude of the crisis we are facing, or is choosing to ignore it. Status-quo simply won’t solve anything.”
TCA has long advocated for a school-aid budget that adopts a weighted funding formula, removes higher education funding from the School Aid Fund and invests badly needed new resources into classrooms across the state. The legislature’s K-12 conference report accomplishes none that criteria and their refusal to adopt Governor Whitmer’s forward-thinking budget recommendation is only going to leave Michigan’s schools falling further behind for another year.
