The Senate Fiscal Agency has published estimates of the impact of cuts included in the Senate’s school aid budget bill, with detail for each district and public school academy (charter school) in the state. To get a copy of the full document, you can find it here.

As part of our Project Washtenaw effort, we’d like to highlight some of the potential consequences to districts in the Washtenaw ISD. The WISD includes districts with a wide range of characteristics, so the impact here can say a lot about what is happening state wide.

This article was published in the Other Voices series of op-ed columns by the Ann Arbor News on Sunday, June 14, 2009. The version posted on the Mlive.com web site is available here.

The school budget news from Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and other communities in Washtenaw County is disturbing, and for good reason. School officials say that in the next two years we will all be driving over the edge of a “funding cliff” that threatens to injure our public schools for years to come. Some school districts are on the brink of failure, while others are having to cut teaching staff for the first time in recent memory. The depth of the coming crisis varies for each district, but the crisis is coming just the same. The question is, should we try to do something about it? Should we the people, the taxpayers, be worried?

The answer should be a resounding “YES!”

Project Washtenaw is a MIPFS-sponsored grassroots organizing campaign inside the communities of the Washtenaw Intermediate School District.

What’s it all about?
Any real effort to keep our schools healthy has to begin at the local level. MIPFS is committed to helping parents and citizens get involved in their local schools, understand the financial problems our schools have been facing, and help make the hard choices that arrive every year at budget time. Good schools mean strong communities. Moreover, understanding what is happening in our local schools helps citizens push for constructive change at the state level.

The House Appropriations subcommittee on School Aid held hearings on next year’s school aid budget, and made preliminary decisions about how to use Federal stimulus money.

Final decisions for this year await further news on what’s happening to revenue collections for school aid. As reported from the subcommittee, the bill uses Federal stimulus (ARRA) money to restore virtually all the cuts recommended in the Governor’s original budget, which had been formed before the stimulus bills were passed.

After some floor dramatics last week, the state House succeeded in passing HB 4313, which expands what school districts can purchase with sinking funds. Opponents of the bill, mostly Republicans, argued to no avail that it would constitute an increase in property tax rates that required a super-majority vote in both houses. Other attempts to amend the bill at the last minute also failed. Even so, the legislation passed on a 74-35 vote, with eleven Republicans voting in favor while three Democrats voted against the bill. The bill now heads to the Senate, which allowed similar legislation to die at the end of last session.

The subtitle of a MIPFS position paper, “Why educating kids isn’t like building cars,” can get a couple of interesting reactions. For some, it confirms the idea that unions have no place in the schools. For others, it smacks of a betrayal of union solidarity. I didn’t mean either of those things when I wrote it, and now seems like a good time to explain what we do mean by that phrase.

As part of a new effort to beef up grassroots lobbying efforts, the Michigan Association of School Boards (MASB) rolled out a new advocacy web site powered by CapWiz, a grassroots advocacy system offered by Washington, DC-based Capitol Advantage.

While the economic news was bad, school funding didn’t take a huge hit in 2008. Part of this was because of the increase in income tax rates for FY08 (really a restoration of the rates in effect a few years ago), and because of earmarking from the new Michigan Business Tax. The other reason is that Michigan as a whole has been losing students, and since state money is paid out on a per-pupil basis, that means the state’s overall obligations are lower. That’s small comfort for districts that lose both students and money, even if their foundation allowance crept up a bit.