Chalkbeat

Detroit school district may allow independent parent organizations after conflict involving PTAs

2026-03-24T18:59:55+00:00

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The Detroit school district is considering recognizing parent organizations that operate independently from the state and national Parent Teacher Association.

The proposal, introduced by the Detroit Public Schools Community District during a Feb. 26 board committee meeting, came after members expressed frustrations over reported dysfunction and conflict within some local PTAs last year. Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said during a June board meeting some PTAs have had challenges with “proper implementation of elections” and “following protocols.”

Board Member Monique Bryant told Chalkbeat this week the proposed policy would create better balance by allowing parents to choose what works best for their individual schools.

Some school communities may not have parents with the time or bandwidth to formally organize and run PTAs, she said. A better option for some parents may be to join an organization overseen by the district’s Family and Community Engagement Department, or FACE.

The proposed policy amendment could mean that formal parent engagement ends up looking different from school to school. It would recognize independent, locally organized parent-teacher organizations, as well as other parent organization models approved by FACE. The proposal would also clarify the voting model all organizations must rely on: Each year, every school would vote on the type of parent organization model it wants to use and submit results to district administrators.

The proposed amendment follows incidents of mismanagement by two parent-teacher organizations reported by the district’s Office of Inspector General over the last seven years.

The National PTA is a nationwide volunteer-led organization with state and local chapters, which organize to fundraise, plan educational events, and advocate for students’ needs. PTAs are self-governed, separate entities from local school districts.

DPSCD’s current policy only recognizes the PTA as its “official parent organization of record” for its schools. There are multiple Detroit PTA councils that oversee school-based chapters in the district.

The board has not yet voted on the proposed changes.

Tonya Whitehead, president of the Michigan PTA, and leaders of several Detroit PTA councils did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But Whitehead said during public comment at a July committee meeting that state and Detroit PTA leadership provided support and additional training to local chapters to address the issues raised by the board and Vitti.

“We are committed to continual improvement within our organizations, including streamlining processes to improve response time, providing additional training to members and PTA leaders at all member levels, and working together with the FACE office to improve two-way communication and behavior problem solving,” she said at the time.

Board members did not discuss the policy when the district introduced the proposal at the February committee meeting. However, members called for change at multiple meetings last year.

Bryant said she complained last year about the handling of a PTA election at Cass Technical High School. Bryant, who is a Cass Tech parent and was a member of the PTA, said the organization did not follow its bylaws when it took nominations for new leadership. The result was that PTA’s entire executive board was reelected before their terms were up, said Bryant.

The Cass Tech PTSA — which also includes students — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bryant added she contacted the Michigan PTA with concerns, but the organization was unresponsive.

“I don’t think we should be moving forward with individual schools still trying to have elections after this,” she said during the June meeting.

Detroit brought back PTAs to ‘heal the divide’

When the state appointed an emergency manager to take control of Detroit Public Schools in 2009, PTAs were removed. That emergency management ended in 2016, and PTAs returned to district schools after Vitti began as superintendent in May 2017.

“We set out to try to heal the divide that was between the community and schools – one of the ways that the board and I thought best to do that [was] bring back the PTA,” said Vitti at the July committee meeting.

Whitehead said during public comment of that meeting that DPSCD staff “were closely integrated in trying to start units in every school in the district” when emergency management ended.

She said their efforts “included collecting dues and being listed as the contractor for PTAs in district documents,” which resulted in “incomplete paperwork” and made it appear that PTA concerns should be directed to district staff.

“Post-pandemic, PTA, in cooperation with the FACE office, has been working hard to end those practices and ensure that adults engaged with PTA and the district know the difference between the roles and responsibilities of each,” she added. “But there is more work to be done.”

Vitti said it is challenging for the PTA “to monitor elections, ensure the training and capacity of officers once they’re elected, and problem-solve through conflict between officers at certain schools.”

Conflict over policy arose at PTAs beyond Cass Technical last year, Bryant said. For example, PTA members at two schools complained it was unfair that school staff who were also parents of students at their school could become executive officers of their PTA, she said. Bryant did not identify the two schools.

Mismanagement of parent organization funds were found in previous years by the Office of Inspector General, or OIG, which serves as an independent oversight office for the district.

In 2019, the OIG received complaints the PTA committee of a district school mismanaged fundraising proceeds. Because the PTA did not properly document the amount of funds raised, the OIG investigation could not determine how much money was reportedly missing.

The district mandated cash management training for all PTA officers and fundraising organizers as a result of the OIG’s recommendations stemming from its investigation. Detroit schools also began requiring PTAs to submit financial statements after every school-based fundraising event.

In 2022, the OIG found that a parent organization improperly retained funds for a school field trip, and also reported a lack of district oversight of support organizations. The OIG recommended the parent group pay an outstanding bill of more than $7,200. The OIG also recommended better collaboration between district offices to improve donation tracking, as well as internal controls for parent support organizations.

However, board members did not mention those two incidents when they shared concerns about PTAs, and Vitti did not address them. It is unclear whether they contributed to the district’s decision to introduce the proposal in February to change how parent organizations work.

“I think the issue has been the PTA has not been able to demonstrate the capacity … to work within the district at the scale that we operate at, because we’re so much larger,” said Vitti in July.

Vitti said the PTA needed to expedite its response to issues at individual schools and improve its communication with the board.

Some board members raised the option of letting individual schools decide whether to continue their PTAs or start new organizations, a choice that’s included in the new policy proposal.

“Instead of creating a one size fits all approach … we might be looking at individual schools that seem to have repeated problems, which is high level conflict, move away from that and run it at the district level in order to create better balance,” said Vitti.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit school district’s budget cuts bring back memories of past fiscal crises

2023-05-22T17:12:34+00:00

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As Reianna Willis looks ahead to starting her senior year in high school in the fall, the thought of losing her college adviser frightens her.

College advisers and guidance counselors, Reianna said, are the people who provide teenagers with the extra motivation they need to stay on track in school. But her school, East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney, stands to lose these professionals, along with other support staff and administrators, as the Detroit school district trims its budget to align with declining revenue.

“If there were cuts at my school I feel as if our students would be lost,” she said, adding that students would miss out on critical relationships with staff members. Cutting advisers may improve the budget picture, Reainna said, “but it will worsen our students.”

Nikolai Vitti, the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, has tried to reassure community members that the cuts he’s advocating will help ensure the district’s financial stability over the long term. “The staffing reductions are less than a financial necessity but more of a necessary strategic decision to sustain and protect our improvement,” he said.

But for some families and district employees, the latest round of cuts have provoked anxiety, rekindling memories of the deep, devastating cuts the district made during past fiscal crises and the era of state control. Those cuts, including the closure of nearly 200 schools between 2000 and 2015, only ended up compounding the district’s financial problems, leading to plummeting enrollment, an exodus of staff, and even larger deficits and debt.

The fears have surfaced in gatherings of the district’s Executive Youth Council of student leaders, and in the monthly school board meetings, where students, parents and employees of the district have come forward to warn officials against cutting professionals who are seen as critical to students’ success and the district’s goals.

What prompted DPSCD’s proposed budget cuts?

The specter of a return to spiraling cuts is especially worrisome in a district that has achieved six years of relative financial stability after it returned to local control in 2017, thanks to a state legislative initiative that granted the district a fresh start.

The state-appointed emergency managers who ran the district in the past relied on “deep spending cuts (including staffing and teacher salaries), long-term debt to cover annual budget deficits, and delaying required payments,” said a 2019 report from the Citizens Research Council of Michigan detailing the district’s roughly 20-year span of state oversight.

But they had “virtually no success tackling the underlying structural deficit,” the report said.

After 2017, until the pandemic struck, DPSCD began to see rising enrollment and balanced budgets — enough progress that the Detroit Financial Review Commission released DPSCD from state oversight in late 2020, a milestone in the district’s quest to control its budget and finances.

Then, in the midst of the pandemic, the federal government came through with $1.27 billion in aid for the district, buoying its revenue for three years. The added funds made it possible to hire more contracted staff; expand after-school, summer school, and tutoring programs; and take care of long-overdue construction and renovation projects.

But moving into the 2023-24 school year, Vitti said, the district will have to balance its budget relying on recurring revenues, and not one-time federal funding. It will also have to account for the impact of inflation, which has cooled over the past year but remains above historical levels. So instead of being able to fund all of its priorities, and then some, DPSCD will have to pick the ones that it can afford and that will make the biggest impact in the classroom.

“Managing the finances of a steep, long-running enrollment decline is hard enough,” said Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on public education financing. But the steep cut in federal funding, coupled with higher costs for maintenance and supplies, compounds that challenge.

In assessing the tradeoffs, DPSCD has chosen to prioritize raising teacher salaries in order to recruit and retain staff and avoid the huge teacher vacancies that it experienced during emergency management.

To satisfy that need, Vitti’s proposed budget would eliminate or shift roughly 300 school and central office positions, including the counselors and college advisers at Reianna’s school. It would also create a $4.2 million budget surplus to address district emergencies, enrollment shifts or other unexpected spending throughout the school year.

“I do not foresee the need to close or consolidate schools in the future for budget reasons,” Vitti said.

Vitti said he believes the district can stick to its priorities and continue to offer what it has promised families in spite of the staffing reductions, and without a hit to enrollment. School principals can choose to fund those positions using Title I money, he noted, and college transition advisers, kindergarten paraprofessionals, and school culture facilitators will have the option to stay with the district in a different role that might be understaffed, such as building substitute, security guard, cafeteria worker, or pre-K paraprofessional. An increase in state per-pupil funding could also help protect some jobs.

On the other hand, if the salary increases go ahead without the staff cuts, the district projects it would swing to an annual deficit and drain its unrestricted funds. And persistent deficits could trigger a return of financial scrutiny from the state.

“If you don’t want us to go back into emergency management or financial review every week, then let us make the necessary budget adjustments so that there’s long term durability and consistent continuity in our district,” said DPSCD board member Corletta Vaughn.

Lisa Card, a DPSCD parent and 20-year veteran educator, said the latest proposed budget cuts reflect a familiar pattern. Initially an art teacher, she went back to school for a master’s in special education when it was clear to her that the district under emergency management was going to cut student programming, including art and music programs.

“We go through these cycles often, and when something is wrong with the budget, it’s always like they go through cutting staff,” Card said. “But I don’t think that that’s the solution.”

Financial goals hang on enrollment numbers

District officials recognize that they can’t merely cut their way to financial stability. The district’s financial strength depends on its ability to rebuild enrollment, which is not even a third of what it was in 2000.

In the past, the district has employed aggressive marketing campaigns in a bid to shore up enrollment and avoid closing school buildings, laying off teachers, and cutting academic programming and support services.

Those campaigns took on increased significance in the wake of the pandemic, during which the district lost 3,000 students. Using its federal COVID relief aid, DPSCD expanded its outreach, home visits and door-to-door canvassing strategies using staff and parent volunteers.

Those tactics enabled the district to bring in 1,000 students, Vitti said.

“Clearly, we are doing something right,” he said.

But there’s still a lot of ground to make up. And now, DPSCD plans to spend less on enrollment strategies. Instead, it will use a smaller budget to market specific schools with available seats and continue to emphasize canvassing through school employees and families. The district is looking to increase enrollment over time by expanding pre-kindergarten programs across the city. As part of its $700 million facility master plan, the district will house those programs at four vacant or underutilized school buildings.

DPSCD’s K-12 enrollment is projected to remain at 48,000 students next year, with a potential bump of 335 pre-kindergarten students, according to Vitti.

Without big enrollment gains, to avoid further budget cuts, Vitti said, the district would have to see an annual increase in per-pupil funding, as well as more equitable state and local school funding. School aid budgets moving through the state Legislature would provide those increases.

“I think we will continue to improve our enrollment but not completely rebound in overall enrollment since the pandemic overnight,” Vitti said.

Vaughn, the school board member, said she thinks the district needs to be more aggressive with its marketing campaign.

“Budgetarily, we’re going in whatever direction the population is going to go,” she said. “If we don’t increase the population, we’ll be right back here next year.”

How will budget cuts affect long-term reforms?

Another key question is how the cuts will affect the district’s progress on its long-term academic goals, which were also thrown off by the pandemic and the shift to online learning. Federal COVID relief aid provided only temporary support, funding tutoring, summer school, and reduced class sizes.

One of Vitti’s long-term reform plans in his first year as superintendent was to hire master teachers to support and coach teachers in math and literacy. He also envisioned having one guidance counselor, college adviser, school culture facilitator, and attendance agent per school.

The aim was to offer broader academic programming and support services that families would otherwise have to leave the district for.

With those positions now threatened, the district says it will look to spread out college advising and school culture and climate work to other school administrators and staff. Guidance counselors for example will take on more work with FAFSA and college applications, while grant funding from the Michigan College Access Network will help ensure that five DPSCD high schools and one career and technical education center can participate in regional college access events.

But some students are skeptical the expanded roles for other educators will provide the same quality and relationship students have with their teachers.

“I truly believe that this would affect students — mostly ninth and 12th graders — because they guide you into the steps right before college,” said De’Loni Perry, a senior at Osborn High School. “It’s not only their help just guiding us but also for the fact that they actually teach us and show us the steps on how to prepare for life after high school. That’s the biggest step you take and most important.”

Asked about that risk, Vitti said: “I do value and understand the relationships that students have with the staff at their school. This is not easy. However, I am confident that the outcomes that matter most for students districtwide will continue to improve with these changes.”

Jaquitta Nelson, a parent and school volunteer at Paul Robeson/Malcolm X Academy, worries that budget cuts will place further pressure on staff members who are already overwhelmed.

Paul Robeson/Malcolm X, according to DPSCD budget documents, could go without its school culture facilitator, dean, and a paraprofessional next school year.

This year alone, Nelson said she’s seen at least four teachers and school administrators at her son’s school retire, some citing burnout. Now she’s bracing for the impact of the district’s cuts on the school.

“How can we help them going forward?” Nelson said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan school board votes to seek financial transparency from charter schools

2022-12-14T22:28:58+00:00

Michigan’s 295 charter schools received $1.4 billion in state funding last year. But exactly how that money was spent, and how much of that went to for-profit management companies, remain unclear, because those companies aren’t subject to public disclosure laws.

The State Board of Education has been trying to change that, and members are hoping to get help from the newly elected state Legislature controlled by Democrats, who are less protective of the for-profit companies that operate many of the state’s charter schools.

At a meeting Tuesday, the board voted 5-1, along party lines, to ask the Legislature to require every charter management organization to post audit reports of its use of public funds, including information related to salaries, benefits, and contracts.

“To send this over now … will be really, really important in setting a priority for the new Legislature and the new legislators that will be starting” in January, said board member Ellen Cogen Lipton, a Democrat and former state representative.

Republican Tom McMillin, the lone no vote, called the resolution a partisan attempt to discourage charter school expansion and deprive parents of school choice. Nikki Snyder, the board’s only other Republican, was absent.

Eighty-two percent of Michigan’s charter schools contract with private management companies, according to the Michigan Department of Education. In many cases, the management company provides a full range of services, including curriculum, financial, staffing, and custodial. In other cases, charter schools manage the day-to-day operations, but contract with a company that provides one or more of those services.

Those management companies are not subject to public disclosure laws.

“Our laws are tremendously weak,” said State Board of Education President Casandra Ulbrich, who spearheaded an effort to obtain financial records from charter schools in five counties. She and Department of Education staff members filed Freedom of Information Act requests with 166 charter schools asking for information about leases and contracts for food service, custodial work, and more. Nearly all said they could not provide the information because their management companies hold the contracts.

The Michigan Association of Public School Academies, a charter school advocacy group, says its members meet their legal obligations to provide staff rosters, annual reports, board minutes, budgets, and management agreements to anyone who requests those records under the Freedom of Information Act.

The trouble, Democrats say, is that those management agreements often aggregate all expenditures into a single line item for “purchased services.” That means it’s impossible for taxpayers to know how much teachers are being paid, which company is mowing the lawn, or the price of textbooks, for example.

“What information is available is difficult to break down in any meaningful way,” Ulbrich said Tuesday. “As we learned from our FOIA attempts, it cannot be easily compared to the same information from traditional schools. For these reasons, I think it’s time for taxpayers to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”

She said she wants to ensure tax dollars are being used effectively and efficiently. She also wants to know how much charter management companies are keeping as profit.

McMillin said charter management companies are being singled out for scrutiny because Democrats oppose school choice. “There are plenty of other entities that get huge amounts of money from the state” and are not subject to public disclosure laws, he said.

State Superintendent Michael Rice said the debate is not about whether charter schools should exist, but about the need for transparency.

“We have the right to know what happens to taxpayer dollars,” he said. “They’re our dollars, and in some cases with respect to public school academies (charter schools), we lose oversight over them. That’s wrong. It’s unacceptable.”

In March, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced the School Freedom, Accountability and Transparency Act, which would have required more transparency from charter schools.

The legislation would have made charter management companies subject to the state Freedom of Information Act and would have required them to disclose audited financial statements, post student recruitment costs, and hold monthly public meetings.

Republicans, who then led both chambers, did not allow the bills to advance.

Correction: December 15, 2022: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of board member Nikki Snyder’s name.

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan students making slow progress after pandemic disruptions

2022-10-17T18:53:24+00:00

Michigan students are making academic progress, but it’s not fast enough to fully make up for losses over the past two years.

Students who learned remotely in 2020-21 because of the pandemic continued to learn more slowly than their peers in 2021-22 even after they were back in classrooms. And the school districts where students improved the most last year were the ones that provided students with highly individualized instruction.

These are among the findings in a pair of reports released this morning by the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University. The results are important for understanding where education resources need to go in the aftermath of the pandemic, the EPIC researchers said.

“Everyone thought we’d continue to accelerate learning in 2021-22 and kids would be back on track,” said Katharine Strunk, director of EPIC. “We’re just not seeing that. They’re not close to being back to where they need to be achievement-wise.”

The findings aren’t unique to Michigan, Strunk said.

Neither were district administrators’ struggles to balance health concerns against academic needs as they decided whether to offer in-person instruction during months when COVID was spreading rapidly.

“I don’t know that our focus was any different than anybody else’s globally,” one district administrator told EPIC researchers. “For us, it was definitely safety, and really safety of our staff, our students, and our community members. … I think it’s safe to say nobody had ever felt that level of fear.”

The good news, Strunk said, is that researchers were able to identify strategies that make a difference. They interviewed school leaders and teachers in five districts where test scores grew at higher rates than other districts with similar demographics and modes of instruction during the pandemic. EPIC did not identify the districts studied.

One thing they had in common was individualized support for students, including after-school tutoring and individualized learning plans based on specific academic needs identified on diagnostic tests.

That held true whether students were learning online, in person, or a combination, according to EPIC’s research partners at the University of Pittsburgh and the research arm of NWEA, the nonprofit that developed the math and reading tests given twice a year to assess the academic growth of students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The districts also set aside time during the school day for students working on the same learning standard to receive small-group instruction.

“These were districts that were able to continue the work of teaching and learning under very challenging circumstances,” said Ayesha K. Hashim, of NWEA.

Some districts created learning labs to address students’ specific learning deficits, researchers said. Others created spreadsheets to track student engagement so teachers could intervene when patterns emerged.

Teachers “worked in grade-level teams to know what students specifically needed and made sure every person working with that student was on the same page,” Strunk said. “They made sure every student received the instruction that particular student needed. That is a big lift for teachers to do, especially in the middle of a pandemic when everything is hectic and they’re switching modalities.”

They also focused on teaching core skills students would need to succeed in the next grade level.

“If you just try to jam two years of curriculum into one year, you can’t,” Strunk said. “It’s just not possible.”

Instead, she said, teachers in the five districts identified building-block skills and focused on those.

Among other characteristics the five districts had in common were readiness to navigate crises, two-way communication with families, and prioritization of social-emotional learning.

Although COVID-related school closures are in the past, the findings remain instructive, researchers said.

“The things we identified are helpful for student learning even if you aren’t in a crisis period,” Hashim said. “These are practices that work.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

You’re invited: Detroit school board virtual candidate forum

2022-10-07T19:19:27+00:00

Two former board presidents, a few former educators, four incumbents, parents, and a recent graduate are among the 18 candidates running for four seats on the Detroit school board in what could be a consequential election for the city school district.

The seven-member board oversees and sets policy for the Detroit Public Schools Community District, which educates nearly 49,000 students. With more than half of the four-year seats up for election on Nov. 8, any new board members could affect Superintendent Nikolai Vitti’s plan to address pandemic-related enrollment losses, chronic absenteeism, and poor academic achievement.

Chalkbeat Detroit and WDET are hosting a virtual school board candidate forum Thursday, Oct. 13, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

RSVP to join us as we hear from candidates vying to lead Detroit public schools.

The forum will be held over Zoom and split into two panels with a short intermission. This event is free to attend, but you must RSVP to receive the Zoom information. You can also let us know what questions you have for the candidates when you sign up.

Panel 1

Corletta Vaughn (incumbent)
Deborah Hunter-Harvill (incumbent)
Jamaal Muhammad
John Telford
Patrice Douglas
Richard Clement
LaMar Lemmons
Ida Simmons Short

Panel 2

Angelique Peterson-Mayberry (incumbent)
Monique Bryant
Regina Ann Campbell
Bessie Harris
Aliya Moore
Ridgeley Hudson
Iris Taylor
Latrice McClendon

Incumbent Georgia Lemmons and candidate Reba Neely have not yet responded to an invitation to attend.

Caroline Bauman is the community engagement manager at Chalkbeat.

Yom Kippur conflicts with student count day in Michigan schools

2022-09-26T12:00:00+00:00

Superintendents will be counting Michigan students Oct. 5, but many children will be out of school observing a major Jewish holiday.

It’s a crucial day for Michigan school districts trying to maximize state funding, but this year it coincides with Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year when the observant fast, pray, and abstain from work and school.

By law, state education funding to Michigan public schools is based largely on student attendance on the first Wednesday of October. At stake is at least $9,150 per student, the base funding provided for in the state school aid budget.

Districts with large Jewish populations including West Bloomfield and Walled Lake close on Yom Kippur. State law allows those districts to apply for waivers, and the Michigan Department of Education has granted five of them, allowing those districts to use Thursday Oct. 6 as count day instead.

But it’s more complicated for schools that are in session that day but have students who observe Yom Kippur.

“There is no provision in current state law that permits the state superintendent to provide a waiver for a local school district that is in session on count day,” state Assistant Superintendent Kyle Guerrant wrote last week in a memo to superintendents.

Those districts can count missing students if their absences are excused and if they return to school within 30 days and attend all scheduled classes. Absences for religious observances are considered excused.

That’s helpful but it isn’t fair, said Jeanice Swift, superintendent of Ann Arbor Public Schools, which will be in session on Yom Kippur. She wants the same flexibility as districts that aren’t in session – to move count day to a date that isn’t a religious holiday.

Having a high-stakes school day on a religious holiday conflicts with her district’s core value of respecting different faiths, Swift said.

More than a decade ago, the district convened a group of community faith leaders to create a calendar of religious holidays and to rank the observances by significance. They designated Yom Kippur a three-star holiday, the highest category. The district prohibits major exams, reviews for major exams, standardized tests, sports and arts tryouts, and major events like proms on three-star days. Other three-star holidays are Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, Christmas, Epiphany, Passover, Holy Friday, Palm Sunday, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha.

“It’s a model that has been emulated across the country because it really is a community coming together to observe and respect each others’ holiest days,” Swift said. “It’s about providing sensitivity to sacred days across the most practiced religions in our community.”

Guerrant said he understands that argument, but state law doesn’t allow waivers for districts that remain in session on the holiday.

“This is a very important day to the Jewish community and having this overlap with count day feels disrespectful,” Guerrant said in a telephone interview. “We understand and appreciate those concerns but we’re in a bind in the sense that we don’t have the ability to provide a waiver because of the way the law is structured right now.”

Swift said she has spoken with lawmakers about amending the law but legislation has not yet been introduced.

For now, MDE will work with districts to ensure every student is counted, Guerrant said.

“We want to make sure a district is not penalized financially,” he said. “We want to make sure they don’t miss a student.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

State board wants to know how Michigan charter schools spend money

2022-09-14T21:57:00+00:00

Michigan charter schools received $1.4 billion in state funding last year. How they spent most of it is a mystery, even to state officials overseeing the education of children who attend them.

The state Board of Education has been trying to find out, but its efforts have been stymied.

Eighty-one percent of Michigan’s 295 charter schools have contracts with private education management companies that are not subject to public disclosure laws. That allows them to skirt disclosure laws by, for example, saying they don’t have payroll records because they don’t employ teachers directly, but rather through a contractor.

MDE filed Freedom of Information Act requests for financial information from 166 charter schools in Genesee, Kent, Oakland, Saginaw, and Wayne counties. Twelve did not respond or declined to provide information even after three requests for information.

Of those responding, 92% contract with private educational management companies, which then provide or subcontract to other vendors. Because they are private companies, the individual expenditures and contracts are considered proprietary and not subject to public disclosure.

Board member Ellen Cogen Lipton, a Democrat, said the rules allow “a magical conversion of taxpayer dollars to be swept into private hands.” Democrats in the Legislature are pushing for stricter disclosure requirements.

Dan Quisenberry, president of the charter school advocacy group Michigan Association of Public School Academies, says charter school operators provide everything the law requires including budgets, audits, staff rosters, annual reports, board minutes, parent satisfaction survey results, contracts, and more.

State Board of Education members say those documents include so few details that it’s often impossible to know how much tax money is going toward education expenses and how much companies keep as profit.

That’s a problem, said board President Casandra Ulbrich.

“All of these schools that we’re talking about here are public schools. Every one of them is using our tax dollars,” said Ulbrich, a Democrat.

The management agreements and budget often aggregate all of those costs into a single line item for purchased services. Those agreements are known as sweep contracts, because they sweep all costs together.

“What you get is a lump sum,” state Superintendent Michael Rice said at a state board meeting on Tuesday. “What the management company does with that lump is what it thinks it needs to do to provide that range of services. We don’t have access to the individual line items.”

Quisenberry said the structure of management agreements is up to the board of each charter school academy.

Sweep contracts are one arrangement, he said. “Boards can and do make changes in those contracts based on their determination of what’s best for the students in their care.”

And, Quisenberry said, they are doing it well.

Board member Tom McMillan said there’s no reason to think charter schools aren’t using the money wisely.

“If they’re able to contract out for some of their administrative staff in order to put more in the classroom for teaching … it seems to me that would be a good thing,” said McMillan, a Republican. “You couldn’t get to find out how much that company is paying its administrators. Nevertheless, the end result might be that the kids are getting better instruction.”

Most charter school boards, though, were unable to provide information MDE requested, including copies of leases and contracts for food service, custodial service, and lawn and grounds service.

“One of them responded that ‘We aren’t providing this to you because we’re not privy to that contract. We don’t hold that contract,’” Alisande Shrewsbury, a special assistant to the superintendent, told board members on Tuesday. “That’s a legal denial of the FOIA, because they don’t hold the contract.” Rather, the private management companies hold them.

Achieve Charter Academy, for example, provided copies of its management agreement with National Heritage Academies, and its lease — just over $1 million a year for a building also owned by National Heritage Academies. But the school denied the board’s request for food service, custodial, and lawn service contracts. National Heritage is the largest charter school operator in Michigan and one of the largest in the country.

“The academy contracts for the above services through a third-party management company by way of an education management agreement and, thus, the academy is not a party to the service contracts,” National Heritage FOIA officer Shane Wilson wrote in response to the information request.

Other charter schools responded similarly.

The lack of information is concerning, said Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University who has been studying the charter school industry for 25 years. It makes it impossible for the public to know how much taxpayer money is being spent on students and how much is going to private management companies.

“You can get a vague general idea of the budget, but we don’t know if that corresponds with reality, because we don’t see the details,” Miron said in a telephone interview.

State Board of Education members are powerless to change the rules regarding disclosure requirements for private companies. That’s why Ulbrich intends to turn to the Legislature for help.

“The next thing to do is a little bit of a deeper dive into the responses we received and come up with some legislative recommendations,” she said.

Some proposals already are in the pipeline. In the spring, Democrats from both chambers introduced the School Freedom, Accountability, and Transparency Act to require more transparency. Their legislation would subject all educational management organizations to the state Freedom of Information Act, which would require disclosure of most documents related to the operation of public institutions and expenditures of tax dollars.

The proposed law would require audits of charter schools, guard against conflicts of interest, and create a process to suspend charter school authorizers that don’t provide proper oversight.

The bills stand little chance of passing this legislative session while both the state House and Senate are under control of Republicans, who largely support looser charter school regulation. There’s a chance that Democrats could regain control of one or both chambers in the November election, and that could make a difference, Miron said.

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit superintendent earns high marks in latest evaluation

2022-08-18T18:12:14+00:00

Ahead of his sixth year overseeing the Detroit school district, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti earned high marks from the school board during his annual evaluation.

School board members rated Vitti’s leadership during the 2021-22 school year “effective,” the second-highest rating possible. He has earned the same rating each year over the course of his tenure as superintendent. Board members noted that the pandemic delayed reform efforts, but added that they expect to see more improvement this school year.

Board members review Vitti’s leadership annually based on a rubric that spotlights district progress on enrollment, daily attendance and academic achievement.

After marginal improvements over Vitti’s first few years as superintendent, Detroit Public Schools Community District has seen its progress in student enrollment and test scores reversed or stalled. The district has reported losing roughly 3,000 students since 2020, when it enrolled nearly 51,000.

The board finalized Vitti’s evaluation in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, which is standard for discussing employee reviews. In backing their “effective” rating, board members cited the challenges of leading the district through the pandemic.

Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, board president, said that she believes Vitti is committed to the district’s vision for reform and accomplished the board’s goals for the 2021-22 school year of establishing a virtual school, creating a 20-year plan for school facilities, and returning students and staff to in-person learning and teaching.

“Although the pandemic has stalled our reform for legitimate reasons, we are confident that we are on a path of recovery and well positioned to increase student attendance and student achievement next year as was the case prior to the pandemic,” Peterson-Mayberry said in a statement.

Board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo acknowledged there was still “a lot of work to do” in order to recover from the pandemic, but praised Vitti for his clear communication with the board as well as his management of COVID safety protocols and testing for students and staff.

“I think we still collectively as a board just have to do more work to make sure our schools are safe and our staff is supported … and I look forward to working with Dr. Vitti and the board to realize those things in this upcoming school year,” she said.

At the public segment of Wednesday’s board meeting, some commenters shared praise of Vitti’s tenure, while others called for more to be done to address student literacy and to bring more input from Detroit students into decision making.

Michelle Cline, a teacher in the district, wrote a letter in support of Vitti, thanking him for “leading the district in a positive direction”.

“The resources he and his team have made available to our educational community have been timely and thoughtful,” Cline said.

Jamarria Hall, a district alum and the lead plaintiff in a federal “right to read” lawsuit that sought to establish a constitutional right to literacy for all Detroit students, called on the board and the district to bring youth leaders to the table when discussing ongoing reform efforts.

“We have not done a great job,” Hall said. “We have done a terrible job specifically here in Detroit. We are failing our youth ... We need to try something new.”

Helen Moore, a longtime community organizer, said, “I have not seen the progress that needs to be happening for our children.” Moore added that she didn’t believe the pandemic should be used as an “excuse” for the regression in student learning in recent years.

In 2020, the board extended Vitti’s contract through June 30, 2025, making him one of the district’s longest-serving superintendents in recent years. He currently earns $322,000. As part of the contract extension, Vitti’s salary will get a raise this year, retroactive to July, based on the percentage of union pay raises. Negotiations over union wages are ongoing.

Vitti and the board have delivered on some promises to reform the district: increased staff support, reduced teacher vacancies, increased teacher pay, and expanded academic and enrichment opportunities for students.

This past year, the influx of federal COVID relief dollars benefited the district’s short and long term goals. In May, the school board unanimously approved a $700 million facility plan, setting up major renovations and rebuilds for school buildings across the city over the next five years. The board also approved a contract with literacy tutoring nonprofit Beyond Basics to provide one-on-one and small group reading instruction to the district’s lowest performing students.

Critics, however, argue school officials haven’t done enough to improve academic achievement. Most recently, the district was scrutinized for its graduation rates, chronic absenteeism and low high school literacy levels.

Meanwhile, the district’s virtual school saw higher rates of chronic absenteeism and poor academic performance compared with in-person students in the 2021-22 school year, prompting the district to tighten its selection process for the coming school year.

Looking ahead, Peterson-Mayberry said the board is expecting to see improvement in student attendance and academic achievement, particularly with literacy, as the district moves from managing the pandemic to continuing its long-term reform efforts.

Michigan’s teacher shortage: What’s causing it, how serious is it, and what can be done?

2022-05-13T12:00:00+00:00

At a state school board meeting earlier this year, a Muskegon teacher told a story that underscored why education leaders, lawmakers, and the governor are pushing hard to address Michigan’s teacher shortage problem.

Danielle Groendyk, an English language arts teacher at Oakridge High School who is in her third year of teaching, told members of the Michigan Board of Education that when she graduated from a teacher prep program just a few years ago, she was part of a cohort of 10 people.

Today, only three of them are teaching.

Others left, “to pursue careers in other fields where they’re better compensated for positions that have a better work-life balance,” Groendyk told board members in March.

There are many more stories like this across Michigan.

Beginning long before the pandemic started, school administrators have struggled to hire and retain teachers, for a vast number of reasons. The number of people entering teacher preparation programs, which was slightly up over the last two years for which data is available, is still well below levels from a decade ago. Teacher turnover is high. Morale is low. And retirements are up.

There’s a lot at stake for Michigan schools, and there are signs the shortage could get even worse. Shortages used to be largely focused on areas such as math and science, but state officials say they’re now seeing shortages in areas that used to be flush with applicants, such as elementary school and social studies. Meanwhile, the bulk of Michigan’s teaching workforce is over the age of 40, meaning retirements could drive up job openings.

The pandemic, which has upended education since 2020, has worsened years of poor academic outcomes for Michigan students, and brought renewed attention to the social and emotional needs of students that have made learning more difficult and increased the demands on teachers.

“The challenges of being an educator these days are different than they were 10 or 15 years ago,” Michael Behrmann, superintendent of the Harbor Springs Public Schools district, said in an interview. “Students bring more complexities to the school and more issues than ever before.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and lawmakers are searching for solutions. State Superintendent Michael Rice has urged the state to invest as much as $500 million in strategies to address shortages. And the state board of education has taken a particular interest in the issue, discussing it at nearly every meeting in the last six months.

How bad is Michigan’s teacher shortage?

The number of public K-12 teachers has grown by 2% over the last decade while the student population has shrunk 9%, state data shows.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story about the difficulties districts are having filling teaching positions.

The statistics are more nuanced than they appear, said Leah Breen, director of the Michigan Department of Education’s Office of Educator Excellence.

For example, the numbers don’t differentiate between certified educators and uncertified substitutes working under full-year temporary permits, and they don’t account for difficulties in hiring for specific positions such as special education, or in remote districts that have more trouble attracting candidates.

Just ask superintendents like Alan Tulppo of Gogebic-Ontonagon Intermediate School District in the westernmost part of the Upper Peninsula. It’s been harder than ever to hire there, he told the state Board of Education during a November meeting. Principals have had to rely on their last-resort solution, hiring uncertified educators who have temporary waivers, he said.

Even districts that used to get a lot of applications are having trouble finding teachers now.

“Fifteen years ago we’d get hundreds of applications for an elementary position,” Behrmann said. “Now we’re lucky if we get three or four.”

Administrators often find themselves hiring from neighboring districts, creating new problems in other places. That’s what Superintendent Chuck North did when a few openings cropped up in the middle of this school year in Reading Community Schools just north of the Ohio border.

“There are no new teacher candidates out there,” North said. “School districts basically have to try to steal from each other.”

Craig Thiel, director of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a public affairs research group, said he doesn’t perceive a statewide crisis the way Rice and other state officials do. But he acknowledged that shortages represent a pressing problem for many communities.

“Any time a student is sitting in front of a teacher that doesn’t have the credential to teach the class, that’s concerning,” Thiel said. “And if that’s happening more often, it is a growing concern that requires public attention.”

Nationwide, there were 386,000 teacher vacancies in February 2022, according to the latest data available from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. A decade earlier there were 108,000 openings.

The bureau doesn’t report vacancies by state, and Michigan doesn’t track them in real time. Breen said the department follows state law, which requires it to collect personnel data from school districts twice a year.

Researchers at the Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, known as EPIC, say that’s too infrequent to capture rapidly changing conditions within districts. They also say the data isn’t detailed enough to be useful. They recommend a new law requiring more frequent reporting of data that captures new hires, terminations, reassignments, job openings, and start and end dates of each vacancy.

Other researchers find the data lacking, too.

“We did a report to try to suss this out in 2019,” Thiel said, and the main finding was that in Michigan, “we’re doing a very bad job of trying to get our arms around the nature of this problem. If there’s a problem, what are the nuances of it?”

What is causing Michigan’s teacher shortage problems?

For many Michigan districts, a teacher shortage crisis has been brewing for years, beginning with the Great Recession of 2008-09, which left many schools reeling financially and caused widespread job uncertainty for staff. It continued as lawmakers enacted laws unpopular with educators that made it easier for school districts to fire teachers, weakened teacher tenure laws, and made test scores an important part of teacher evaluations.

Meanwhile, fewer people were choosing the profession to begin with. Suddenly Michigan, which used to be a state that overproduced teachers, was seeing big holes in its pipeline. In 2014-15, there were 14,749 people enrolled in teacher preparation programs. In 2018-19, the latest year the data is available, the number was 10,168.

Although average teacher salaries in Michigan are around $64,000 a year, the pay for new teachers is low. Beginning teachers average $37,320 annually, according to the Michigan Education Association. It can take years for a new teacher to reach the top of the pay scale, and those who have in-demand skills in areas such as math and science can command much higher salaries in the private sector.

Factor in an aging workforce — 62% of teachers in Michigan are over age 40 — and the challenges become more clear.

The pandemic has only exacerbated this problem. Teachers are working longer hours, often filling in for colleagues who’ve become ill with COVID. Online teaching has been difficult, as have the challenges of dealing with learning loss, mental health concerns, and inconsistent modes of learning over the years. Some teachers have had enough and are considering leaving the profession.

“Teachers are exhausted,” Leah Porter, a Holt teacher who was named Michigan’s Teacher of the Year in 2021, said during a recent meeting of the Michigan Board of Education. “The stakes have never been higher on teachers, and they feel that pressure. They are just burned out beyond belief.”

The pandemic has often put teachers on the front lines of conflicts over whether schools should be in person or remote. A raging debate about curriculum, including how topics such as Black history and racism are taught, hasn’t helped.

The MEA, the state’s largest teacher’s union with affiliates across Michigan, earlier this year released the results of a survey that show 1 in 5 Michigan teachers who responded expect to change careers in the next two to three years, while 14% said they plan to retire. That doesn’t mean they’ll all leave, and national data show that similar survey responses haven’t resulted in a huge exodus, but it is concerning for local and state education officials.

Where is the shortage worst?

It’s difficult for researchers to say which districts are struggling the most to hire teachers. The answer isn’t captured clearly in the data the state collects, said Katharine Strunk, director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University.

Districts in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula, for example, have the highest ratio of teachers to students. Yet teachers in those districts are the least likely to have permanent certificates in the grade or subject they are teaching.

Turnover is highest in urban districts with the highest poverty and the most Black students, according to EPIC. That means some of the state’s most disadvantaged students have the least experienced teachers. A Chalkbeat analysis last year shed light on the disproportionate effect of teacher turnover on students of color and students from low-income families.

“This kind of teacher churn can have substantial deleterious effects on students, and on schools’ and districts’ abilities to operate effectively and efficiently,” EPIC researchers said in a 2021 report.

How have the shortage areas changed?

Michigan, like many other states, has long had trouble finding enough teachers certified to teach special education, math, world languages, the sciences, English as a second language, and career and technical education courses.

Recently, hiring difficulties reached elementary schools, where principals at one time had their pick of hundreds of applicants for each open position. In 2018, elementary teachers appeared on the U.S. Department of Education’s critical shortage area list for Michigan.

That’s startling in a state that once produced so many teachers that the State Board of Education in 2005 stopped authorizing new college and university teacher preparation programs.

There are currently 26 disciplines on Michigan’s critical shortage list, twice as many as a decade ago. Recently added disciplines include physical education, art, music, elementary education, language arts, psychology, and social studies.

How does the struggle to hire qualified teachers affect students?

Students are in larger classes and are sometimes being taught by uncertified long-term substitutes or educators teaching outside the grade levels and subject areas they trained for. Other students are being taught by educators who are stressed from the burden of covering for absent colleagues because of a troubling shortage of substitute teachers, Breen said.

Despite staffing challenges, most Michigan schools are finding ways to still offer electives and advanced courses, Breen said. Doing that sometimes requires assigning teachers who don’t feel prepared to teach in those content areas or who haven’t taught those courses in 12 or more years, Breen said.

Will there be money in next year’s state school aid budget to help?

The governor, House and Senate agree there’s a problem, but they have vastly different ideas for how to address it and how much to spend on it. They have until July 1 — when school districts’ fiscal years begin — to hammer out the differences in their disparate spending plans.

Whitmer’s plan is the most expensive, most complicated, and most controversial.

Her proposed budget calls for $1.5 billion to cover bonuses for teachers who remain in their districts or transfer to high-poverty schools. The bonuses would gradually increase from $2,000 to $4,000 over four school years.

Teachers unions support the plan, but government watchdogs like Thiel say the bonuses should be more targeted.

“Rather than sprinkle the infield, maybe we should provide greater retention bonuses to those who are in special education classrooms or middle school science classrooms,” Thiel said. “If these are the classrooms where we’re having a problem with retention, where we’re seeing teachers leaving, let’s tailor the retention bonuses to those classrooms and those districts.”

Whitmer also wants to invest $150 million in scholarships, tuition reimbursement, and mentorship programs for new teachers.

Teacher recruitment and retention are a much lower priority for Michigan senators who budgeted just $25 million for it in the spending plan they passed last week. That money would be used to provide scholarships to student teachers.

House lawmakers want to invest much more. They budgeted $529 million for recruitment and retention efforts including scholarships, compensation for student teachers, and support for programs that offer pathways for school support staff and high school students to become educators.

That’s in line with what Rice, the state superintendent, has said it will cost to alleviate the state’s teacher hiring problem. He has been calling for a variety of changes including raising teacher pay, forgiving teachers’ student loans, paying child care costs for parents enrolled in education programs, and providing stipends to defray student teachers’ living costs.

Won’t federal COVID relief money help?

Michigan schools received a $6 billion windfall as part of the federal government’s COVID relief package. Districts are using it for tutoring programs, summer school, computers, ventilation systems, and much more.

Superintendents are reluctant to use it to hire staff because they would have to maintain the salaries for new hires after the three years of federal COVID money runs out.

What is the Michigan Department of Education doing to mitigate the problem?

Last summer, the MDE launched the Welcome Back Proud Michigan Educators Campaign to help former teachers with lapsed credentials return to the profession. The program also provides the necessary professional development to open pathways to Michigan education majors who completed their programs but never became teachers.

Last year, Rice approved new alternative-route teacher certification programs created by New Paradigm for Education, a charter school network, and the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Alternative-route programs are an important part of the solution but not a replacement for college and university programs, Breen said. Alternative-route candidates need to already have bachelor’s degrees before they enroll, she said. Much of the recent growth in enrollment in teacher preparation programs was fueled by alternative programs.

Rice is also using his bully pulpit to encourage local school districts to boost teacher salaries, and to press the Legislature to fund recruitment strategies and — especially — retention efforts such as Whitmer’s proposed bonuses.

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit deputy superintendent gets top job in Cincinnati schools

2022-03-01T21:15:26+00:00

Iranetta Wright, deputy superintendent of schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, will take on the top leadership position in the Cincinnati school district this spring.

Wright, an educator for nearly 30 years, was selected Monday as the next superintendent for Cincinnati Public Schools, Ohio’s third-largest school district. The announcement came after a six-month search. Wright was a finalist alongside two other candidates.

“I couldn’t be prouder of Ms. Wright,” said Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti in an email, describing her as “exceptionally bright”, “hardworking,” and “a fighter for children whose families do not always have the resources or networks to advocate for a stronger public education system.”

Wright was a top administrator in the Duval County Public Schools in 2017 when Vitti was the superintendent there. When Vitti was hired to lead the Detroit district, she soon followed and took on a top administrative role as the district emerged from nearly two decades of state control and the school board sought new leadership that could turn around the district. In the Duval district, Wright had been a teacher, principal, and chief of schools.

Wright is expected to begin her new job in May.

“I thank the [Cincinnati Board of Education] for their decision and belief in my ability to lead our District to the next level as we make Cincinnati Public Schools the public school choice for children and families of our city,” said Wright in a statement following the announcement. “I’m looking forward to leading this district. We’re going to hit the ground running to learn, grow, and develop together.”

During her tenure as Detroit deputy superintendent, Wright oversaw the daily operations of the district’s 107 schools, including managing principals, counseling services, discipline, public safety, and athletics.

She also led the district’s efforts to overhaul its programs for students with special education needs, and addressed issues with transportation, academic instruction, as well as the program’s ability to identify and provide services to students.

Wright also led efforts to better identify and serve students who are experiencing homelessness by ensuring each school appoints a person to serve such students and providing staff training. Since 2017, the district has increased the number of students identified as homeless from 600 to nearly 1,900.

Vitti said that he and Wright had been discussing her future as a superintendent for the past couple of years, and that her departure should not come as a challenge for the district’s administrators.

“This has always been the plan,” he said. “Organizational structures have already been adjusted in the anticipation of this transition.”

Senior administrators from within the school district will take over the departments and work that Wright oversaw, Vitti added, instead of the district conducting a search for outside school leaders. Those changes should be announced shortly, he said.

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org

Michigan districts are running out of snow days. What happens now?

2022-01-28T20:43:17+00:00

It’s been a mild winter so far in southern Michigan, but already Reading Community Schools near the Ohio border is nearly out of snow days.

The district isn’t alone.

It’s not yet February, and many districts are nearing state caps on the number of days they are allowed to close for emergencies. In addition to snow days, there have been pandemic-related closures, attendance challenges and threats of school violence. Administrators want more flexibility, but the state Legislature doesn’t appear willing to grant it.

That jeopardizes school funding and districts’ ability to end the year on time in early June when many teachers and families have plans to start vacations and summer camps.

Michigan’s pupil accounting rules allow six school closures per year, known as “forgiven days.” They’re most often used for snow, but this is an unusual school year of staff shortages, COVID outbreaks, and copycat threats that followed the deadly November shooting at Oxford High School. Those factors are forcing school closures that are rapidly draining districts’ pool of forgiven days.

The 750-student Reading school district has had to close three times because of threats of school violence, once because of a citywide problem with water pressure, and once because of icy roads.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District has used all six of its forgiven days for health and safety reasons, administrators said.

On the snowier west side of the state, Newaygo Public Schools, about 35 miles north of Grand Rapids, already exceeded nine days. The district used five days for weather-related closings, plus 4½ more for “a variety of reasons” including staff shortages, Superintendent Jeff Wright said.

Administrators around the state have been asking the Legislature for more flexibility but so far their efforts have gained less traction than a school bus on an icy hill.

Fewer days versus long year

The closures come at a time schools already are trying to make up for lost learning time earlier in the pandemic when many schools closed or moved hastily to remote learning before teachers and students had the resources to get online. That has sparked some pushback to the notion of allowing fewer days of schooling, as opposed to extending the school year a few days or weeks into June.

“So many kids for the past couple of years have gotten nowhere near the [state-required] 180 days of learning so it’s even more important now to make sure they get as much as possible. We’ve got a two-year deficit we keep adding onto,” said Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, an Ann Arbor-based nonpartisan think tank focused on education’s role in bolstering the state economy.

Districts that deplete their six forgiven days can ask the Michigan Department of Education for three more, but some administrators are concerned even that won’t be enough to cover unforeseen challenges in the months ahead.

“With so many disruptions this year, I don’t know if three days is going to make that much of a difference,” Reading Superintendent Chuck North said.

Unless the Legislature acts, districts will have to cut short spring breaks or extend school calendars by the number of days they’ve closed beyond their allotment of forgiven days.

So far, only three districts — Ludington, Muskegon and Newaygo — have applied for additional forgiven days, but it’s still early in the year, said MDE spokesman Martin Ackley. More applications are expected. The department is likely to approve them, but can only allow three additional days (for a total of nine) unless the Legislature provides more flexibility.

Cedar Springs Public Schools, 20 miles north of Grand Rapids, hasn’t applied for additional forgiven days although the district has used all six allowed days — two days each for bad weather, power outages and high teacher and student absences. Superintendent Scott Smith said he will extend the school year if necessary to meet the state-required 180 days and 1,098 hours of instruction.

“This does not keep me up at night. We’ve got provisions and we’ve got a plan … so to me this is really not a big challenge,” Smith said.

“It can be a little bit of a bump for some families who’ve scheduled vacation or some staff who’ve scheduled vacation, but you figure it out and make it work,” he said. “It’s a human business. You’ve got to be flexible.”

Extending the school year has a price

Extending the year could be costly and would require districts to renegotiate with local labor unions.

But money shouldn’t stop schools from doing what’s best for kids, especially in a year of historic school funding, Glazer said.

“If the only reason not to extend the school year is that it costs too much, then they ought to be able to figure that out,” he said.

For superintendents in northern Michigan, that isn’t the only reason. They face extra pressure from the tourism industry, in which businesses would suffer if school calendars are lengthened. They depend on long summers when families can visit and teenage workers can staff their shops and restaurants.

There’s another option, Glazer said. If it’s too unsafe to open school buildings, classes could be moved online, he said.

“It’s not perfect. A lot of homes have trouble getting Internet, but we’re far better off today than we were two years ago,” he said.

That could be a tough sell for lawmakers like Rep. Pamela Hornberger, who has staked out a firm position against remote learning. As chairperson of the Education Committee, the Chester Township Republican controls the House education agenda.

The worst thing the Legislature could do, Glazer said, is hand out extra forgiven days that would stop formal learning entirely.

“With all the disruption in kids’ lives because of COVID, why take additional school days away from them?” he asked. “We really need to figure out how to get as many learning days as possible. That’s particularly important for non-affluent children.”

Unprecedented disruptions caused by the pandemic have put districts in a vise.

There are financial penalties when district attendance falls below 75%. The amount is determined by a complex formula. For example, a district with 2,000 students and a state funding level of $600,000 per day would lose $56,000 on a day attendance fell to 68%, according to the formula.

In essence, schools stand to lose state funding if they open classrooms with attendance under 75%, while school costs (gas for buses, heating bills, and staff salaries) remain the same on those days.

“These penalties end up harming the very students we strive to educate and support. A loss of funding clearly takes away much-needed resources for students,” said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit school system.

Attendance rules challenge district

Superintendents face a difficult choice when surging COVID cases portend high absences. Some open school doors anyway and take the funding hit. Others close and use a forgiven day, hoping they won’t run out and later have to extend the school year further into June.

Attendance rules are less stringent when school years are extended, requiring only 60% attendance for districts to receive full funding on days after the originally scheduled end of the year.

Superintendents like Smith in Cedar Springs are willing to sacrifice funding to provide consistency for students who are able to attend.

“Let’s say we have only 68% in attendance. We’ll lose a fraction of the funding for that day but at least we can have a meaningful day for 68% of the students. It’s about what you can do, not what you can’t do,” he said from his 3,500-student district. “Let’s do what we can for those who are there, and catch the others up later.”

Petoskey Superintendent Chris Parker is similarly minded.

“To the degree schools are open, it’s better for kids,” Parker said. “If only 70% attend, at least that 70% gets the in-person instruction, social interaction, access to guidance counselors, and nutritious school lunches they need … but it’s going to reach a point where you can’t afford to do that,” he said.

“It’s great to say you’ll give up the money, but if you’re running a district without your full foundation allowance, the (local) board of education isn’t going to be fond of that.”

It isn’t clear whether school districts can make up for those funding losses using federal COVID-relief funds. Some superintendents said it’s possible but others believe that money must be spent in accordance with grant applications they already submitted.

Lowering the 75% threshold would be a big help, said Jennifer Smith, head of government affairs for the Michigan Association of School Boards, but so far the state House of Representatives has been unwilling to consider it. Other groups, including the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals, also are asking the Legislature for relief from attendance requirements during the pandemic. So far, the Senate has taken a step in that direction but the House Education Committee has not budged.

The Senate bill would prevent districts from being penalized in limited circumstances when low attendance is caused by pandemic-related quarantines.

The school board association says that bill isn’t enough, but the House hasn’t been willing to go even that far.

Hornberger, the House education chair, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Other House Republicans, though, have resisted attempts to provide any flexibility they believe could encourage districts to return to remote learning or could make it easier for school buildings to close.

“I don’t understand that argument. The insinuation is that superintendents don’t want what’s best for their kids,” said Kevin Polston, superintendent of Kentwood Public Schools, a 9,500-student district south of Grand Rapids. “We know in-person instruction is what’s best for most kids, and the districts across the state have been committed to offering that for our students and families, but safety is always going to be first for us.”

Kentwood used two forgiven days so far this year on consecutive days because of snow, Polston said. When school resumed that Friday, only 71% of students showed up so the district won’t get its full share of state funding for that day unless the Legislature agrees to a rule change.

“Schools that are in person for every kid and doing the best they can shouldn’t be penalized during a pandemic,” Polston said.

The free-market Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which has staunchly advocated for in-person learning, hasn’t taken an official position on the Senate bill but encourages the Legislature to reconsider attendance rules for quarantined students. The organization wants to discourage districts from temporarily switching entirely to remote instruction, as schools in Detroit and Ann Arbor recently did.

“Schools should be given greater flexibility not to excuse them from filling their responsibility, but to better equip them to provide students with effective instruction. That means guaranteeing all students access to an in-person option, as well as giving schools latitude,” said Ben DeGrow, the center’s director of education policy.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is working with Republican legislative leaders on ways to encourage in-person learning and is expected to offer proposals in her budget proposal next month. Bobby Leddy, spokesperson for the Democratic governor, would not say whether those solutions include flexibility on attendance rules and forgiven days.

“Right now 98% of districts have their classrooms open, and we are working to get that to 100% at soon as possible,” Leddy said.

Detroit superintendent proposes solutions.

Schools that have temporarily moved online are in a bind, Vitti said from Detroit, where students have been remote since December. Attendance is challenging on remote days when younger students might not have enough support at home, and older ones might have too many distractions.

On four days in January, Detroit’s attendance dipped below 75%, including once as low as 59%. The highest attendance in January was 78%.

Before going remote in December, Detroit schools closed several times because of building and city infrastructure problems, threats of school violence, and increases in COVID positivity rates. When schools reopen to in-class learning, Vitti said he expects to add five minutes to the school day to help meet the 1,098-hour school year requirement.

“We have felt the impact more than other districts regarding COVID because of the infection rate and because of low vaccination rates,” Vitti said. “I know other districts are in a similar situation, which is why we need some flexibility moving forward.”

Vitti suggests lowering attendance minimums to 60% and eliminating or reducing financial penalties in certain circumstances, such as during extreme weather, high COVID transmission rates, or critical infrastructure failure. The Legislature also could allow districts to close in response to threats of violence without using a forgiven day, he said.

Jennifer Smith of the state school board association said parents can do their part to pressure lawmakers to take action now so districts can plan for the spring, but she isn’t optimistic that they will.

“I don’t think parents will fully understand until we start talking about having to go to school in June,” she said.

“There needs to be an understanding from the Legislature that this is affecting their constituents, and something needs to be done. It doesn’t have to be drastic. It needs to be flexible,” she said.

Few Michigan districts require staff vaccines amid COVID spike

2022-01-13T23:31:53+00:00

A spike in coronavirus cases is again causing upheaval for Michigan’s K-12 schools, yet many districts aren’t using all of the tools at their disposal to prevent the virus from spreading.

In the absence of guidance from the state, only a few of Michigan’s more than 800 school districts require staff to get vaccinated against COVID or to take regular tests. Individual districts are allowed to implement such requirements even though a similar mandate from the Biden administration was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court today.

Vaccines and testing reduce the spread of COVID, which is disrupting student learning and families’ lives. Numerous Michigan districts are operating remotely in the first part of January, in part because many staff members are falling ill and replacements are in short supply.

The Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement for workplaces with at least 100 employees — a category that includes school districts in 26 states — was among the federal government’s most sweeping attempts to reduce the spread of COVID. With the mandate blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, implementing such mandates will be left to individual states and districts, continuing a pattern of local decision-making that has defined much of the U.S. response to COVID.

Experts say vaccine requirements for staff can help districts reduce disruptive outbreaks. They are “a very important tool, especially now,” said Sarah Reckhow, a professor of political science at Michigan State University who studies education and COVID.

Only the city districts in Lansing and Detroit have implemented such requirements so far. East Lansing will do so this month, its superintendent said in an email to families.

Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, said the district’s vaccine-or-test requirement for staff would remain in place despite a decision today from the Supreme Court preventing the Biden administration from enforcing a similar rule for all U.S. companies, including school districts, with at least 100 employees. Detroit is requiring all employees to get vaccinated, without the option of testing, in February.

Hundreds of districts across Michigan are using other COVID mitigation methods, such as requiring masks and offering free at-home tests to students. For instance, Ferndale Public Schools offered free COVID tests to students and staff before classes resumed this month, though a negative test wasn’t required for students to return to school.

Mandatory testing for students and staff remains rare, with DPSCD an outlier for its massive investment in testing. Vaccination requirements for students haven’t been implemented yet. The Detroit district is seriously considering one for next school year.

Mask and vaccination requirements have helped reduce the spread of COVID in some of Michigan’s public universities. Both the University of Michigan and Michigan State require students and staff to mask and be vaccinated, and campus outbreaks have dropped sharply after major spikes in the early days of the pandemic.

Still, state officials have stuck to urging that everyone get vaccinated, shying away from implementing broad COVID mitigation measures such as universal masking — or even from endorsing staff vaccine requirements.

Responding to questions about whether the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services supports vaccine-or-test requirements for school staff, spokesman Bob Wheaton said the department “continues to recommend universal masking in K-12 settings.”

Wheaton said the Supreme Court decision doesn’t change the state’s position.

In Lansing, which announced its vaccine-or-test requirements in August, before any other district, 649 of 721 teachers reported being fully vaccinated, said spokesman Robert Kolt. The overall vaccination rate for staff — a group that includes secretaries and administrators — is 65%, above the Michigan average.

“The effort was really made to get kids back in the classroom,” Kolt said. “The conclusion was that the only way to do it was to mandate vaccination.”

Lansing students didn’t return to classrooms last year, which almost certainly came at the cost of student learning.

Research on virtual learning during the 2020-21 school year left little doubt that students — especially students of color and from low-income families — struggled when they were away from the classroom. For instance, half of Black fourth graders started last school year significantly below grade level in math, and two-thirds were significantly behind by the end of the year.

Some district leaders aren’t convinced that vaccination requirements for staff are a good idea. As with other COVID mitigation methods, opinion is split along partisan lines, polls show.

Vaccine-or-test requirements are “a violation of a person’s right to do what they want with their body, and I don’t think it should be done at a district level,” said Tom McMillin, a Republican member of the Michigan Board of Education.

Michigan schools are getting billions in COVID aid. Where is it going?

2021-12-18T11:00:00+00:00

Proof that $6 billion in federal education aid can transform schools is already on display across Michigan, from expanded summer programs to upgraded buildings to new staff hired to help students cope with the pandemic.

But most of the COVID relief spending is still to come — as of December, districts have spent roughly 10% of the total federal funding — and the public still doesn’t have a clear picture of how the money will be spent.

Some districts have responded to the challenge by reaching out to ask about community priorities and promising to keep the public informed about their spending.

Other districts are putting in less effort. Experts say that lack of communication could damage public support for schools at a moment when students desperately need the kind of intervention schools can give only with extra funding.

And the public needs to know what intervention works – and what doesn’t.

“We don’t know what districts are doing with their ESSER funds,” Katharine Strunk, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said. “We won’t be able to understand how we’re going to help kids accelerate during and post-pandemic unless we understand what districts are doing.”

If schools don’t practice transparency, students could lose out. The money, much of it received through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), isn’t just a critical tool to help students through a time of historic upheaval. The funds amount to an enormous real-world experiment in education spending that will likely shape funding debates for years to come. If educators spend the money well, it will help them make the case for more funding after COVID dollars run out.

As districts prepare to ramp up spending, the Detroit Free Press and Chalkbeat are partnering to shed light on how the state’s schools are investing this critical influx of cash.

Reporters reviewed 50 school district and charter school websites, a mix of suburban, rural and city districts, and found that only a handful provide any information online about spending.

Schools must engage community members and make spending plans accessible online under U.S. Department of Education rules for the largest round of funding, but there is no timeline for sharing those plans. School leaders said they want to share with their community how the money is being spent, particularly so they can show how it can improve public education.

“It’s important that we use these funds to meet students’ needs,” said Alena Zachery-Ross, superintendent of Ypsilanti Community Schools. “We need to show as educators that we can be wonderful stewards of money when we receive it.”

What does successful spending look like?

Experts say transparency and community engagement are especially important because effective COVID spending may prove difficult to judge. Improvements in students’ mental health aren’t easily measured, for instance. What’s more, districts’ needs vary widely, and they can’t be expected to spend the money the same way.

Still, “there are criteria for the process: It’s transparency and accountability. It’s genuine engagement with communities,” said Tyler Thur, assistant director of the Office of K-12 Outreach at Michigan State University.

Districts still have plenty of time to share their plans and get their communities involved, even though it’s been more than a year since Congress approved the first round of relief funding, in March 2020. Congress sent COVID aid to schools in three major waves, and the third, largest wave of funding hasn’t even gone out to Michigan districts yet. The deadline to submit plans for the third wave is mid-December, but districts can amend their plans after that as new needs arise. The last dollars won’t be spent until 2025.

So far, many districts are doing the bare minimum to communicate with the public about their spending priorities.

The review of websites in communities of all sizes across Michigan found that a handful of large urban districts — notably traditional districts in Detroit and Grand Rapids — had posted detailed spending plans on their websites. Detroit also held 15 community forums in the spring and summer, said district spokeswoman Chrystal Wilson.

But little or no information was available on most of the 50 district websites. There are more than 800 school districts and charter schools in Michigan.

Experts say the massive scale of the funding means districts should ensure that information about their spending is widely available, including online.

Craig Thiel, research director at Citizens Research Council of Michigan, said districts should post explanations of their spending online, not just dollar amounts.

“It’s the largest federal investment in public education history,” he said. “I think taxpayers will want to know where those dollars are going.”

That information shortfall is reflected in the way some districts have laid plans to spend the funds.

Under federal law, districts are required to “meaningfully consult” with the public — including teachers, students, and parents — about their plans to spend the third and largest wave of money. Practically speaking, that could mean simply discussing the plans at a school board meeting or inviting public input through a survey.

“We’ve definitely not been in the loop about” federal COVID aid, said Owen Bondono, Michigan Teacher of the Year 2020-21, who teaches English at Oak Park High School in suburban Detroit. “It’s sort of like, everyone waits for the next board meeting to see where those funds are going.”

Some Michigan districts are finding creative ways to build their spending plans on community feedback.

Over the summer, Ypsilanti Community Schools sent staff members into neighborhoods twice a week to ask community members what they wanted out of the district’s roughly $33 million in federal aid. Staff handed out popsicles in parks and, in one case, set up a food truck.

Everywhere they went, they asked people what needed to be different about Ypsilanti schools this year.

The outreach campaign — called “Boots on the Ground” — confirmed for district leaders that parents were particularly interested in intensive tutoring and other programs that help students get back on track academically.

But it also turned up some new ideas: A surprising number of parents asked for water bottle filling stations, said Superintendent Zachery-Ross. The district installed them using federal funds.

“There were some things that we hadn’t even thought about from students’ perspectives and parents’ perspectives, that were wins. We didn’t know those were the things that were valued.”

“It’s not too late” to do outreach, she added. “The important thing is to get the feedback.”

A district with $150 million to spend

Flint Community Schools has not provided any documents specifying where the district has spent tens of millions of dollars from the first two rounds of funding more than three months after The Detroit Free Press and Chalkbeat requested the information. District officials have said broadly they’ve spent money on laptops for students, $22,500 bonuses for every staff member, and personal protective equipment.

Federal funding has mainly gone to districts through the Title I formula, which is calculated to send more money to districts with higher populations of students from low income families, because these districts often have higher needs.

Flint received the most money per student of all districts in the state, more than $27,000 per student, in COVID relief funding, the last and largest round of funding.

In all, Flint has about $150 million to spend from three rounds of federal funding. According to documents presented in district school board meetings, Flint has been reimbursed for at least $22 million in federal funds.

But finding how that money has been spent is more difficult.

Reporters requested documents from the district detailing spending on Sept. 7. A district official first directed a reporter to the district’s budget transparency page, where schools must post the current year’s budget under state law. Flint’s page lacked any of the required budget documents for the current fiscal year or any of the information on federal spending reporters requested.

When a reporter explained that the transparency page did not fulfill the request, nor did it include documents showing COVID relief spending, district officials wrote that they would send the information. They failed to send anything that detailed specific spending or intended spending, even though it’s likely such documents exist.

Board members, for instance, have referred multiple times to documents with line items for spending in meetings in October and November. Why the public does not have access to those documents or who within the district maintains these records remains unclear.

The assistant secretary/treasurer of the Flint board of education Adrian Walker before a meeting at Accelerated Learning Academy in Flint, on Dec. 8.

Kevelin Jones, Flint’s superintendent, said the district is working toward transparency and offered a broad overview of federal relief spending.

“What we have spent that money on is wages, benefits, contracting services, maintenance and repairs, PPE supplies for our scholars,” he said.

The district has also publicized the staff member bonuses and it is acquiring enough laptops so every student will have one at school and at home. The district has not provided total amounts spent on either initiative.

Discussion from school board meetings over the past three months offers clues about where money might be going.

But the meetings have also been subject to increasingly rancorous debate among board members over district spending, including debate over COVID relief funds.

Board members have said in meetings that they find the district’s general processes for spending money opaque.

The district has weathered multiple controversies over general spending this year, including an ongoing investigation into questionable payments made to Flint’s longtime law firm, which was billing the district close to $1 million annually for more than a decade, an amount an attorney investigating the billing practices called “extreme.”

During one debate on Oct. 20 over a $53,000 grant for student career planning for the district, which included college tours, board members questioned sparse details provided to them about the grant. Treasurer Laura MacIntyre said the material didn’t indicate how the money would be spent for the tours.

“I’m not going to go in and sign a check register when I don’t have the invoices and I can’t see what’s on it,” she said. “This is woefully inadequate in terms of information being provided for us to approve.”

Similarly, MacIntyre has questioned proposed COVID relief spending, including a plan to authorize $44 million.

She said in a Nov. 3 meeting that she found several items on the list for spending “really troubling.” The list was not shared with the public. The Free Press reached out to MacIntyre but did not receive a response.

Among her concerns were what she said were $10,000 stipends for data technicians over three years and stipends for a handful of administrators, directors, and administrative assistants for taking on extra duties, she said. The amounts of the stipends for administrators weren’t discussed.

Federal guidance states that funds “generally will not be used for bonuses, merit pay, or similar expenditures, unless related to disruptions or closures resulting from COVID-19.”

A budget official said in the meeting that the stipends for data technicians were intended to reward programmers who did extra work getting virtual school off the ground. Jones said the stipends for directors and administrators would pay for extra work put on staffers due to unfilled positions.

MacIntyre also questioned a $180,000 intercom system. A district official said a safety assessment showed some of the district’s existing intercom systems need to be replaced in case of an emergency in schools.

Despite MacIntyre’s concerns, the spending plan went through.

The board unanimously voted to authorize spending the $44 million.

The district still has the majority of its relief funding to spend.

In late November, Flint launched a more energized effort to communicate to the public, announcing 10 public forums to ask community members how to spend $99 million in COVID relief funds, signaling a stepped-up effort to communicate with the public.

Jones was first appointed as interim superintendent in Flint in September, then permanently appointed to the role on Nov. 18.

Although the district has been mired in financial controversy in the past, he said he wants to move forward to rebuild trust. Part of that effort will include conversations with community members about how to spend the federal cash still coming in, in ways that benefit students.

“It is my goal to be 100% transparent about what has happened in this district,” he said.

Michigan schools seek options as staff shortages and COVID cases converge

2021-11-19T14:00:00+00:00

The first domino fell at 8:30 a.m.

School had just started on Nov. 3 when two bus drivers called to say they couldn’t make their afternoon routes because their kids tested positive for COVID. A half hour later, another driver tested positive, and a fourth had to go home to care for a sick parent. That left four drivers – half the usual number — to get 350 children home from Johannesburg-Lewiston schools.

Superintendent Katy Xenakis-Makowski had until 2:47 p.m. to get buses to the schools. She decided to dismiss some students early to give drivers enough time to do two routes each, covering the 300 square miles spanning the northern Lower Peninsula school district.

Crisis averted, but the dominoes kept tumbling and Xenakis-Makowski wound up shutting her schools for a full week. Johannesburg-Lewiston schools aren’t alone. Schools in Michigan and across the country are closing, sometimes abruptly, as COVID infections and staff shortages converge into crises.

Now Michigan superintendents are worried about meeting the required 180 days and 1,098 hours of instruction required for their full allocations of state funding. Johannesburg-Lewiston’s week off meant losing five of the six “forgiven” days that districts typically use during snow storms. If Xenakis-Makowski has to close again for more than a day she will have to extend the school year or lose funding she needs to heat buildings and pay teachers.

Superintendents across the state are feeling the same pressure as COVID cases rise and more students are forced to quarantine.

Some districts are switching temporarily to remote learning. The Detroit Public Schools Community District, for instance, is switching to remote learning on three Fridays in December. In announcing the decision, Detroit superintendent Nikolai Vitti cited rising COVID cases, mental health stresses, and the need to thoroughly sanitize buildings.

It’s like a rolling brownout meant to stave off a blackout, said Wendy Zdeb, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals Association.

“It’s better in the long term to relieve some of the system’s stress so it doesn’t build up to a critical point,” she said.

Although pupil accounting rules don’t provide clear guidance for remote learning, some superintendents believe it’s allowable as long as students and teachers are online together during regular class meeting times, interacting in real time as if they were in a classroom together.

But that isn’t practical for rural districts like Johannesburg-Lewiston, where a recent district survey showed that 40% of students don’t have strong enough internet connections to support remote learning, particularly in families with multiple children who need to be online at the same time. The district has hotspots it can distribute, but they don’t work in some parts of the district that lack an adequate internet infrastructure.

“If I say we’re going to remote learn but it’s not accessible for all I’m increasing gaps so we’re really in a predicament,” Xenakis-Makowski said.

On top of that, she said, it’s too much to ask young elementary students to sit in front of a computer for seven hours a day.

Superintendents say they need the Legislature to provide more flexibility to let students learn independently without jeopardizing funding as it did during the first year of the pandemic when districts pivoted between in-person and at-home learning. Then, districts could count remote learners toward daily attendance as long as teachers could document interactions about school work.

Districts need and deserve flexibility, said Bob Kefgen, a lobbyist for the Michigan Association of Secondary School Administrators. Asynchronous learning — where students learn at their own pace — should be an option for districts that need it, he said.

“We can’t assume that when kids aren’t in the classroom they can’t learn. We want schools delivering education to students where they are and when they’re ready to get the information,” Kefgen said.

The state Senate passed a bill in October that would allow schools to count virtual learners if teachers document interactions and if absences are directly related to coronavirus transmission, exposure, or a quarantine ordered by a local health department.

The House has not acted. Rep. Pamela Hornberger, the Chesterfield Township Republican who leads the House Education Committee, did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’re all hoping the Legislature is willing to step up and provide some relief,” said Rob Dickinson, executive director of the Michigan Pupil Accounting and Attendance Association, which represents 870 pupil accounting managers and intermediate school district auditors. “I think everybody is just holding their breath. If COVID gets worse over the winter the legislature is going to have to do something.”

Leaders of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy envisions districts asking the Legislature for extra forgiven days like they did in 2019 when schools ran out of snow days.

That would be wrong, said Jarrett Skorup, communications director of the policy center, which advocates free-market principles and limited government.

“Taxpayers are paying for 180 days. If they can’t do that, that’s a tough situation for the school board and the superintendent,” Skorup said, “but I don’t think taxpayers should be paying for schooling days if kids are not in school.”

Some Republicans have been reluctant to provide flexibility for remote learning because they want to encourage in-person learning.

“Trying to get the Legislature to allow for remote learning is going to be an uphill battle because they heard loud and clear from parents: ‘We’ve got to go to work,’” Zdeb said.

State Rep. John Damoose, for one, wants to help.

“While I will not support massive closures like we’ve seen over the last two years, I am open to bringing people together to hear ideas on how we can help with short-term challenges,” said Damoose, a Harbor Springs Republican on the House Education Committee.

“It’s time to come back together as a community, recognize that the default should always be ‘open with no restrictions,’ but understand that as thinking people there are times when it just makes sense to adapt to temporary solutions,” Damoose said.

Administrators say they need lawmakers to trust them to make the right decisions for their districts.

“No one wants to not have school. We want to have kids here. The best days are the days kids are here. I would hope that people trust my colleagues to only close school when we absolutely can’t come up with another plan,” Xenakis-Makowski said.

For days like November 3.

After the drivers called out of work that morning, Xenakis-Makowski got a text from the bus garage. This time it was the school nurse who was conducting drive-through COVID testing there for symptomatic students. Half of the tests were coming back positive.

By 10 a.m. school attendance reports had rolled in showing a 24% absence rate. At 25%, districts lose a portion of their state funding for the day.

Now people were lining up outside the superintendent’s office.

The teachers union president wanted to know the plan and was demanding answers Xenakis-Makowski didn’t have.

The transportation director was back, saying it would be a week before he would have enough drivers to operate his department.

Two principals appeared. They were short four substitutes, teachers were at their breaking point covering for each other, and re-teaching lessons to students who’d been absent.

Just then, another attendance report came in. Some students had gone home sick. The absence rate reached 26%.

“If it was only one of those things we would have gotten it covered but when you have a COVID flare up, a staffing shortage and then not enough bus drivers,” there was no solution but to shut down, Xenakis-Makowski said.

“We had zero intention of closing school this year for anything but there was just no way we could sort out how we could get classrooms covered, get transportation to take place for everyone who needs it, and make learning cohesive for kids,” Xenakis-Makowski said.

More Michigan schools could open before Labor Day under House bill

2021-10-15T19:39:56+00:00

Mission Point Resort is a bustling Mackinac Island retreat where families swim, golf, play croquet, sip lavender lemonade and dine on seared walleye all summer.

Come September, business falls off sharply as vacation season ends and children start school.

That drop could happen sooner if state lawmakers repeal a law prohibiting schools from opening before Labor Day unless they hold public hearings and get permission from the state Department of Education.

The House education committee recently advanced a bill to repeal the 2005 law, driven by the tourism industry. The committee voted 9-2 at the hearing Oct. 5.

The perennial debate pits education leaders who want to build more flexibility into their school year calendar against tourism and economic development interests eager to protect summer profits by ensuring families can book vacations through the Labor Day holiday.

It isn’t hard for districts to get waivers to begin classes in August. The education department typically works with districts to help them meet criteria for approval, said department spokesman Bill DiSessa. Waivers are good for three years.

Waiver applications have been on the rise. For 2019-21, 29 intermediate school districts and 121 local districts and public charter schools received waivers to open before Labor Day. For 2022-24, 48 intermediate districts and 142 local districts and public charter schools have already been granted waivers.

Intermediate school waivers allow any school district within the intermediate district’s service area to start before Labor Day.

But school districts need more predictability than a temporary waiver provides, said Don Wotruba, executive director of the Michigan Association of School Boards. They don’t feel confident investing in plans to extend the school year if they have to get permission again every three years, he said.

Tourism leaders like the waiver process because they believe the administrative hassle deters some districts from applying.

But education advocates say they shouldn’t have to apply in the first place.

“We believe districts should have the flexibility on their own without the Department of Education deciding yes or no,” Wotruba said. “Districts need the flexibility to decide what makes sense for them.”

That’s one reason Chesterfield Township Republican Pamela Hornberger said she introduced the bill to repeal the ban on pre-Labor Day school schedules.

Another reason is that many school activities — such as football and other fall sports — begin practice in early August, leaving many families already unable to travel as Labor Day approaches, said Hornberger, who leads the education committee.

School start dates vary throughout the country. Just 22 percent of districts across the U.S. opened after Labor Day in 2019, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. Start dates that year ranged from July 23 in suburban Phoenix to Sept. 9 in Trenton, N.J.

Virginia had a law similar to Michigan’s but amended it in 2019 to allow schools to start in mid-August as long as they give students a four-day weekend for Labor Day. Michigan already prohibits schools from being in session on the Friday before Labor Day.

Districts just want flexibility to do what’s right for their communities, said Bob Kefgen, lobbyist for the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals.

“Plenty of schools want to get started in August to minimize the potential summer learning loss and maximize the amount of learning time before breaks,” Kefgen said. Such concerns have multiplied since the coronavirus pandemic, which has disrupted in-school learning and left schools with enormous challenges in getting students caught up.

Opponents of the Hornberger bill say classrooms aren’t the only place to learn. They say kids learn a lot about history, geography and the environment in places like northern Michigan that rely on tourist dollars.

“If your only goal is strict academic education and you don’t believe in the value of other forms of education, then you might support this, but I believe there’s” more to education than classroom learning, said Republican state Rep. John Damoose of Harbor Springs, who voted no in committee.

The only other no vote came from another northern Michigan Republican, Jack O’Malley whose district includes Benzie, Leelanau, Manistee and Mason, four northwest counties that hug the beaches of Lake Michigan.

Earlier school starts could particularly harm businesses that rely on teenage employees through the summer, O’Malley said during a recent committee meeting.

Golden Shoes in Traverse City is among them, said owner Bill Golden, who has been especially reliant on teenagers through the pandemic when older workers were unwilling to work at the shoe store.

“It’s not just Traverse City,” Golden said. “It’s Holland. It’s Grand Haven. These are all tourist areas that really depend on those kids because we just don’t have enough workers.”

The Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association is concerned about the workforce and the customer base.

“Hospitality has been hit incredibly hard because of COVID, so the timing of this could not be worse,” the association’s lobbyist, John McNamara.

Mackinac Island businesses like Mission Point Resort are open only six months a year. To chip away at the customer base during the height of tourist season would hurt, said Liz Ware, its vice president of sales and marketing. Seventy percent of hotel guests are from Michigan, so it’s important that families from other parts of the state are able to travel through Labor Day, she said

“The peak months of June, July and August are when we have to make enough money to have a successful year. Reducing that 90-day window because people are going back to school? That would hurt,” Ware said.

“This is a real existential threat to us in northern Michigan,” she said. “The hospitality community supports so much of the economy in this region. We should be doing everything we can to support travel and tourism as opposed to making it harder.”

That sounds shortsighted to education advocates.

“Tourism is important but, at the same time, we don’t believe the education side should be sacrificed,” Wotruba said. “Districts need the permanent ability to make decisions that fit their communities.”

The bill now awaits action by the full House. A vote has not yet been scheduled.

First month of classes in Detroit sees virtual school challenges, demand for hourly employees continues

2021-09-29T23:07:23+00:00

Three weeks into the school year, Detroit Public Schools Community District officials still are fielding complaints from parents about its new virtual school.

Some of those concerns, about classes with no teachers and operational glitches, were aired during a virtual parent meeting Tuesday night with Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, who told parents the district is working to address the problems.

Vitti also provided an update on enrollment, which he said continues to look strong, and on district efforts to address support staff shortages.

The meeting was part of a series Vitti and school board member Corletta Vaughn have been holding to hear directly from parents and to answer questions.

Here’s what parents and Vitti had to say on some key issues:

K-12 enrollment on the rise

Vitti said district enrollment is “about where it was in the spring and it is increasing.” The district’s spring enrollment was about 49,000, according to state records. While that’s still below the pre-pandemic level of nearly 51,000 students, it was above where the district began in fall 2020.

In addition, he said, about 98% of students are back for in-person learning. “I’m just excited to see the vast majority of our students back in school,” Vitti said.

The superintendent suggested that the enrollment numbers were improved in part due to the district’s ongoing home visit program, in which parents and district employees knock on doors to track down students who haven’t attended school.

Virtual school off to rocky start

A handful of parents came to the listening session with complaints about the district’s virtual school.

“I do think our children with virtual learning have been slighted,” said Aliya Moore, a parent who said that her child, who has an individualized education plan, or IEP, did not have a resource teacher to support them while completing assignments or taking tests.

Another parent noted that her daughter lacked a teacher in three of her classes this semester. In several instances, she said, the principal took attendance and then her daughter and her classmates would “sit there for 45 minutes or however long the class is and not do anything.”

“(My daughter) doesn’t want to fail or see her grade point average drop because she is an honor roll student,” the parent said.

“I don’t want to push her back to Benjamin Carson (High School of Science and Medicine), but I do want her to be able to get her education the same if possible. She’s in the 11th grade so these are crucial times these next two years.”

About 2,000 families are currently enrolled in the virtual school, Vitti said. Prior to the beginning of the school year, 2,500 students were enrolled. The superintendent added that he and other school officials would look into parent complaints.

“The development of the virtual school could have been smoother,” Vitti said.

“The challenge was we were having conversations about virtual school back in June and trying to get a sense of how many families were going to sign up for virtual school.”

Increased interest in virtual learning brought challenges that the school has had to address in the past several weeks, including hiring certified teachers from outside the district to fill in needed roles.

“I will commit that those positions will be filled, Vitti said. As of this week, he added, the virtual school has to hire two more teacher positions.

District makes progress on employee shortages

Vitti also noted progress in addressing the district’s security guard shortage.

Earlier this month, Vitti told school board members that a shortage of guards was forcing the district to increase hourly wages.

On Tuesday, he said the district has since boosted security guard pay to $16 an hour, from $12.61.

Vitti estimated that the district had received 200 applicants for 40 security guard positions since the district held its own career fair to attract recruits.

“We’re seeing a lot of interest in it so we should be fully staffed with security guards soon,” Vitti said. “I think a lot of people do want to work for the district. It’s an opportunity to work with our students.”

The shortage has been exacerbated in part by the pandemic, when the district needed fewer security guards because fewer students were in buildings. With students back in the classroom, the district is currently seeking hourly employees for guards and other positions such as bus drivers, paraeducators, and cafeteria workers.

“Hourly wages and just hourly employment through the city and throughout metro Detroit is challenged right now, it’s hard to hire people right now at an hourly wage,” Vitti said. The district is negotiating with unions to offer similar wage increases for other positions.

Editor’s note: This story was updated after an editing error resulted in the incorrect number for virtual school enrollment prior to the beginning of the school year.

Security guard shortage drives Detroit schools to raise pay and prompts safety concerns

2021-09-16T22:08:25+00:00

The Detroit school district is boosting the pay of security guards to address a severe shortage that has left some buildings with fewer guards and raised concerns about school safety.

“We will continue to hire, and we will continue to negotiate higher wages, at least for the employees who work for us,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti in a recent school board meeting.

The security guard issue is top of mind in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, where school safety is usually one of the top considerations of parents when choosing schools.

The shortage has been exacerbated in part by the pandemic, when the district needed fewer security guards because fewer students were in buildings. But now, as most students and teachers return to in-person learning, the Detroit school district faces many of the same difficulties the private sector faces trying to find hourly employees.

To address the shortage, the district is working to hire 40 security guards, and has been moving guards from schools with fewer safety issues to schools with more. Prior to the pandemic, most high schools employed two to three security guards.

The district did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request for the current number of security guards in schools.

Multiple educators, both during a school board meeting Tuesday and on social media, expressed concern about the dwindling number of security personnel at some schools as well as the stress of handling fights themselves.

N’shan Robinson, lead counselor at Mumford High School, told the board that she intervened in a fight that took place outside the school. She added that a lack of substitute teachers and security have placed a heavy burden on educators.

“I am a school counselor. I should not have to put my life on the line to help a staff member who’s probably getting beat up,” Robinson said.

Charlotte Smith, an English teacher at Cody High School, said she and other teachers would feel safer if there were full-time security guards to ensure outside strangers cannot roam the halls.

“We’re not asking them to run and break up fights, not arresting kids, we’re not looking for that. We’re just looking for someone at the front door to check people in and make sure that we are safe.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Vitti explained that every high school would be assigned a security guard, a campus police officer, or both.

Security guards differ from campus police officers, who are trained to work in schools with students. Security guards are tasked with monitoring the front desk at high schools as well as clearing hallways and maintaining order.

“We will commit to having more security guards in schools with a large number of students,” Vitti said.

Among the factors that will determine the number of security guards in a school includes the number of students, the number of reported incidents, and the building’s layout.

Smaller elementary schools have opted to hire neighborhood parents as “greeters” to meet students at the front door and direct parents or guardians to the main office.

Board members expressed their concern over the shortage, particularly the district’s salary for security guards.

Prior to the pandemic, the hourly wage for security guards was $12.61 per hour, Vitti said. The district raised it to $15 per hour this fall.

“I know in fast food you can make more than $15 an hour. So it is going to be extremely difficult to fill those positions,” board president Angelique Peterson-Mayberry.

“We want to make sure that parents feel that their children are safe when they drop them off at schools.”

Vitti gets high marks for his pandemic response: Detroit school board

2021-08-26T02:20:27+00:00

The Detroit school board is backing Superintendent Nikolai Vitti as he enters his fifth year at the helm of Michigan’s largest school district.

Vitti won high marks on his annual board evaluation for coordinating the district’s outreach to families during the pandemic, creating “bold” COVID safety protocols, and helping improve literacy instruction in the district.

“He’s been extremely focused, satisfying and diligent in working for our students and staff,” Deborah Hunter-Harvill, board vice president, said in a statement. “He still mesmerizes me with his deliverables. For such a time as this, he is the one.”

Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, board president, praised Vitti and said the board had asked him to focus more heavily in the coming year on the district’s 20-year plan for its facilities and on improving the district’s new fully virtual school.

The board finalized Vitti’s evaluation in a closed meeting, which is standard for discussing employee evaluations. Chalkbeat requested a copy of the written evaluation but didn’t receive it by Wednesday evening.

The board evaluates Vitti based on the district’s progress on enrollment, attendance, and academic achievement. The district’s test scores improved marginally during Vitti’s first years on the job, and chronic absenteeism fell, but progress on those metrics has stalled due to the pandemic.

The board’s support for Vitti does not come as a surprise less than a year after the panel extended his contract through 2025, making him one of the longest-serving superintendents in the district’s turbulent recent decades. The contract set Vitti’s annual salary at $312,000 and said he would receive a raise during the 2021-22 school year proportional to salary increases for district teachers. A new contract between the district and its teachers union is expected to be announced in the coming days, Peterson-Mayberry said.

At the board meeting Wednesday evening, several public commenters criticized Vitti’s salary, which is among the highest for a district leader in the state.

Gavin Buckley, a teacher in the district, said Vitti has “increased the number of high-salaried people [working for the district] downtown ... and yet we don’t see a translation into the outcomes in terms of learning, in terms of safety, in terms of respect or pay for the staff, students, and families of this district.”

Vitti pointed out that the district has increased teacher salaries during his tenure, setting starting pay at one of the highest levels in the region. He said the school system is on track to start the coming year with no vacant teaching jobs, a sharp contrast to the hundreds of vacancies he faced when he became superintendent.

He said he expects that the district’s next contract with teachers “will once again increase salaries on a recurring basis for teachers.”

Substantial challenges lie ahead for Vitti. Rising COVID cases threaten the district’s efforts to help more of its roughly 50,000 students learn in person this school year. Meanwhile, the Detroit district is working to spend $1.2 billion in federal COVID relief to help students bounce back academically and emotionally from the pandemic.

“This upcoming year will be one of recovery,” said Peterson-Mayberry. “Our focus will be to restart our momentum toward improving student attendance and achievement.”

Detroit school board reschedules meeting where it will decide on suspending in-person learning

2021-05-10T21:44:38+00:00

The Detroit school board has rescheduled its Tuesday meeting when members will decide whether to suspend in-person learning through the end of the school year.

You can attend the meeting virtually at 5:30 p.m. May 18 here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84691018515

In April, the board of the Detroit Public Schools Community District failed in its first attempt to suspend in-person learning for the rest of the school year. The 3-2 vote failed because the board needed at least four yes votes for it to succeed.

Two days later, board members voted to pause in-person learning, but keep virtual instruction in learning centers until they could vote again on the issue. The date to bring back in-person learning could be extended if the city’s COVID-19 infection rate hasn’t improved.

The rate of positive cases of COVID-19 in Detroit is 12.4%. Beginning April 26, the district began weekly COVID-19 testing — using saliva tests — of students and staff who have returned to the learning centers.

“The district would continue to monitor infection rates,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in April. “If they are roughly where they are now, or even slightly lower, we would make a recommendation to suspend in-person learning from the May meeting until the end of the school year.”

The district could not immediately comment on why the meeting was rescheduled but did confirm that the Tuesday meeting date posed schedule conflicts for some board members.

Detroit district considers pausing in-person instruction for one week after spring break to prevent COVID spread

2021-03-24T19:04:36+00:00

The Detroit school district is considering pausing in-person instruction and closing its learning centers for a week after spring break to give students and staff time to isolate themselves in case they’ve been exposed to COVID-19.

“We know extended families will be visited. We know churches will be open,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said during a media conference Wednesday afternoon. “We are concerned about the infection rate.”

The increase in positive COVID-19 cases in the city and across the state is already raising concerns among some school leaders.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District will be on spring break during the week of March 29. If the district does pause, students would return in-person on April 12 instead of April 5. They would learn online during the week of April 5.

Staff would need to obtain a negative COVID-19 test in order to return April 12. The district is also looking to implement a randomized COVID-19 testing program for students that would include saliva tests instead of nasal swab tests.

Such testing, Vitti said, “may be one of those last safety precautions we can implement in addition to the vaccine to bring more of our students and employees back.”

After shutting down in-person instruction in November, the district reopened its learning centers, where students can take their classes online with supervision from a staff member, in late February. On March 8, the district reopened for face-to-face instruction, with students learning in the same classroom with their teachers.

On average, Vitti said, about 9,000 students have returned to attend the learning centers and in-person instruction. Only about 1,000 students are receiving full-time, in-person instruction. The rest are either attending the learning centers full-time or receiving a mix of in-person instruction and online classes.

Michigan pushed harder for classrooms to reopen. It’s leading to confusion, but not much change.

2021-03-19T22:54:13+00:00

Michigan lawmakers are offering a financial incentive for districts to reopen more classrooms for the first time during the coronavirus pandemic, and it is not going well.

A law passed earlier this month makes certain districts eligible for a slice of $136 million if they offer at least 20 hours of in-person instruction a week by Monday.

The tight timeline has forced districts to scramble to offer more face-to-face instruction, in some cases reigniting contentious public debates about the safety of opening classrooms during COVID.

There’s also been widespread confusion about the text of the law, signed earlier this month. And observers say the law won’t do much to change in-person offerings statewide. The program could even widen the educational opportunity gap between low-income communities and more affluent areas that have offered more face-to-face instruction, the best mode of learning for most students, throughout the pandemic.

“It could create a bigger gap,” said Katharine Strunk, a professor of education at Michigan State University. “That being said, I don’t know how much of a difference it will make in in-person offerings. There’s already such a strong push in Michigan to open.”

Since January, most school districts in Michigan have moved steadily to open their classrooms for face-to-face instruction at least part of the time, driven by new public health guidance and pressure from political leaders. A decline in COVID-19 case counts also helped convince more districts to reopen, though cases have risen in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, several of the state’s most affluent districts suddenly began a rush to offer even more in-person learning.

They were driven by a single sentence in a new state law whose main purpose was to pass $3.7 billion in federal coronavirus aid along to Michigan schools.

Lawmakers set aside $136 million for districts that receive the least federal aid — less than $450 per pupil in the second round of funding — arguing that even schools in middle- and upper-income communities had incurred additional costs. Federal aid is being distributed largely based on child poverty, and the districts that receive the least generally have lower poverty rates.

The districts must offer at least 20 hours of in-person instruction per week for all students by March 22 to receive the money.

In a letter to legislators this week, State Superintendent Michael Rice asked for clarification about the law, which he said is “ambiguous” and causing “confusion.” Among other issues, he asked whether schools would get part of the funds if students in some grades were offered 20 hours a week of face-to-face learning.

The law also may not lead to a substantial increase in face-to-face instruction because many of the 215 districts eligible for the money are already offering 20 hours per week.

What’s more, many key districts that have kept their classrooms shuttered, such as Kalamazoo, aren’t eligible because they got more than $450 per pupil from the second round of federal aid.

Some districts have raced to comply with the new law by bringing students back to classrooms for more hours per week.

In West Bloomfield, where the school district stands to gain $1.2 million from the program, the school board met three times in recent weeks to come up with a plan to move from 12 hours of face-to-face operations per week to the required 20. The board will meet again on Monday to decide on that plan, which is fiercely opposed by some parents who don’t want their children to spend more time at school.

The new law has “put our board and boards across the state in a place of a no-win scenario,” said Dan Durkin, a spokesman for the West Bloomfield District.

Others have been able to qualify for the money without making major changes.

For some districts, making the change was straightforward.

“We had already been planning to go to five days a week for high schoolers on April 12,” said Mark Snyder, spokesman for the Lake Orion School District. All other students in the district were fully in person.

“We moved that up.”

Michigan’s top education leader calls for canceling state exam requirement

2021-01-25T22:58:01+00:00

Michigan’s top education official, seeking to cancel standardized state exams this year, urged the federal government to waive requirements that students be tested annually.

State Superintendent Michael Rice cited the pandemic when requesting the waiver in a letter Monday to the U.S. Department of Education.

“The typical environment for conducting state summative assessments cannot be met this spring, and the current environment under a global pandemic undermines the value and trustworthiness of any state summative assessment results that might be gathered,” Rice wrote.

Rice said canceling the state exams would allow the Michigan Department of Education to prioritize a new legislative requirement that schools conduct “benchmark” assessments in the fall and spring to gauge student improvement during the school year.

During the spring, the state administers several exams including the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP) and the SAT. Last year, the state sought and won a federal waiver that allowed the exams to be canceled for the 2019-20 school year.

Rice said in his letter that it would be impossible to replicate ideal testing environments when some students are learning online, some are learning in person, and others are doing both.

“Without uniform testing conditions, adequate participation, and appropriate test security measures, summative assessment results will misrepresent achievement within Michigan,” Rice wrote.

It would also undermine confidence in Michigan’s assessment and accountability system, Rice said.

It’s unclear when federal officials will respond. Similar requests have been sent from other states, including New York, which also sent a waiver request Monday.

Rice’s letter brought mixed reactions from leading education groups in the Michigan.

Amber Arellano, executive director of the Education Trust-Midwest, called on Rice to rescind the request, saying the tests are necessary for the state to understand how the pandemic has affected students in order to better provide resources.

The state’s proposal “would greatly jeopardize efforts of parents and educators to help students catch up now and in the years to follow,” Arellano said. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, national research suggests millions of students have been falling behind during the disruptions to in-person school since last spring. Now is the time to face this educational challenge with great transparency and honesty.”

But the president of the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest union for teachers and other school employees, applauded the move.

“Amidst this pandemic, we simply cannot waste valuable learning time on high-stakes standardized testing,” Paula Herbart said in a statement. The local benchmark tests, she said, are helping to guide efforts “to address student learning delays caused by the public health crisis.

“Mandated standardized testing like the M-STEP does not provide educators the data needed to meet individual student learning needs in real time, which is what we need to be laser focused on right now.”

‘We’re out of time for excuses’: Michigan school leaders say lawmakers must finalize education spending

2020-08-07T18:22:29+00:00

As an Aug. 15 deadline looms for Michigan school leaders to unveil their plans for reopening for the 2020-21 school year, some say a lack of guidance and funding uncertainty are forcing many to abandon plans to start the year in-person.

But starting the school year fully remote is an option “educators and parents agree does not provide students with the best learning experience,” according to a press release from the Tri-County Alliance for Public Education, a group that represents the interests of school leaders in metro Detroit.

During a virtual media roundtable the group hosted Friday, Robert Shaner, superintendent of the Rochester Community Schools district, said, “School districts are facing an uphill battle, not just because of the uncertain nature of this virus, but because of the funding shortfalls that make it difficult to meet the challenges associated with returning our students and staff to school safely.”

Shaner and several other school leaders gathered with members of the press to discuss the state of Michigan schools. They pointed to a lack of guidance and funding uncertainty from state and federal lawmakers.

The school year officially begins Sept. 8 in Michigan, though some districts plan to start sooner (Flint Community Schools began the school year online Wednesday), but state lawmakers have yet to approve a budget. School leaders have been bracing for substantial cuts in funding since the pandemic began, because of massive drops in state revenue. Many have been counting on a second round of federal coronavirus relief dollars to help address any budget shortfalls, but Congress has yet to act.

In May, Congress approved the first round of federal coronavirus relief funds, which included $13.5 billion to help schools deal with the financial impact of the pandemic. Michigan received $390 million. Most went directly to districts, with the remaining $40 million distributed in grants by the state department of education. School leaders have said that money likely isn’t enough to plug budget holes and cover additional costs related to educating students during the pandemic.

Those attending the Friday media event said state lawmakers don’t have to wait until additional federal dollars are approved to pass a Michigan budget that gives schools the resources and certainty they need.

“Lawmakers still have an opportunity to pass a clean K-12 spending bill immediately that utilizes General Fund dollars to make up the deficit in the School Aid Fund and ensure schools receive the resources and funding certainty they critically need as they attempt to finalize reopening plans,” said Robert McCann, executive director of the Tri-County Alliance for Public Education. “We’re out of time for excuses. Our students need action.”

Reopening discussions in the Michigan Legislature were stalled when hearings and sessions were canceled this week after a lawmaker was diagnosed with COVID-19.

This year won’t be the first that school districts begin the year with no funding certainties. But the fact that it’s happening in the middle of a pandemic is a growing source of frustration.

Adding to that: Districts planning for in-person classes may not know if that is permitted until days before the school year begins. State officials have said a determination will come close to that date as they review data on positive COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. There are many more uncertainties, as Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti laid out in a tweet earlier this week.

“A month before school starts and MI school districts still do not know: Is F2F learning required?” he wrote, referring to face-to-face learning. “Will online learning be funded? What will per pupil funding be at for 20-21? Will last year’s enrollment be used for our allocation? How will [student enrollment] be counted for online (if funded).”

The Detroit district is planning to begin the school year with a hybrid of in-person learning and remote learning. Many other districts are opting for an online-only start to the school year. School districts and charter schools must have their reopening plans complete by August 15 and posted on their websites by August 17.

Detroit district asks parents to pick face-to-face or online instruction for their children this fall

2020-07-30T22:23:04+00:00

Detroit school district officials are urging parents to fill out a survey that will help schools better plan for how many parents want to send their students to school for in-person learning and how many want their children to learn at home.

The survey, and a series of town hall meetings that begin Friday morning, are among the efforts the district is making to hear from parents and others about reopening schools for the 2020-21 school year. These efforts are happening as parents and school employees across Michigan raise questions about the safety of reopening school buildings, as well as the effectiveness of online instruction.

The deadline to complete the survey is Aug. 21, but officials are hoping parents will fill it out sooner to better help the district determine how to allocate resources across the system’s roughly 100 schools. The district sent the survey to students’ school email address.

“We need to get a preliminary understanding of what parents want, to move forward with a plan to start,” said Chrystal Wilson, spokeswoman for the district. “We anticipate adjustments will need to be made due to parents changing their minds. The plan indicates there will be evaluations performed throughout the school year to make adjustments.”

Wilson said the district and parents also need to be prepared for the possibility Gov. Gretchen Whitmer may bar in-person instruction before the first day of classes because of rising COVID-19 cases.

Parents will be indicating a preference for their children’s learning format on the survey, which is non-binding. If they change their minds, they can submit a new survey, but district officials want the responses in by the Aug. 21 deadline.

Meanwhile, during the district’s virtual town hall meeting at 10:30 a.m. Friday, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti is expected to take questions and provide information about the district’s reopening plan, which the school board approved during a contentious meeting in July.

Friday’s town hall will be streamed on Facebook and the district’s website, or parents can attend via telephone. The district is holding six more town hall meetings in August.

In a spring survey of nearly 4,000 parents, about 61% said they would be prepared to send their children back to school buildings if the necessary safety precautions are taken. Vitti has said he expects demand for in-person learning to increase, in part because online education isn’t effective for all children.

Yet demand for in-person learning could shift if the current battle over in-person summer school is any indication. An activist group hoping to shut down face-to-face summer school classes filed a lawsuit in federal court. As part of a temporary restraining order, students were required to be tested for COVID-19 in order to continue summer classes. Three district students tested positive.

Earlier this week, the head of the district’s teachers union, citing the public health risks of COVID-19 to students and staff, threatened that teachers would walk off the job if they felt conditions were unsafe.

The school year is set to begin Sept. 8. Whitmer has said the decision on whether to allow in-person instruction at all will be made shortly before that.

‘Parents should not have to make a choice’: Michigan group calls for suspension of face-to-face instruction this fall

2020-07-15T17:42:40+00:00

A group of Michigan teachers, parents, and students is calling for school districts and political leaders across the state to adopt strict health and safety measures before in-person classes resume this fall.

“I am not allowing any of my children to step into any schools if none of these demands are met,” said Marietta Elliott, a special education teacher and parent of four students in the Detroit school district.

The new group — Michigan United Stakeholders and Champions of Learning and Equity — is calling for 14 consecutive days of declining COVID cases before schools can reopen for in-person classes, regular testing and contact tracing for students and staff, an independent agency to monitor safety in schools, hazard pay for teachers with a high risk of exposure to the virus, and a state hotline to take reports of safety violations.

Their demands come as the debate grows about the reopening of schools for the fall semester, and some parents and teachers raise questions about whether face-to-face classes can be held safely. Schools nationwide closed in the spring, and shifted to remote learning to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The demands also come as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer continues to sound the alarm about the rising number of positive COVID cases and the potential for that growth to impact reopening schools. Michigan reported 891 COVID cases Wednesday, the highest single-day total since May 14. Whitmer, during an afternoon press conference Wednesday, noted that there are 55 days until the official beginning of the 2020-21 school year Sept. 8.

“Whether our kids get to school depends on what we do today,” Whitmer said.

Whitmer said the state likely won’t decide until closer to the first day of school whether it’s safe to reopen schools. The number of cases, as well as the number of hospitalizations, will be key determining factors, she said.

The debate heated up in Detroit this week as the school district began summer school, which included in-person classes for hundreds of students whose parents chose that option. Protesters on Monday and Tuesday blocked buses from leaving one of the district’s bus terminals, making it difficult for students to attend classes at a handful of schools. Medically fragile children who need bus transportation to attend two of the district’s special education centers were affected the most.

On Wednesday, a lawsuit was filed in state court against the district and the state seeking to halt the summer school. The lawsuit names Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, Mayor Mike Duggan, and Whitmer, among others. It was filed by the activist group By Any Means Necessary on behalf of a group of seven individuals, including teachers, parents, a student, and other district staff. The city’s corporation counsel said in a statement that he would seek to have Duggan removed from the lawsuit, as he “had no part in deciding whether or when to have summer classes.”

Detroit isn’t the only Michigan district to hold in-person classes. Many districts nationwide have also done so, including in Newark, New Jersey, where the teacher’s union worked with the district to create a summer pilot program that is providing lessons for the fall.

On Tuesday night, the Detroit school board approved its plan to reopen schools in the fall, despite outrage from some teachers and parents.

Until their demands are met, the group said, schools should provide remote learning for students.

Whitmer’s June 30 executive order required all Michigan K-12 school districts to submit a fall reopening plan by August 15, or seven days before the start of a district’s school year. Whitmer also released guidelines for reopening that mandated some safety requirements.

Michigan state representative Sherry Gay Dagnogo, a former district teacher, called into the video conference pledging her support for the group. She called the current push for school reopenings “disconcerting.”

Wendy Carlisle, a Plymouth-Canton Community Schools teacher, said she’s worried about whether teachers who test positive for COVID after returning to the classroom will have enough sick days.

“An [extended] quarantine will decimate a teacher’s sick bank,” she said.

Some have called for the reopening of schools to relieve the pressure on parents who must work but don’t have access to child care. Valencia Cade, a Washtenaw County teacher and a charter school parent, said that isn’t fair.

“Parents should not have to make a choice and put their child in harm’s way. … Some of these parents are desperate and rely on the school system,” Cade said.

Survey: Michigan parents worried about being able to work if schools don’t reopen

2020-06-08T20:52:22+00:00

Nearly 60% of Michigan parents say their ability to go to work would take a hit if schools don’t reopen in the fall, according to survey results released Monday.

The survey, commissioned by the Tri-County Alliance for Public Education, found that 26% of the parents said the impact would be significant if schools didn’t reopen, while 30% said it would have some impact.

“Many businesses and families are already under significant financial strain due to the COVID-19 crisis, and that is only going to worsen if parents aren’t comfortable and confident in sending their kids to school and going back to work,” Gilda Z. Jacobs, president and CEO of the Michigan League for Public Policy, said in a statement.

Jacobs, whose organization helped release the survey results, said elected officials at the state and federal level must act swiftly “to allocate additional funding to support Michigan parents during this unprecedented time.”

The responses were among the key findings of the survey of 600 parents, conducted May 30-31 using automated calling and text messaging. The Tri-County Alliance represents the interests of district leaders in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties.

After nearly three months of remote learning because of the coronavirus pandemic, school districts across Michigan are working on plans for reopening school buildings for the 2020-21 school year. On Friday, the Detroit Public Schools Community District released a draft of its plan, which includes shorter school days, alternating between in-person and remote learning for high school students, using auditoriums and cafeterias as classrooms, and providing protective equipment such as masks and face guards.

A state panel appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will provide recommendations on safely reopening schools.

In addition to concerns about their jobs, 88% of the parents in the survey said schools must meet or exceed medical experts’ safety recommendations before classes open in the fall and 71% said additional safety protocols will require increased funding. In addition, 44% of the parents said their ability to pay their bills would be affected if schools don’t reopen.

Mark Greathead, superintendent of the Woodhaven-Brownstown School District, said in a statement that each of the recommendations from the state panel will likely come with a price tag attached to them.

“Whether it be reduced class sizes that require more space and more teachers, additional bussing routes to accommodate social distancing, sanitization supplies and procedures, or emotional support resources for students, these are all expenses that aren’t in existing school budgets. We need Lansing to act quickly to accommodate the significant added costs we can expect as a result.”

To read the full report:

Page 1 of MICHIGAN EDUCATION FUNDING SURVEY REPORT

Contributed to DocumentCloud by Lori Higgins of Chalkbeat • View document or read text

05012020 Letter to Avondale School Board From Reps Manoogian, Carter, Kuppa (PDF)05012020 Letter to Avondale School Board From Reps Manoogian, Carter, Kuppa (Text)

It’s too soon to say whether the elimination of in-person instruction at the Academy points to a broader shift toward virtual education in Michigan in the wake of the pandemic.

Budget cuts are coming, but not all districts will follow Avondale’s lead, said Chris Wigent, executive director of the Michigan Association of Superintendents and Administrators.

“That’s taking one situation and broad-brushing it,” he said. “I’ve talked to many superintendents, and there has not been a discussion of shifting any or all programs online.”

That may not be enough to reassure educators in a moment of historic uncertainty. On Tuesday, the governor in New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to “reimagine” public education in the wake of the pandemic.

“All these physical classrooms — why, with all the technology you have?” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, announcing the partnership. (The Gates Foundation is a Chalkbeat funder.)

Virtual schooling has spread rapidly across Michigan over the last decade, even though just 55% of students enrolled online pass their classes, compared with an estimated 90% of all students statewide, according to Joe Friedhoff, vice president of Michigan Virtual, a state-funded online learning provider. For alternative programs the number is even lower: 44% of those students pass their online courses.

The Academy’s students are among the most vulnerable in the state. In addition to the academic or behavioral struggles that led many of them to enroll there in the first place, 83% are economically disadvantaged. More than half are people of color. Three-quarters missed more than 10 days of school last year. The Academy earned F’s last year from the state for student test scores.

Students in alternative programs are especially reliant on their relationships with their teachers for academic motivation and emotional support, said Deb Baughman, president of the Michigan Alternative Education Association. Across the state, alternative programs have been shifting to online learning; about half of them currently offer full-time virtual learning.

“That trend is motivated by financial considerations as opposed to what works best for the typical alternative student,” Baughman said.

Two years ago, her organization named Avondale Academy the alternative program of the year, pointing to the strength of its art program.

“I feel sad,” she said of the program’s shift online. “They were doing great things, and it will be much more challenging to reach their students if their instruction is primarily virtual.”

Justin Bryant, a sophomore at Avondale Academy, agrees. He’s never found much to like about school: Bullies seemed to target him, and he struggled to pick up concepts as quickly as the other students. Things were better at the Academy, he said, because he connected with his art and math teacher. His grades improved, and he’d begun to believe that he stood a chance of graduating high school. Now he’s not so sure.

“I feel like it might actually harm my chances of graduating, because I’ve never been good with online things,” he said.

Avondale officials acknowledged that finances played a key role in the decision.

Superintendent James Schwarz said that enrollment in the Academy has decreased in recent years, making it harder to pay teachers at the school.

“There are financial issues without a doubt,” he said. “We’ve got classrooms with five to eight kids to a teacher, and that’s something we can’t sustain financially.”

The budget shortfall is especially pressing as the coronavirus blows a hole in the state budget, he added: “There’s going to be a whole lot of hurt going on, with cuts, with loss of programs. We’ve gotta create something that we can move forward with, knowing those cuts are coming.”

Schwarz estimated that the district will save about $180,000 by contracting out the school’s academic services to a private company, Diploma & Careers Institute, which already runs a credit recovery program for Avondale students in danger of dropping out of high school.

Under Michigan law, DCI can enroll students online from across the state, bringing in additional funding for each one. Todd Biederwolf, chief academic officer of DCI and the former superintendent of the Harper Woods school district, argued that the online program will help students graduate while bringing in new revenue.

Research indicates that while online programs can help students graduate, it’s not clear that they teach students much.

Major changes coming to district as Detroit school board OKs restructuring plan

2020-02-13T02:59:10+00:00

The Detroit school board approved a comprehensive restructuring plan that will result in some schools moving to new buildings, some programs moving to new schools, and one traditional high school becoming an exam school.

The changes are part of efforts to increase enrollment, streamline access to programs, provide students with safer learning environments, and reduce unnecessary spending, officials have said. The plan is key for the district’s goal to rebuild the school system after nearly eight years of emergency management.

The board approved the restructuring unanimously during its monthly meeting Wednesday night, and the changes will take effect in time for the 2020-21 school year.

The plan originally included a proposal to convert Martin Luther King Jr. High School to a full exam school and change its attendance boundary. The King proposal likely will come before the board for approval at a later date.

The restructuring will affect more than a dozen schools. A few examples of what’s in store are below:

Southeastern High School: The school will become a traditional high school with its own attendance boundaries. Students would still have to take an exam to be enrolled in the school’s business administration program. Southeastern will gain an advanced manufacturing program, courtesy of a partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Programs in information technology, welding, and cutting will move from Golightly Career Technical Center to Southeastern.

Golightly Career Technical Center and Davis Aerospace Technical Academy: The existing culinary program will remain at Golightly, and the district’s food and nutrition program would relocate there. Davis Aerospace will remain at Golightly or move to the city airport. The district is already holding some Davis Aerospace classes at the airport.

Detroit International Academy for Young Women: The school, which currently is housed in the old Northern High School building, will move. The new location is a district-owned building formerly occupied by a charter school. The district’s eventual goal is to move its headquarters to the Northern building.

Communications and Media Arts High School and Ludington Middle School: The school will relocate to the campus that now holds Ludington Middle School. Students at CMA will also be required to take an exam as part of the application process. Ludington students will remain in the building until current students have graduated.

The district’s effort to move Davis Aerospace classes to the airport was applauded during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting.

“Having kids back at the airport is probably the best investment you could make for our children,” said Jason Jones, a Davis Aerospace graduate and pilot.

Also during Wednesday’s meeting, the board approved spending $25 million from its rainy day fund to address immediate capital project needs, such as replacing out-of-date boilers and fixing leaky roofs.

Nearly $9 million would pay for projects associated with the restructuring plan.

The board also approved a resolution to ask Wayne County voters to approve the renewal of a millage that has provided millions of additional dollars for schools across the county. The millage would appear on the November ballot.

The district has used revenue from this millage to cover some pay increases for teachers. A change to the state law will allow charter schools in the county to share in the revenue if the millage is renewed. If the millage isn’t approved by voters, it would cost the district $15 million to $20 million in revenue.

“Not renewing this millage would have a disastrous impact on our operating budget,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said during the meeting.

Ambitious new school at Marygrove hits another snag as interim principal leaves unexpectedly

2020-01-17T20:44:06+00:00

A high-profile new school in Detroit has lost its second principal since it opened in September.

Adrian Monge had been serving as interim principal of the School at Marygrove after Nir Saar, the founding principal, was removed from his post in October for reasons that remain unclear. Monge resigned last week. She will be replaced by Christa Reeves, who was previously the principal of Bagley Elementary School of Journalism and Technology and an assistant principal at Cass Technical High School.

Halfway through its first year, the school is still in the early stages of an ambitious plan to build a “cradle-to-career” school on the campus of the shuttered Marygrove College. After enrolling only ninth graders this year, it plans to add 10th grade classes next year. Once crews finish work on a new $15 million early childhood center on the site, the school ultimately plans to enroll students from prekindergarten through 12th grade.

The concept is the result of a partnership between the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the University of Michigan, Marygrove College, the Kresge Foundation, and others. (Kresge is also a Chalkbeat funder.)

Frequent changes in the principal’s office are a challenge for any school. That’s perhaps especially true for a school like Marygrove, a high-profile project which is attempting to pull off an unusual, project-based curriculum that blends social justice and engineering.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the school won’t be affected in the long run by Monge’s departure.

“[Monge] did not feel that she was the right fit for the high school principalship,” he said in an emailed statement. “She was originally recruited to eventually serve as the K-8 principal. We respect and understand her decision. There were no outstanding issues, concerns, or questions regarding her leadership or separation.

Adrian Monge

“The changes in leadership have been unexpected and unfortunate but we have no question or doubt that The School at Marygrove is currently successful and will continue to grow into one of the best schools in the country.”

An event was held at the school yesterday to give parents a chance to meet the new principal.

Monge previously served as principal of Detroit Achievement Academy, a charter school that enrolls students in grades K-7. She declined to comment on the reason for her departure.

“I am working to support a smooth transition for the school and continue to root for the success of our students, staff, and the Marygrove project as a whole,” she said in an emailed statement.

Saar, the founding principal, was placed on administrative leave this fall pending an investigation into his conduct. The district said at the time that the behavior in question did not negatively impact students. He has not appeared on a periodic list of fired district employees.

Vitti said parents he had spoken to were more concerned about consistency in the classroom than in the principal’s office.

“Leadership matters but for parents and children it’s students’ experience in classrooms and at the school that matters most.”

More zzz’s may be on the way for high schoolers in Detroit as district weighs later start times

2019-12-16T23:04:15+00:00

Teenagers in Detroit could sleep later next year if the city’s main district has its way.

Pointing to a growing body of research linking sleep and academic achievement, leaders of the Detroit Public Schools Community District want to move high school start times from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. The last bell would ring at 4:20 p.m.

“The research is overwhelming that it is best to start later than earlier when you are talking about high school students,” said Nikolai Vitti, district superintendent, adding that he believed the change would lead to better attendance and “more alert students.”

Union leaders haven’t weighed in on the district’s plan, which was made public for the first time at a school board committee meeting on Monday. The teachers’ contract allows for start times between 7:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. Vitti said the policy has been in the works for two years, and that principals and parent focus groups were consulted about the change.

A spokesman for the Detroit Federation of Teachers, the district’s largest teachers union, said union leaders plan to discuss the issue with Vitti.

“We have no comment at this time but we are looking forward to having a conversation with Dr. Vitti about the proposal,” Ken Coleman said.

Decades of research suggest that students are more likely to attend school, pay attention in class, sleep more, and ultimately graduate if their high school starts later. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends high school start times later than 8:30.

Schools everywhere have been pushing high school start times back, from Dearborn and Berkley in suburban Detroit to the entire state of California. The promise of improved student achievement is perhaps especially enticing for a district in the third year of a major effort to undo decades of disinvestment in the classroom.

Research highlighting the benefits of later high school start times has been making headlines for decades, but school districts have been slow to change. The average school start time nationally is still 8:03 a.m., and many schools start earlier. In 2015, fewer than 20% of American schools started after 8:30 a.m.

The shift won’t just affect the district’s several dozen high schools. To make bus schedules line up, four schools with younger students will start earlier and two will start later. The biggest changes are coming to Thurgood Marshall Elementary School and Henderson Academy, which will move from 9 a.m. start times to 7:30 a.m.

Critics of the policy argue that changes to district bus schedules made to accommodate later high school start times can result in painfully early wake-up calls for younger children. While Detroit board members said they support the idea, they raised concerns about scheduling, asking whether the changed start times would pose a problem for sports teams or for parents who drop their children at school on the way to work.

“In the morning, parents are dropping kids off and getting on to their jobs,” said Deborah Hunter-Harvill, a school board member. But she added that the change could also be an improvement in the afternoon. “At the end of the day parents will be getting off at 5, so it’ll jibe really well.”

Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, a board member, also said that an earlier start time could pose safety concerns for younger students who might now be walking in the dark.

Vitti added that staying later in the afternoon could pose a challenge for some high school sports teams, especially football teams that make it through the playoffs in late fall, when there is less light. He said he spoke with coaches about beginning practices immediately after the school day ends.

The policy would reduce the district’s bus routes by 8%, or 30 total routes. That would translate to a cost savings of $814,717 next year.

“This is less about cost,” Vitti said, “and more about trying to give students the right start time in the learning day.”

Just two months after a new ‘cradle-to-career’ school opened, Detroit principal is under investigation and on leave

2019-10-31T17:57:12+00:00

Nir Saar, the first principal of a high-profile new school in Detroit, has been placed on administrative leave related to unspecified allegations just two months after the School at Marygrove opened its doors.

The district said in a statement that the alleged behavior happened before Saar was placed at Marygrove, and that the allegations “are not related to the direct health, welfare or safety of students.”

Saar declined to comment.

His departure is a significant bump in the road for the school he helped launch.

He was tapped to lead the school after serving as principal of Mumford Academy, a school-within-a-school that produced a high attendance rate and strong academic results.

Nir Saar

After Mumford Academy was folded back into Mumford High School, Saar was tasked with helping to set up an ambitious new “cradle-to-career” school on the campus of Marygrove College, which is closing permanently in December.

Backed by $50 million from the Kresge Foundation, the school combines several education reform ideas in a single campus. The K-12 curriculum, which was designed with help from education experts at the University of Michigan, is structured around projects and real-world learning. The school’s new teachers will be trained through an innovative process modeled on medical residency programs, in another collaboration with the university. And there will be a high-quality preschool program on-site.

The school currently only enrolls ninth-graders. The district plans to add 10th grade and kindergarten classes next year, with the goal of eventually enrolling grades K-12.

The district said in its statement that it is still committed to the school.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, dean of the School of Education at the university, said in a statement that the partnership wouldn’t be hurt by Saar’s departure.

“Any school-level administrative changes at the School at Marygrove will have no impact on the strength of our partnership between Detroit Public Schools Community District and the School of Education or with any of our other partners. We have strong confidence in Interim Principal Adrian Monge and her ability to help all the partners carry out the vision of the Detroit P20 collaboration.”

Wendy Lewis Jackson, managing director of Kresge’s Detroit Program, echoed that sentiment.

“The Kresge Foundation, like the other partners in the P-20 Cradle to Career campus at Marygrove, is committed to its development as a campus for more than 1,000 students and a new model for anchoring a community’s economic development in quality education,” she said. “Any individual personnel change will not impact our resolve or ability to pursue this vision.”

The district’s ambitions for the school under Saar’s leadership were high.

In July, it posted a letter from Saar to Detroit families saying that the new school “seeks to change the conversation around what education should look like in the 21st century.”

Saar’s departure has apparently been official for at least a week. His replacement, Adrian Monge, the former assistant principal, posted on LinkedIn a week ago that the school is looking for an assistant principal. Monge’s current title is Interim Principal.

The job posting has now been removed from the district’s website.

The district’s full statement:

“Please be advised that due to a preliminary investigation related to allegations prior to placement at Marygrove, Principal Saar has been placed on administrative leave. The allegations are not related to the direct health, welfare or safety of students. During the investigation Assistant Principal Monge has been promoted to the Interim Principal and will assume lead for administrative responsibilities. Please be assured that this decision will have no impact on the District’s commitment to the School at Marygrove.”

How 30 minutes could make or break Detroit school ‘right to read’ lawsuit

2019-10-23T13:35:55+00:00

Around 3 a.m. Thursday morning, two buses mostly full of Detroiters will leave for Cincinnati for a hearing in a historic “right to read” federal lawsuit that seeks to hold the state accountable for education outcomes in Detroit.

There’s a lot at stake. The case is the first of its kind in federal court to argue that access to literacy is a fundamental right. And it seeks major remedies: literacy reforms, a systemic approach to instruction and intervention, and fixes to buildings that are in poor condition.

A federal judge in Detroit dismissed the case in 2018, but the plaintiffs quickly filed an appeal.

Lawyers for the state and the plaintiffs will have just 30 minutes to plead their case before a panel of judges on a federal appeals court. Then the waiting begins, and it could be months before the court rules.

Helen Moore, a longtime activist who organized the bus trip, hopes the court sides with the plaintiffs.

“Education for our children is in jeopardy,” she said Tuesday.

Moore, who is co-chair of the Keep the Vote/No Takeover Coalition advocacy group, said more than 100 people are expected to make the trip, with many more on the waiting list for a seat.

Also expected to attend the hearing: Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Officials in the district filed a brief last year in support of the lawsuit.

Michigan officials are targeted in the lawsuit because the state controlled the Detroit school district for much of the time between 1999 and the end of 2016.

The lawsuit arguments

Here’s a breakdown of what we expect to be key arguments made Thursday:

Plaintiffs: They’ll argue that the state is responsible for systemwide failures they say have deprived Detroit children of their right to literacy, left many classrooms and buildings in terrible condition, and left teachers without the resources they needed to do their jobs.

Defendants: They will likely argue that plaintiffs haven’t proven there’s a constitutional right to literacy. They’re also expected to argue that the lawsuit is moot because the people who were in charge at the school and state level are gone, new leaders are in place, and the school district is under local control.

Case timeline

Want to get caught up with major developments in the case? Check out Chalkbeat Detroit coverage below:

September 2016: An allegation that an eighth-grade student taught math to his classmates was among the claims in the lawsuit.

January 2017: Detroit students blast then-Gov. Rick Snyder over the state’s response to the right to read lawsuit.

March 2018: Eighteen months after the lawsuit was filed, Detroit students are still in legal limbo.

July 2018: Attorneys for plaintiffs in the lawsuit plan to appeal after a federal judge dismissed the case.

November 2018: The lawsuit gets new backers and fresh hope.

November 2018: Read why experts and advocates are backing the lawsuit.

May 2019: A member of the state board of education says Michigan should side with students in the lawsuit.

June 2019: Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, urges court to recognize the right to a minimally adequate education.

Fighting bullying with kindness: Every student in the Detroit district will get weekly classes in respect, compassion

2019-09-27T21:45:54+00:00

The Detroit school district is asking all of its students and staff to sign an anti-bullying pledge to set new expectations for how people treat each other inside roughly 100 city schools.

“It’s unfortunate that we live in a day and time where we have to have a document, but respect isn’t always given and received,” said Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, a member of the board of the Detroit Public Schools Community District.

On Thursday, students across the district were introduced to the new anti-bullying initiative during school assemblies. For the rest of the school year, school counselors and social workers will give the district’s 50,000 students weekly lessons on 10 virtues such as respect, compassion, and self-control. The lessons will last between 30 minutes and an hour, said Iranetta Wright, deputy superintendent of schools.

The district, along with others in the city and state, is investing in the idea that students need to be taught to treat each other well. Roughly one in five students nationwide reports being bullied, putting them at risk of poor educational and health outcomes.

Speaking to reporters on Friday at Mann Learning Community, an elementary school in the Franklin Park neighborhood on Detroit’s west side, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the initiative is a response to issues “that our concerned parents have raised, and some of the isolated but negative situations that have occurred with individual children.”

Parents often urge the board to do something about bullying during board meetings.

At Mann on Friday, students signed anti-bullying pledge cards, which include a promise to “not engage in bullying and report bullying when I see it.”

The district will hold all its employees to the same expectation, Vitti said.

“This is about our employees as well,” he said. “It is not OK to yell ‘shut up’ to children in the classroom, or yell ‘sit down.’ Some people may say it’s the only thing that children respond to. No, that’s what we’ve acculturated children to respond to. That doesn’t make it right.”

Letoi Mitchell has lived most of her life in Franklin Park, and she attended Mann as a child.

Now her first-grader with special needs attends the school. Though the child hasn’t been bullied so far, Mitchell said she came to the press conference because she knows it’s all too common.

“I pray that it will work,” she said of the initiative.

Scroll down to read the district’s anti-bullying pledge card. Click here to learn more.

The Detroit school district sets the stage to improve in key areas such as enrollment, absenteeism

2019-08-02T02:23:13+00:00

Detroit school officials are looking to aim high with ambitions to increase enrollment, reduce chronic absenteeism, and increase the number of students showing academic improvement.

Those are among the many goals the district will monitor regularly, according to a plan presented to members of a school board subcommittee Thursday. The goals are crucial to the district’s overall turnaround efforts: Boosting enrollment, for instance, would bring the district about $8,000 per student from the state.

The plan lists specific targets the district would aim for. However, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti cautioned that those actual targets likely will change between now and when they’re presented to the full board for a vote.

For now, the plan sets a goal of increasing enrollment by 500 children a year. The district’s data shows enrollment declined by 316 students between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, after a gain in the previous year. About 50,000 students are currently enrolled.

Chrystal Wilson, spokeswoman for the district, says there is confidence in the district’s ability to increase enrollment.

“This year, we were intentional about parent engagement,” Wilson said, pointing to door-knocking initiatives to inform parents of neighborhood schools, and pop-up enrollment centers where parents come to learn more about the district. “By those different mechanisms, we’re hoping to attract more families.”

The overall plan, which included goals in a number of other areas that are tied to the district’s strategic plan, was approved by the school board’s curriculum subcommittee.

Here are some of the other preliminary goals the district is reaching for:

Chronic absenteeism: The district wants to reduce the rate of chronic absenteeism by 4.5 percentage points. During the 2018-19 school year, 63% of the district’s students were chronically absent, down from 72% in the previous school year. Chalkbeat earlier this year wrote about the district’s wide-reaching efforts to address absenteeism. Shortly after, the school board approved a plan to purchase passenger vans that will in part be used to pick up chronically absent students and bring them to school.
Teacher attendance: The district wants to increase the percentage of teachers with excellent or moderate attendance by 3 percentage points annually. During the 2018-19 school year, it was 72% — meaning that more than a quarter of teachers have less than ideal attendance.
K-8 academic growth: The district wants to increase the percentage of K-8 students who meet their annual improvement targets on district assessments in math and reading by 4 percentage points.

This isn’t the first time the district has set goals. Early into the tenure of Vitti, who arrived in 2017, the board approved a set of measurable goals. At the time, officials said the goals would be updated as more data became available.

The district will produce quarterly reports to update the board and the public on progress towards reaching the goals.

To see a full list of the goals, go to:

High turnover of security guards prompts Detroit district to hire its own force

2019-07-22T19:43:27+00:00

A revolving door of security guards was creating an unstable environment in Detroit schools, prompting the district to make a big change in how it hires those tasked with ensuring the safety of schools.

The Detroit school board approved a plan to begin phasing out its previous contract with Securitas, a privately contracted security company, in last week’s meeting. The move will mark the first time in nearly a decade that the district will employ its own full-time security guards.

During the meeting, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the plan should change school culture.

“It’s not about judging people individually, it’s looking at a holistic strategy or approach about how you provide security,” Vitti said.

He presented a plan to hire 91 full-time security guards for 39 schools next year. The full-time employees will receive $3 more an hour than Securitas guards. They also will receive benefits, a change that Vitti believes will attract and retain dedicated security guards. It is unclear when the full transition will be complete.

Full-time security guards will not report to Ralph Godbee, leader of the district’s police force. Instead, principals will now be responsible for the hiring and managing their school security. Vitti said that this will give school leaders a feeling of “ownership and empowerment” over their schools.

Although the guards will be trained by the Detroit Police Department, they won’t be armed or authorized to make arrests. The district’s culture and climate department will train the guards to work within its code of conduct.

The district’s decision to hire security guards comes after testing the plan at 12 schools last year. Now, in addition to those 12 schools, every high school, alternative school and most secondary schools will receive a full-time security guard employed by the district.

Vitti shared data at the Tuesday board meeting that he said showed why it is important for students to have “more continuity and sustainability overall,” which full-time security guards should provide.

He said that the high turnover of Securitas officers interrupted learning in Detroit’s schools, led to inconsistent enforcement of the code of conduct, and created bad relationships between students and security guards.

“We believe that this will reduce the turnover rate,” he said. “In fact, we found that once we filled the positions for the full-time security guards, we had a zero turnover rate.” That’s compared with a 57% turnover rate at Securitas.

Dawn Wilson-Clark, a mother of two current students in the district, says she’s happy with the district’s decision to move away from Securitas. Her daughter is a senior at Cass Technical High School, and her son a sophomore at Detroit Collegiate Preparatory High School at Northwestern.

Although Wilson-Clark is critical of any school security, she believes that it’s important for the district to be critical of where they spend money. She says that removing Securitas was “a good first step.”

She also says that principals gaining more control over their buildings is a good idea.

“I’m happy that the power is back into the principal’s hands, and that they will be able to bring in who they think is needed in their building.”

See Vitti’s presentation below, and the security information on Pages 3-7

School is out for most Detroiters. Here’s what you told us you learned this year.

2019-06-21T19:48:10+00:00

Most teachers in Detroit shut down their classrooms Friday, ending another school year that had its share of good and bad times. As parents, educators, and students get ready for summer, many of them are reflecting on the experiences of the past year.

Last week, we asked you to tell us what you’ve learned. Some of you submitted answers to our website, and we talked to some of you in person. Among those who responded were teachers, parents, activists, and students who said they learned more about how the district is run, changes in the system, and how the fight for education has changed.

Carrie Russell, a teacher at Cody high school in the Detroit district, says she learned about the importance of local control this year. She left the district 2 ½ years ago when it was still under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. She taught briefly in a suburban district, but returned to Detroit.

She was pleasantly surprised.

“Having local control and a superintendent that works in the best interest of the students in the district makes a big difference to the future of the schools and the students they serve,” she said. She added that the district “clearly still [has] a long way to go, but for the first time I have a sense of hope that we will do what it takes to support the community we serve.”

Josie Whelan, a second-grade teacher at Cesar Chavez Academy, said she learned new ways to make sure her students had at least some resources for fun experiences to get them out of the classroom more often.

“My class had a free pottery class through a Pewabic grant, saw an opera through the Michigan Opera House, went to the science center, zoo, and the DIA. All free!,” she wrote. (The DIA is the Detroit Institute of Arts.)

“I’m so glad that these resources are available for students who wouldn’t be exposed to these things if it weren’t for school.”

Kyle Goodall, a teacher at Renaissance High School, reflected on his student group’s accomplishments.

He recalled a project he and his LGBTQ students created this year, noting that they surprised many teachers and administrators with their diligence. He says that he hopes his students continue the work next year, and that it becomes more widespread.

“I really hope that the queer students band together district-wide and are the ones that push for transformative and cultural change,” he said. “What we did at [Renaissance] was amazing and the LGBTQ students are something to be afraid of. They surprised a lot of people.”

One Detroit School of Arts graduate, Elanah Wilson, said she learned more about the ways that schools operate. Wilson is also a student organizer with 482Forward, an education advocacy organization.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And it’s all a game to getting a good grade,” she told us. She was critical about the ways that her teachers run their classrooms, and says her hope for the future is that students “actually start learning” in the classrooms.

Edgar Gomez, another organizer with 482Forward, and a Detroit parent, noted a shift in organizing around schools.

“I think one of the biggest things I’ve seen this year was really the fight to improve our schools,” he said. “I know in the past several years, it’s been about keeping schools open. But now there’s definitely this fight going on at different levels — from the youth all the way to the administrative level — trying to improve our schools and the education of our students.”

He says he’s hopeful that the work will be successful.

“I hope to see us accomplish those goals and improve our education,” Gomez said. “Michigan test scores are very low and I think it’s extremely important that we move up on that list.”

As Detroit teachers demonstrate, they send a big message to leaders: ‘We want real raises.’

2019-05-14T22:44:11+00:00

Hundreds of Detroit teachers took their argument for higher wages to members of the district’s school board with a rally Tuesday night.

Many of the protesters were wearing red shirts and carrying signs that said things like “Rise up the wages for DPSCD educators.”

The “rise up” was a riff on the district’s “Students rise. We all rise” slogan. Meanwhile, red has become the color teachers across the nation have worn to demonstrate teacher solidarity. The union and district are negotiating salary increases for the final year of the current three-year teacher contract.

“It’s not over. We have a long road,” said Terrence Martin, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

The current contract called for salary increases of about 7% over the first two years. It included a provision that the two sides come together to negotiate wages for the third year.

Martin claimed victory in the union’s fight against a calendar for the upcoming school year that members said violated their contract. The district backed away from the calendar the board approved April 16 after backlash from teachers — and after union leaders said they don’t support the calendar.

But Martin, during a demonstration held minutes before the school board’s budget hearing, said the union is hoping to send a message to board members.

“We want real raises. We want step increases,” Martin said.

He said union members supported the push for an elected, empowered school board during the years the district was under the control of state-appointed emergency managers. The district got that empowered board back in 2016.

“Now, it’s time for them to step up to help us,” Martin said.

Latrell Maxwell, 12, and his mother, Melissa Redman, were part of a teacher rally Tuesday.

It was a message board members heard over and over again as dozens of people — most of them teachers — spoke during the public comment period of the monthly school board meeting that followed the budget hearing.

“We voted for you. We supported you. And now we’re asking you to support us,” one teacher told the board.

The meeting wasn’t just an opportunity for teachers to call for raises en masse. Many of the teachers raised concerns about other major issues. One teacher complained about a relatively new student code of conduct that was designed to improve the culture in schools. She said, however, that it was ineffective and “has not improved climate and culture.” There were a number of complaints about the district’s new curriculum in language arts and math for elementary and middle school students, which has been a challenge for teachers and left many with mixed opinions. One of them was a little boy who asked, “Who thought the new reading program would be good for children like me?”

But most of the comments kept coming back to salary issues.

Vitti said during the budget hearing, as he has said several times before, that the budget for the 2019-20 school year includes pay increases for all employees. That includes step increases for some employees and bonuses. Vitti has said he wants to ensure teachers at the top of the pay scale receive pay increases to get their salaries back to levels that existed before emergency emergency managers took control of the district. He’s also pushed for bonuses for others.

The union, though, wants all teachers to receive salary increases, and not bonuses.

Teacher Steve Conn said the only way the district will have a stable teaching staff is to give raises to all teachers. Anything else is “a complete betrayal of the young people.”

Vitti has argued that the district is hampered by inadequate funding from the state and has pushed teachers to take their fight to Lansing lawmakers.

“We’re going to take our argument to the state,” Martin said. “We know our worth.”

Latrell Maxwell, 12, was among those who attended the demonstration Tuesday night. He held a sign that said, “Working extra days does not = salary increase.” The sign referred to what had been part of the proposed calendar: an extra five work days for teachers to undergo professional development. Latrell said he came to the meeting with his mother, a parent action leader, to support teachers.

“Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are as students,” said Latrell, a student at Paul Robeson/Malcolm X Academy.

Mitzi Davis, a second-grade teacher at Thirkell Elementary School, said she is a dedicated teacher and said teachers need to feel dedication from others.

“They need to respect our teachers,” Davis said.

“They need to treat us like we are professionals,” said Lynn Huddleston, a fifth-grade English language arts teacher at Thirkell.

After backlash from teachers, Detroit district backs away from controversial calendar

2019-05-14T15:26:13+00:00

The Detroit school district is backing away from a new calendar for the upcoming school year after teachers pushed back against it.

The district school board approved a calendar on April 16 that moved the start of the year earlier, added teacher training days and, for the first time, closed schools for a major Muslim holiday.

But members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers voted to oppose the calendar, saying it violates their contract, and announced plans to protest the calendar at Tuesday’s board meeting. Now, the board is expect to change course during the meeting and approve a new calendar that is similar to the one that existed for the current school year.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the district and union tried to negotiate in recent weeks.

“After a couple of weeks of negotiating the calendar, it is clear we cannot come to an agreement,” Vitti said. “Therefore, we need to move on to plan for professional development this summer and to provide families and staff with clarity on next year’s calendar. We have been negotiating the calendar for five months. I, the district, respect the collective bargaining agreement and that means honoring it even when you disagree with aspects of it.”

He tweeted Tuesday afternoon that returning to last year’s calendar “is less about pushback and more about an unwillingness on our part to violate the contract.”

Vitti has consistently said that leaders of the teachers union, as well as other district unions, agreed to the calendar before he took it to the board for approval. He said the dispute after the board’s sign-off would cause the district to handle calendar planning differently in the future.

“Historically, this is a verbal agreement, not a signed agreement,” Vitti said. “Moving forward, we will need to change that expectation.” That means the district will be expecting a formal agreement on future calendars, he said.

Terrence Martin, the president of the teachers union, has said he didn’t approve the calendar. He couldn’t be reached for comment about the latest development.

The union’s biggest objections were to the calendar approval process and to what leaders described as a calendar designed to prioritize standardized testing, which the union opposes. They also objected to the five additional days of professional development without a significant across-the-board pay raise. The resolution noted that district teachers are paid 20 percent less than their peers in surrounding districts.

The calendar the school board is considering Tuesday night will include the same number of required professional development days as during the current year, but it will also include some additional days that will be voluntary.

The union’s protest is also causing the district to do away with one other change that had been received warmly.

The district had earned praise from Muslim leaders for listening to students and including an observance of the Eid al-Fitr holiday next May. It included the observance of Eid al-Fitr on May 25, 2020, which would already have been a day off for Memorial Day, and the following day (a proposed professional development day for teachers). Students would have had a four-day weekend to observe the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.