Editorial
A sobering situation in Highland Park schools
What is to become of the poor Highland Park school district?
The district got its most recent round of fixes Friday, as Gov. Rick Snyder reappointed Jack Martin to the position of emergency manager and then transferred most day-to-day personnel functions to the Detroit Public Schools for the remainder of the school year. Earlier in the week, the governor had arranged to get money to teachers and other staff who had not gotten their paychecks on time the week before.
The fixes will get students through to June, but they don’t really solve anything. For small districts like Highland Park, the problems go beyond the steps even an emergency manager can take.
Yes, Highland Park suffered from fiscal mismanagement, putting the district $1.7 million behind in its bills by last November, when Snyder first declared a financial emergency. And the district ran deficits in five of the last six fiscal years. Only 969 students remained as of November, down from more than 3,000 as recently as 2006.
When you ask school districts to compete, there are going to be winners and losers. Highland Park looks like a loser. Yet what other district would want to merge with it, absorbing its debts and retirement burden? Nor is there precedent for simply leaving a geographic area unserved by a district, even though the Republican team in Lansing seems to prefer standalone charter schools and sometimes undercuts traditional school districts.
In Highland Park, teachers and other staff deserve kudos for coming to work last week even though they did not get the biweekly paychecks due them Feb. 24. But more confusion may follow, as parents must decide whether to use the $4,000 bounty on each student’s head and leave for another district or charter school, using a list that was to be available to parents Friday.
And what about next year? One solution might be to put Highland Park schools in the Educational Achievement Authority that Gov. Rick Snyder is trying to get in place by next fall. But many questions remain about its structure and financing — and whether it, too, will indirectly push more costs onto traditional districts.
Highland Park’s payless payday stirred remarkably little controversy, perhaps on the assumption that it was a glitch. Perhaps, though, it’s the canary in the coal mine.
When Kalkaska schools went broke nearly 20 years ago, school refinancing became a major topic in the state. Eventually, then-Gov. John Engler and the Legislature put together the plan now known as Proposal A and campaigned hard for its passage with voters in 1994.
These days, districts fall into emergency management and still no one takes on the big questions, chief among them how to handle long-promised retirement benefits when fewer and fewer students attend the traditional district schools that have to cover the legacy costs. Nor is anyone asking whether Michigan should dismantle or rearrange school district boundaries or even abandon the idea of assigned neighborhood schools altogether. Certainly that’s where proponents of choice seem to be headed, without saying so forthrightly.
Yet, in Highland Park and everywhere else in the state, there needs to be a school where, when you go, they have to take you in. Until Michigan’s leaders figure out how to make all this work, and chart a path from here to there, there is no good answer to the question of what to do about the poor Highland Park district.
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