LANSING — Despite a framework budget agreement being reached last week, Michigan lawmakers still have given few details on what public education spending could look like.
With the state’s new fiscal year starting on Oct. 1, Northern Michigan educators say that it’s anyone’s guess how lawmakers will agree to spend billions in public school funding.
“We have not seen any details,” said Dr. John VanWagoner, superintendent of Traverse City Area Public Schools. “We’re still going into it, really, with an unknown understanding, which is not really all that transparent for us.”
Educators shared frustration about the months of uncertainty that have defined this year’s budget process.
The Legislature is legally required to agree on education funding by the end of June, largely to give schools more certainty entering into their year — but that deadline came and went without any progress.
“Here we are months out now, and we really don’t know what we have to work with,” said Katy Xenakis-Makowski, superintendent of Johannesburg-Lewiston Area Schools.
Schools have so far been operating off of their best guesses for what funding they’ll receive from the state.
“Whether we have to take out of our savings account to be able to do some of the things we did is yet to be seen,” VanWagoner said. “But we’ll be going through here this next week and teaching kids and doing great things that schools do.”
Lawmakers could take two approaches for their funding plan — needs-based categorical funding, or per-pupil payments, which rely solely on the size of a district’s student body.
Previous budgets have included hundreds of millions of dollars for specific categoricals, like universal school meals and rural transportation funding.
The House Republican plan would do away with those items, which Northern Michigan educators say would leave schools without the support they may need.
“If they start ripping categoricals away, basically what they’re saying is, hey, we want everybody to have the same piece of the pie’,” said Tom McKee, superintendent of Rudyard Area Schools. “When we get rid of the categoricals, the Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan students are going to get less”
VanWagoner says that his district will continue to serve free meals through at least the next week.
“Just to make sure that, you know, we don’t have a kid that doesn’t know about where we’re at in the situation, as far as going hungry,” he said. “And so we’re waiting kinda on pins and needles here to see what transpires there over the next 24 hours.”