Chalkbeat

Michigan schools may lose more than 5,000 teachers due to funding shortfalls, report says

2024-04-04T17:07:52+00:00

Michigan schools could lose up to 5,100 teaching positions in the next two years due to the end of federal COVID relief funding and a potential stagnation of state revenue growth, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

School districts with enrollment declines will likely be the ones most affected.

“When we look at which individual districts have felt the brunt of enrollment declines, many are the same districts that got large federal allocations,” said Craig Thiel, research director of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, the nonpartisan not-for-profit public affairs research organization that released the analysis.

As the 2024-25 budget cycle begins, the state has begun to see some of the effects of the funding cliff, the end of billions of dollars in federal funding schools received during the pandemic. Districts are facing difficult decisions. Ann Arbor Public Schools has warned of a $25 million shortfall. The Flint Community Schools Board this year rejected a deal that would have restored annual salary increases for teachers, saying a $14 million operational deficit left no room in the budget.

Last year, the Detroit Public Schools Community District announced layoffs, cutting around $300 million from its 2023-24 budget. Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the district deliberately earmarked more than half of the federal funds it received for one-time expenses to avoid widespread layoffs. It spent around $700 million on long-needed school building renovations.

Additionally, the increase in the money the state has allocated to schools from one-time revenue surpluses is projected to slow down in the coming years, according to the CRC analysis.

School districts used the $5.6 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding, or ESSER, to pay for programs and hire staff to meet students’ needs in recovering from learning loss. Those dollars – which in many cases were used to hire additional teachers, social workers, counselors, nurses, tutors, and other staff – will run out in September.

“Where we sit today, not only do schools see the importance of having those positions, but so do parents,” said Bob McCann, executive director of the policy group K-12 Alliance of Michigan, which advocates for school funding priorities in the state legislature.

Combined revenue for Michigan K-12 public education increased from $15.1 billion in the 2018-19 school year to $19.8 billion in the 2022-23 school year, a 31% jump in funding, according to the report. But those temporary extra dollars can’t continue to pay for ongoing programs and services.

The analysis calculated that up to 5,100 teachers may need to be cut to get back to the same staffing levels that existed before the federal relief funding. That would be a 10% decrease compared to current ratios.

The extra money ESSER gave to schools was a “band-aid” on Michigan’s long “broken” school funding system, said McCann.

“We knew we couldn’t count on ESSER forever,” McCann said. “That doesn’t mean those services aren’t still desperately needed by students.”

Though students have made some year-over-year gains in state assessment scores, proficiency rates in core subjects remain below pre-pandemic levels.

Based on last year’s state test scores, Michigan students in grades 3-7 were still behind in math and English language arts compared to pre-pandemic levels. And the gaps between the lowest and highest performing K-8 students were wider than they were before COVID on benchmark tests given each spring from 2020 through 2023.

Research suggested a mental health crisis among youth before the pandemic, but the trauma, loss, and isolation brought on by COVID compounded it. Educators and advocates in Michigan say there currently aren’t enough staff to address students’ social and emotional needs, despite schools hiring more than 1,300 additional mental health professionals since 2018.

Thiel said districts may have to decide between letting go of teachers in the classroom or the support staff who aren’t in classrooms but either work directly with kids or help teachers improve instruction. There isn’t much room to cut administrative roles, he said.

“The administrative group is a small piece of the pie,” said Thiel. “The ranks of those people didn’t grow that much and may have shrunk over this period in a number of districts.”

Long-term investments from the state are needed to fully address students’ needs, said Robert Dwan, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Michigan School Business Officials, in an email.

McCann agreed.

“Our hope is that state officials find ways to make investments in public education, not just one time, but thinking long term,” he said.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan school districts brace for Count Day ahead of ESSER spending cliff

2023-10-02T21:31:14+00:00

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Wednesday’s official student headcount for Michigan schools could be more crucial than ever, as districts where enrollment has declined since the pandemic began are now facing the expiration of federal COVID relief.

The federal aid known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, helped schools weather the pandemic in several ways. Some districts used a portion of that aid to cushion the fiscal blow from enrollment losses. But ESSER funds will run out in September 2024, and in response, districts could be forced into some budget cuts in the near future as long-term enrollment drops persist.

The stakes are high across the nation, including in Michigan, where the pandemic accounted for more than half of the 9% decline in statewide student enrollment over the past decade, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. In Michigan, where enrollment is tied to school funding, each student leaving local public schools could cost a district nearly $10,000 in annual funding without the backstop of COVID aid.

The end of ESSER funding could be especially challenging for high-poverty districts, which have typically received more federal relief and spent their funds at a slower pace than their more affluent counterparts.

And the end of federal COVID relief is approaching as students continue to struggle, both academically and emotionally, from the pandemic.

The end of ESSER money could on its own drive down funding significantly in many districts in Michigan and elsewhere. A national analysis estimates that on average, the loss of the federal pandemic funding will cause a drop in revenue of about $1,000 per student.

“There’s certainly more question marks than there are exclamation points at this point when it comes to where this is going to go,” said Robert McCann, executive director of K-12 Alliance, an organization that represents school superintendents across Michigan. “Every superintendent right now is looking at their budget, and trying to figure out how to best maintain some of those programs that were created during the pandemic.”

Michigan enrollment declines exacerbate spending cliff

School systems across Michigan were provided roughly $6 billion through ESSER that districts used for a variety of programming families wanted. Districts like Flint Community Schools that lost students throughout the pandemic also used ESSER funding to counteract the loss of state aid that followed enrollment declines.

No more ESSER dollars means Flint and other districts can only rely on that strategy for so long. Although that funding hasn’t run out yet, districts will use Wednesday’s student count to help determine their budgets for the 2024-25 school year.

COVID funding “has allowed us to have a fund balance to cushion us for the next couple of years,” said Kevelin Jones, Flint’s superintendent.

“We need every dime that we can get our hands on,” Jones said. “When you’re losing 50 to 100 students every year, it means that we can not properly staff and meet the needs of every one of our scholars.”

Jones added: “Once this fund balance is gone, we are back in the same situation that we were in prior to the pandemic of being in the red.”

The district has lost 66% of its student population, or roughly 5,700 students, in the past decade.

Alena Zachery-Ross, who has led Ypsilanti Community Schools since 2018, said high-poverty districts like hers are in dire straits. Ypsilanti saw a 280-student dip in K-12 enrollment at the start of the 2020-21 school year. The district is also still making up for the loss of students who left for neighboring districts in the wake of a district consolidation in 2013.

“For those of us who really need that additional support, who benefit by having social workers in every building, instructional coaches in every building, climate and culture coaches in every building, we use those [Count Day] dollars to provide those extra supports that are needed,” said Zachery-Ross.

Michigan counts students on two official days during the school year, this Wednesday and Feb. 7. District principals have led a daily attendance campaign in anticipation of Wednesday, and have sent letters home to families reminding them of Count Day’s significance.

Budget cuts can be especially challenging in districts that used ESSER money to maintain staff and programming that they would not have been able to afford otherwise.

This summer, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, Michigan’s largest school district, moved to cut and consolidate central office and support staff to make up for a loss of 2,000 students during the pandemic. DPSCD enrolled roughly 50,000 students pre-pandemic.

Heading into Wednesday, DPSCD is budgeting for at least 48,200 students, according to Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. The district is tasking its principals with creating their own Count Day plans, and they have received additional funding for those activities.

“You really go to any school during Count Day, you will see something different happening,” Vitti said at a DSPCD meeting on Monday. “We have to be realistic with how that drives funding and to make that a unique type of day for students.”

In some places, the cuts could extend beyond staff and programming. Districts like Flint and Grand Rapids Public Schools, where there’s been a 20% drop in enrollment over the past decade, have recently weighed whether to close underutilized schools in the coming years.

Some school leaders with rosier enrollment statistics or projections argue the ESSER spending cliff is no more daunting than the challenges cash-strapped districts have contended with before.

For the first time in over a decade, Coloma Community Schools may see a bump in enrollment according to preliminary figures ahead of Count Day, said Superintendent Dave Ehlers, who leads the rural, high-poverty school district on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The end of ESSER, he said, won’t come as much of a loss for his district, which enrolls roughly 1,300 students. Most of the district’s dollars went toward providing new technologies and social-emotional learning.

“I think we’re gonna be in a good spot,” Ehlers said. “We’ve invested well and made sure that we did good things with it, but we’re prepared to go with our regular school budget and be okay.”

Stiles Simmons, superintendent of Westwood Community Schools outside of Detroit, said financial belt-tightening has kept the district of nearly 1,500 students afloat amid previous enrollment losses. This past year, when the district gained 91 students, the district’s corresponding increase in state aid went directly to build up the district’s general fund balance.

How badly districts are faring enrollment-wise may also guide lawmakers’ decisions regarding next year’s school aid budget.

This summer, lawmakers approved a $21.5 billion budget that raised the state’s per-student allowance by nearly $500 and boosted funding for at-risk students and special ed services.

“What we’re hoping is that the legislature is going to look at that budget that got passed this year and say ‘That needs to be the baseline going forward, not an exception that we’re going to start scaling back from,’” McCann of K-12 Alliance said.

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

Michigan schools turn to COVID relief funds to upgrade aging buildings

2023-03-29T23:15:42+00:00

As many as 32 students crowd into classrooms originally meant for 22 to 24 students in the Crestwood School District.

Many of Crestwood’s buildings were built in the 1960s, said Youssef Mosallam, superintendent of the district in Dearborn Heights. But updates have been few and far between for the district’s needs, the superintendent said.

Then came a small fortune from the federal government: $24 million in COVID relief funds for the district of nearly 3,800 students. At least $8 million of the relief money is going to build 12 new classrooms in the district’s elementary schools, to reduce class sizes and to keep students spaced farther apart, he said.

Dozens of school districts across Michigan are also directing relief funds to rehab aging school buildings, some of which lack air conditioning or functioning heating systems. In rural Harrison Community Schools north of Mount Pleasant, Superintendent Judy Walton said that means heat may work in one side of a school building in the morning and the other side in the afternoon. The district hasn’t had the funding to make updates for years, she said.

For school districts in lower-income areas like Harrison, relief funds have covered essential facility upgrades that annual state funding and bond money don’t.

“We’re probably one of the most economically depressed counties in Michigan,” Walton said. “So the availability of those funds to do those HVAC upgrades was really critical for us.”

Michigan’s public schools planned to spend about 18% of relief funds on buildings and facilities needs, according to a May 2022 analysis of approved school district plans by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, around $641 million at that time. Since the analysis, more spending has likely been approved. In all, Michigan schools have nearly $6 billion in COVID relief funds to spend by September 2024.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Chalkbeat Detroit, the Detroit Free Press, and Bridge Michigan have teamed up to find out where the money is going, who is benefiting, and whether the money is helping students get back on track academically, emotionally, and socially.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

The largest district in the state, Detroit Public Schools Community District, is also allocating roughly half of its more than $1 billion in relief funds to building needs, a total not included in the Citizens Research Council’s analysis.

Michigan schools might be particularly hard-pressed to find funding to keep buildings from falling apart. Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan and part of a group advocating for stronger school funding measures in the state, said Michigan is one of only a few states in the nation that do not specifically allocate money for facilities on a statewide level. The state in its most recent budget created a fund partially dedicated to infrastructure, with $250 million for buildings. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has also recommended $500 million for the next budget to go to infrastructure.

“Michigan probably has a much more rapidly aging school infrastructure than a lot of other states do,” he said, “because Michigan is also one of the handful of states that doesn’t really have any sort of statewide infrastructure spending for schools.”

Schools close because of building problems

Lawmakers in June 2022 assigned $20 million to go to an audit of school facilities in the state. McCann said such a study has never been conducted before.

But anecdotal evidence suggests many Michigan school buildings in low-income areas are in disrepair or facing major problems:

Flint Schools closed for several days in summer 2021 due to a lack of air conditioning in certain buildings.
Dearborn Schools canceled class when temperatures soared in June 2022 because some rooms in the district weren’t cooled.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 found that half of the districts it studied across the nation needed multiple systems, such as the HVAC system, replaced. GAO officials visited a school building in Michigan that still relied on a boiler from the 1920s for heat.
The photos in the GAO report included one of water damage in a Michigan school library and another of signage warning of asbestos.
In 2016, a series of protests led by Detroit public schools educators raised, among other issues, crumbling conditions in the district’s school buildings. Teachers described mold issues, leaky ceilings, and pest infestations.

In May 2022, the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s board approved a $700 million facilities plan to address longstanding needs. The plan involves rebuilding five buildings and renovating 64, focusing on roofing, heating and cooling, building exteriors, and lighting.

Construction at Highview Elementary School in the Crestwood School District will add additional classrooms to address crowded classrooms.

The district will use nearly half of its COVID relief money to make the sweeping changes over the next five years.

A national analysis of spending data by the Associated Press found that school districts with the highest numbers of students living in poverty are more likely than wealthier districts to spend the relief funds on building and transportation upgrades.

Phyllis Jordan, associate director at FutureEd, an education think tank based at Georgetown University, said it makes sense that districts in low-income areas are directing funds to facilities after struggling for so long.

“It also reflects that a lot of these poor districts, with years and years of disinvestment, of underinvestment — that they haven’t been able to make these repairs,” she said. “This is an opportunity with a lot of cash and a lot of cash they have to spend quickly.”

In Michigan, that means districts like Walton’s are turning to federal relief funds to address critical building issues. Nearly 54% of students in Harrison Community Schools are economically disadvantaged, defined by eligibility in the free or reduced price lunch program.

The Harrison district is spending $3.15 million to install air conditioning where the district doesn’t have it, and to replace old furnaces and air-handling units. Bond money approved by the community in past elections has helped facilities, Walton said, but ultimately, property values in the area weren’t high enough to cover HVAC repairs and replacements.

“You can only get so much through a bond, and at some point, the balance of the percentage of home value isn’t going to support the numbers you need,” she said.

Michigan’s school funding formula does not allocate specific sustained funding for buildings or facilities, which means schools without bond or other supplemental funding often struggle to find room in the budget to replace failing boilers or fix what’s broken. The most recent state budget did allocate some funds, $250 million, for school facilities, though the money hinges on a statewide facilities audit that has not yet been conducted. It’s also unclear whether the fund is ongoing or one-time.

Building improvements pay off later

Essexville-Hampton Public Schools near Bay City will use $1 million in COVID relief funds to help fund a nearly $5 million energy efficiency project in its buildings, Superintendent Justin Ralston said. The district was able to pay for the rest of the project with bond money, but the COVID relief funds helped bring the project to fruition.

More efficient buildings will save money in the long run.

“Everybody is strapped for cash,” Ralston said. So the energy efficiency project “is looking at adding new heating boilers, new rooftop units, chillers, and then also doing water conservation efforts in all of our buildings.”

In Crestwood, Mosallam, the superintendent, said district leaders focused on areas that most needed improvement, finding class sizes and school security to be priority areas. To lower class sizes, Crestwood needed more classrooms. And to ease security concerns, the district needed to add cameras and door lockdown systems, and upgrade fire systems.

While many districts are focusing on necessities, research indicates that higher quality school facilities help students learn. When they feel safe and in a nurturing environment, they’re more likely to engage with education.

Olivia Graf Doyle, design principal for Architecture for Education, a California-based firm dedicated to learning environments, said funding ideal learning environments in public schools has always been difficult, because schools often struggle to receive funding for even the necessities, such as keeping heating and cooling systems running or fixing bona fide safety hazards like crumbling ceilings.

Features like big glass windows or folding walls that seamlessly connect classrooms or enhanced outdoor spaces end up feeling like luxuries, she said.

“We really need to shift the conversation away from physical security and barriers, to really how we can use the learning environment to create a sense of belonging, which inherently builds safety,” she said.

Jordan said a lot of focus in media coverage around this spending has gone to new athletic fields or other projects that may seem more frivolous. But projects like that are rare, she said, according to her organization’s research. Instead, Jordan said districts nationwide are taking care of the necessities.

One school superintendent from a rural area of the country told Jordan that in an effort to replace a school’s roof, an inspection found the entire school needed to be condemned.

“Now there’s a lot of pushback like, ‘This is money that’s supposed to be emergency money or learning loss. Why is it going to facilities?’ And that’s a legitimate point,” she said. “But at the same token, you can’t really divorce facilities from learning. If kids are too hot or too cold, if there’s mold in the building, you get a lot of absenteeism. It’s harder to learn.”

Editor’s note: This story has been edited to add details around the state’s school consolidation and infrastructure fund.

Lily Altavena is an education reporter for the Detroit Free Press. You can reach Lily at laltavena@freepress.com.

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

2023-02-17T18:00:00+00:00

For the past couple of years, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has been able to tap its share of federal COVID relief aid to fund after-school enrichment programs that help students recover from learning lost during the pandemic.

But those funds will soon run out, and Detroit and other districts face some tough decisions about which programs and employees they can afford to keep once federal support is gone.

Detroit parent Aliya Moore said she is concerned that her daughter’s newly funded after-school debate team will be “snatched,” along with funding for new positions such as parent outreach coordinators.

“That’s my biggest fear,” said Moore, who is a frequent critic of the district. “Just going into (next) school year, and a lot of these people are not there.”

For districts, there’s an added challenge: Looming deadlines attached to the federal aid put them under time pressure to map out their spending and use up the remaining funds quickly and effectively, while also figuring out how they’ll manage without it.

What they’re eager to prevent is a so-called fiscal cliff, where a steep drop in funding forces sudden and severe budget cuts that could ripple throughout the school system.

Superintendents in Michigan are generally optimistic that their districts can avoid that scenario, especially given the prospect of increased state funding. But experts say it will take work.

“Districts need to plan now, so students don’t face chaos at the start of the 2024 school year with classrooms and teachers shuffled, programs abruptly dropped, demoralized staff, and leaders focusing on nothing but budget woes,” wrote Marguerite Roza, a professor at Georgetown University who studies school finance, in a recent article.

What is federal COVID aid?

Michigan hasn’t seen anything like this: more than $6 billion in federal funds aimed at helping students recover from the pandemic, by far the largest one-time federal investment in schools in state history. Most of it was distributed based on poverty levels in each district’s community. The Detroit district alone received $1.27 billion.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Congress gave districts plenty of leeway on how they could spend the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money, or ESSER funds. So far, they have used it for a wide array of projects, including summer school expansions, staff bonuses, air filtration improvements, building renovations, tutoring, and mental health programs.

But they’re on a tight schedule to spend it. The federal government wants the funds deployed quickly to accelerate the recovery from the pandemic. So districts have only until 2024 to get state approval for all their spending plans. Much of the spending itself must be complete by 2025, though districts may apply for extensions through 2026.

Districts aim to reduce spending without affecting the classroom

Having such a massive spending initiative roll out — and wrap up — so quickly was never going to be easy for Michigan districts. The state’s highest-poverty districts, which received by far the most funding per student, are taking the longest to spend the funds amid supply chain disruptions and a tight labor market.

Even districts that budgeted carefully and avoided long-term spending commitments that couldn’t be sustained without federal support will see disruptions from the loss of short-term programming that has been critical to the COVID recovery effort.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District, for instance, has notified as many as 100 staff members, including central office staff, master teachers, deans of culture, and attendance agents, that their positions paid for in part using federal COVID aid may be cut or consolidated by the end of the school year.

Neighboring Ecorse Public Schools will end a tutoring program designed to help students manage the effects of the pandemic.

DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the district isn’t planning to make budget recommendations that would hurt student achievement. “However, at a high level, if hard decisions are not made, then we will not be able to fund some of the COVID initiatives that we believe are most important to students,” he said.

Detroit has moved relatively quickly to plan out and spend its COVID aid. Of the $1.27 billion DPSCD received, $700 million is already earmarked for an infrastructure program that will renovate and rebuild schools across the city. The rest has gone toward expanding programming and providing additional staff at individual schools, among other things.

Vitti said that although no decision has been made yet, “it will be difficult to fund nurses and expand after-school programming and summer school next year.”

The DPSCD school board will convene on Saturday for a retreat and its first in-depth conversation about the expiring funds. Board members have insisted that district leaders find a way to maintain expanded mental health programming, even if it was funded by COVID aid.

Moore, whose daughter is a seventh-grader at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy, plans to attend Saturday’s meeting to hear what COVID-funded initiatives board members intend to keep or cut. With pandemic recovery far from complete, she’s hoping the board will prioritize after-school programming and academic recovery programs moving into the 2023-24 school year.

“I don’t feel like at this time any school should be denied after-school opportunities,” she said.

Some districts have huge sums left to spend

For other districts, it’s the federal deadlines that are proving to be the bigger challenge.

The issue came into sharp relief last year when hundreds of superintendents nationwide asked the U.S. Department of Education to extend the deadlines, saying that supply chain and staffing problems were slowing spending. The department said no, barring a change to federal law. (In Virginia, lawmakers are seeking to ratchet up the pressure with a bill that would require districts to return unspent funding to the state this summer.)

In Michigan, some observers have argued that state lawmakers should withhold new investments from districts that still have enormous amounts of federal funding to spend.

As of January, Michigan districts had spent 30% of the third and largest round of federal funding. They still have $2.1 billion to spend — which is equivalent to 10% of all state education spending this year.

Detroit has spent 38% of its federal funds, but other districts that received very high levels of federal aid — roughly defined as more than $10,000 per pupil — have much more ground to make up.

Flint Community Schools has spent 12% of the third wave of COVID funds. Hamtramck Public Schools spent 14%, Eastpointe Community Schools spent 5%, and Pontiac City School District spent 7%.

Benton Harbor Area Schools hasn’t spent any of its funds.

A recent report from the Citizens Research Council, a Michigan think tank, linked the vast majority of the unspent funds to a handful of high-poverty communities.

The report warns that rapid spending won’t be easy given the staff shortages and supply chain problems that have plagued the pandemic-era economy.

It notes, too, that spending the money effectively will be even tougher on a tight timeline.

Flint Superintendent Kevelin Jones said his district will be able to spend the money on time, and that it has emphasized one-time investments to make it easier to manage the end of COVID funding. In 2021, the district used federal funds to pay teachers one-time bonuses of $22,500.

“From the beginning, the district understood that ESSER funds served as a one-time” funding source, he said in a statement, noting that the goal of its spending was still to create a lasting impact.

Strong state budget provides a backstop

The closest parallel to the challenges facing Michigan schools may be the 2011 expiration of federal funds linked to the Great Recession.

Many districts used those dollars to build new programs, hoping that the state would step in to continue them when federal dollars dried up. Instead, amid a disastrous economy, state leaders opted for a steep cut to school funding, leading to a brutal round of cutbacks in school programming.

Things look different this time around. The state budget is far stronger, bolstered by historically high sales tax revenues. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s recent budget proposal taps an estimated $4 billion school aid surplus to call for a second straight major increase in school funding. Democrats, fully empowered in Lansing for the first time in decades, say they are eager to support increased school spending.

While the federal COVID aid program is much larger than the Great Recession package was, experts say the boost in state funding this time will do much to smooth the transition away from pandemic-related funding and ease the risk of a fiscal cliff.

Westwood Community School District, set in a high-poverty suburb west of Detroit, avoided using COVID aid to pay salaries or hire staff. Superintendent Stiles Simmons said the district used the money instead to pay $1,000 bonuses to classroom aides and improve facilities. When it needed new staff to help students cope with the pandemic, it relied on new state funding to cover salaries.

When the funds expire, aides might miss their bonuses, Simmons said, and the district won’t be able to continue paying educators $60 an hour to teach summer school. But he said he’s more worried about the possibility of a recession or a change in political support for schools than the expiration of COVID funds.

“If things continue as they are at this point, it’s difficult to see the cliff, but just knowing how things ebb and flow … especially with the economy, we have to always be on the lookout,” he said.

Even with rising state funding, DPSCD school board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo said the coming budget adjustments for school districts warrant a reconsideration of the way Michigan funds schools, calling the current formula inequitable. Since the passage of Proposal A in 1994, Michigan school funding has been based on the number of students attending the district. In Detroit, a series of economic downturns and a decline in the city’s population eroded student enrollment.

“Now’s the time, because we have a Democratic majority, to revisit Proposal A,” Gay-Dagnogo said. “We’re not talking about taking away funds from other districts. We’re talking about equalizing the dollars.”

She added: “You can’t plug in short term money for long term positions in perpetuity, but we have to have a solution for how to make sure that we are not displacing (staff) that really care and want to serve our children properly.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

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

Michigan seeks $10K fee for access to data on districts’ COVID aid spending plans

2022-11-23T20:00:00+00:00

Michigan’s education system got $6.2 billion in federal COVID relief funding to help school districts mitigate the pandemic’s impact on students.

Now state officials want to charge journalists $10,620 for access to public records that contain detailed, updated information about how districts across the state plan to spend that money.

Chalkbeat requested the data from the Michigan Department of Education in May under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, as part of a reporting collaboration with Bridge Michigan and the Detroit Free Press. Reporters have fought the fee for months on the grounds that the information is a public record that should be made available at no charge.

State officials say the fee — which is considerably higher than what Michigan agencies typically charge for records requests — is needed to cover the cost of screening the data for possible privacy issues. Fulfilling Chalkbeat’s requests without compromising confidential information, they said, “would require careful scrutiny of 42 detailed federal grant applications and hundreds of lines of budget descriptions in one part of the request, and another 2,421 applications and thousands of lines more of budget descriptions in a second part,” along with redaction of any personal information.

Lawyers and advocates for transparency in government say the high MDE fee violates the spirit of freedom of information laws.

“It’s one of the big problems with Michigan FOIA that allows public bodies to hide behind excessive fee demands to keep the public in the dark about its own business,” said Herschel Fink, legal counsel for the Detroit Free Press.

The documents that reporters requested include line-by-line, written explanations of how each district planned to spend COVID relief dollars. The data offers the most up-to-date, detailed picture of the proposed spending — a tool that could help teachers and parents advocate for their priorities and raise concerns if they disagree with their district’s spending plans.

Districts have used the funds to hire social workers, expand summer school, hire tutors, and purchase curriculums, among many other allowable uses.

District officials are required by law to get community input on their spending plans, but they aren’t required to share anything more than rough outlines of the plans they submit to MDE. Some districts have gone to great lengths to publicize details of their intended spending; others have not.

Individuals could try to get the detailed data or other records on their own from MDE or their local district. MDE has signaled that it’s willing to release the documents Chalkbeat requested — specifically, the budget detail page from districts’ applications for COVID relief grants — for individual districts.

A need for up-to-date data

At the core of Chalkbeat’s records request is a public need for current information about how districts plan to spend their federal COVID relief funds. The funds fuel a statewide effort to help address the academic and emotional distress that resulted from the pandemic.

Michigan, like all states, publicly releases extensive information about school spending, but that data lacks details about, for instance, which contractors districts intend to use for specific programs. What’s more, that information is released every January for the previous school year. That means spending recorded in September might not be published until more than a year later.

But parents and educators want to be kept up to date on districts’ spending of COVID relief aid, said Maria Lograsso, a parent, Harper Woods teacher, and organizer with the Michigan Caucus of Rank and File Educators, a group of unionized school workers.

“Not only do parents want to know that their kids are getting what they need, but teachers need to know that educators are getting what they need to help students recover from the pandemic.”

Teachers unions, too, have an interest in this data, because they can use district spending priorities as leverage during contract negotiations. The federal dollars can be used to improve teacher working conditions through, for instance, reducing class sizes or hiring support staff such as school counselors.

“It’s transparency and democracy,” said Toni Coral, president of the Hamtramck Federation of Teachers. “This is federal taxpayer money, and we should have an accounting. I think the information should be available. It seems to me that if you are trying to get people to trust you and to believe in you and to work with you, the information should be released.”

State says it’s concerned about confidentiality

In order to receive federal COVID relief dollars, every district in Michigan — more than 800 in all, including charter schools — has to submit detailed budgets to the state. District officials submit a form online explaining, item by item, how they intend to spend their grant funds.

Some districts proposed spending the money on just a few items — technology or salaries, for example. Others submitted complex budgets including hundreds of lines.

Chalkbeat asked state officials in December 2021 for copies of the initial spending proposals submitted to that point. A department employee emailed Chalkbeat the full data set in a spreadsheet containing more than 30,000 lines.

Each line in the spreadsheet contained, among other data points, the name of the district, a dollar amount of the proposed spending, and an explanation of how the money will be spent.

The data looks roughly like this:

Grant	District	Description	Total Proposed Spend
American Rescue Plan	Lansing Public School District	Additional Hours for Certified Teachers to address Learning Loss in extended year programming for 2 school years. ($32.35/hr X 20,000 Hours)	$977,000
American Rescue Plan	Lansing Public School District	IPads for student learning and connection with Teachers. (504 x $443 ea)	$223,272
American Rescue Plan	Lansing Public School District	Art supplies, glue, paint, brushes, markers, crayons, colored pencils, paper, notebooks, writing utensils, binders, poster board, activity cards, erasers, folders, posterboard, manipulatives, magnetic letters and numbers to support programming and services for EL students at all 8 LAP locations	$20,000

A sample of the requested COVID spending plan data

Data is current as of December 2021.

Source: Michigan Department of Education

The data requested by Chalkbeat and its reporting partners goes beyond other publicly available records of COVID aid spending: It includes the “description” column that contains written explanations of every line item of proposed spending. Typically, the publicly available records group school spending into broad categories, making it difficult to pinpoint spending on specific programs.

MDE says the descriptions are at the center of its concerns about Chalkbeat’s request for updated budgets, because they could contain a student’s name or other personal information that is exempt from public records requests.

In months of working with the data, Chalkbeat has not encountered a student name.

When school districts submit the data to the state, they are instructed not to include student names or other information that the department isn’t allowed to release. MDE officials estimated that it would take an employee making $35 an hour, including benefits, 300 hours to read through the data in case schools didn’t follow those instructions. They later increased that estimate to 807 hours — the equivalent of 100 workdays.

“MDE has worked tirelessly to respond timely and as completely as possible to FOIA requests involving federal COVID dollars for schools,” MDE spokesman Martin Ackley said in an email. “Some requests, such as the one submitted by Chalkbeat, require more time and effort to respond.”

The employee who released the early data to Chalkbeat in 2021 later said that they did not mean to share the description field.

Ackley noted that the state has provided financial information about the COVID relief funds in an allocations portal on its website.

That portal connects to information about how much COVID funding districts received, but not how they plan to spend it. MDE also released written summaries from districts on their spending plans, but those summaries typically didn’t contain any specific spending proposals.

For instance, Lansing Public School District said in its publicly available spending description that it planned to provide “supplemental afterschool programs as well as tutoring, and summer learning for identified students to provide accelerated as well as continued instruction due to COVID-19 learning loss.”

But the district’s detailed budget, which Chalkbeat obtained in December 2021, specified that its extended year programming alone would involve paying teachers for an additional 20,000 hours of work over two years at a cost of $977,000.

In any case, state officials shouldn’t charge money for releasing the updated information, said Lisa McGraw, public affairs manager for the Michigan Press Association, even if it’s allowed by Michigan’s notoriously weak public records law.

“If you’re doling out that kind of money, you should be compiling the information” about how it’s spent, she said. “Taxpayers have a right to know where their money is going, and they shouldn’t have to pay to find that out.”

Jarrett Skorup, director of communications for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank, said the MDE should already have the data in a format that’s ready to release.

“It is bizarre that the Michigan Department of Education could provide similar documents very quickly a few months ago but cannot do so now,” Skorup said. “These are documents or data filled out by school districts and sent to the state. It seems like they should … be compiling this information in a spreadsheet.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary of a downturn

2022-09-27T18:13:50+00:00

Grand Rapids Public Schools received $104 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding, an enormous one-time cash infusion equal to about half its annual budget.

The district used the money for tutoring, extra summer programs, and coaching for teachers. But now, facing an uncertain economy and the expiration date of the federal funds, the district is shifting its focus from spending to saving.

“Yes, we have a lot of money right now, but it is one-time money,” said Rhonda Kribs, chief financial officer of Grand Rapids Public Schools. “We’re on a cliff, so we need to be planning for what the district looks like in two years.”

That’s not quite what federal policymakers had in mind when they sent $6.2 billion in COVID relief funding to bolster Michigan’s education system. They wanted districts to spend the money on urgent needs like addressing the academic and emotional toll of the pandemic, which is why they set a fall 2024 deadline for the last of the spending.

Districts have already spent $1.6 billion of the federal aid to support students and shore up crumbling school infrastructure, and they’ve laid plans to spend billions more. Loose federal guidelines allow districts to use their aid to help build up savings, said Tom DeKeyser, superintendent of Whitmore Lake Public Schools. “But the needs of the students are so great.”

Yet Grand Rapids and many other districts are calculating that it’s just as critical to bolster their reserves while they can, and protect against future funding cuts that could destabilize children’s education again. They’re heeding warnings from school finance experts of a “perfect storm” of economic uncertainty fueled by inflation, enrollment declines, the threat of recession, and expiring federal aid.

“This year and probably the next school year look pretty healthy. But the medium term looks a lot scarier,” said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab, a nonpartisan think tank based at Georgetown University, adding: “How do we make investments that respond to the needs of today without putting districts in a hole in a few short years?”

How districts choose to allocate their resources during this unusual period of plenty could play a big role in determining how successfully they can support students through the profound challenges left by the pandemic, and whether they’re able to get through future fiscal crises without a new round of disruption.

For some administrators who witnessed painful cuts after the Great Recession, it’s a no-brainer to put away some money while school budgets are at a historic highwater mark.

“I’ve lived through two times when the state cut school funding,” Lou Steigerwald, superintendent of Norway Vulcan Area Schools in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said in an email. “Schools with no or little (fund balance) had to borrow money and slash staff and other items in their budgets.”

Indeed, Michigan’s most financially troubled districts, which were battered by the Great Recession, have been able to wipe out deficits and bolster their fund balances during the pandemic, allowing them to exit state oversight.

In a time of enormous academic needs, though, the tilt toward savings has some people worried that students will be shortchanged. For parents of students who struggled with virtual learning and other pandemic-related disruptions, it can be hard to accept anything but an aggressive spending plan from school districts.

“I have a kid who’s struggling, so it’s frustrating,” said Heidi Gates, parent of two children at Brighton Area Schools, where the fund balance jumped from $8 million pre-pandemic to a projected $14.7 million this year. “I feel like schools are saying, ‘OK, we’re back to normal.’”

Others warn that this caution could feed a public perception that districts are sitting on federal dollars meant for students — a perception that could come back to haunt the school system in coming funding fights.

“The school rescue funds were designed to help students now,” said Thomas Morgan, a spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “For that to happen, the money needs to be spent, and not sit in the bank. I know administrators will say they’re saving money for a rainy day, but it’s raining now.”

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Savings on the rise

School funding experts often use fund balances — sometimes called reserves or a “rainy day fund” — as a proxy for districts’ financial health. In broad terms, a district’s fund balance is what’s left over after a district has done all of its spending for the year.

A large fund balance functions as a cushion in the event of funding cuts or an unexpected problem with a school building. Districts with small fund balances typically face higher costs to borrow through the bond market. A negative fund balance — which means a district can’t cover its bills for the year — triggers state oversight, and can eventually lead to districts being shuttered or taken over by the state.

After one year of the pandemic, fund balances across Michigan school districts skyrocketed.

By summer 2021, when the most recent audited school finance data was released, the combined reserves of Michigan school districts had grown by 37%, from $2.4 billion pre-pandemic to $3.3 billion, according to the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan think tank.

Michigan school leaders are counseled to maintain fund balances equal to 15% to 20% of their expenditures. Last year, for the first time in at least a decade, more than half of districts had fund balance ratios of more than 20%. The number of districts above that threshold rose to 438 from 263, a two-thirds increase.

“Schools are as flush as they’ve ever been in history,” said Craig Thiel, research director for the CRC.

Graphics for Detroit. September 2022. Lauren Bryant / Chalkbeat

Superintendents pointed to numerous reasons that reserves increased. Virtual learning brought savings on school bus fuel and heating. At the same time, the state sharply increased per pupil funding and changed its funding policies to help districts with declining enrollment.

Others emphasized that reserves were boosted by transitory pandemic-related factors like school shutdowns and supply chain disruptions. In Grand Rapids, for example, Kribs said that supply chain issues forced the district to delay purchasing new security vehicles, inflating the district’s fund balance.

The most widely cited explanation, however, was the $6.2 billion in federal COVID aid that is being sent directly to school districts to help them deal with the effects of the pandemic.

In interviews and survey responses, 21 Michigan superintendents — echoing their counterparts nationwide — said it has been difficult to spend the extra funds. A tight labor market has slowed hiring, and many superintendents were reluctant in any case to expand their staffs using funds that will expire within a few years.

Some said the increased fund balances are only temporary while districts save for major expenses that are coming up soon, such as school renovations. Still, many argued that putting some money away now is just good policy given the risks they face in the next two years from inflation, declining enrollment, and the expiration of the federal relief dollars.

The state school budget reached record highs this year, but superintendents worry that a recession could reverse that trend. And even if the state budget remains strong, many districts will still see their revenues fall sharply, particularly those in high-poverty areas that received the most federal aid. For instance, the Lansing School District is in line to receive about $10 million extra under the latest state budget, but it received $142 million in federal aid.

“Fund balance allows for the consistency of programming in good times and bad,” said Robert Dwan, deputy executive director of Michigan School Business Officials, a trade association that provides financial training and support to district officials.

“Having a healthy fund balance which may help support the district in poor economic times helps fulfill the district’s responsibility to ensure today’s kindergartener graduates with as little disruption as possible throughout their educational journey,” Dwan added.

Flash in the pan or long-term plan?

It’s important to note that districts are not simply depositing their federal aid in the bank.

Under the laws governing that aid, that money is supposed to go exclusively to COVID-19 relief and can’t be channeled directly into reserves. But broad spending guidelines for the funds meant districts were able to apply the federal aid to some of their normal operating costs — things like laptop computers, building repairs, and some teacher salaries — and then direct some of the unspent operating funds into savings.

While available data don’t show how much districts spent on new programs, it’s clear that many schools upped their summer school offerings, expanded mental health services, and trained teachers and bought new curriculums to support students’ academic recovery.

With the federal funds expiring, district leaders said there’s a real danger that overspending now could make matters worse for students and teachers if their districts ended up in a budget hole in a few years.

Graphics for Detroit. September 2022. Lauren Bryant / Chalkbeat

“It’s a fine line, because this money was meant to accelerate learning that was disrupted due to COVID, but at the same time, if you’re able to build a fund balance, then I could see districts doing that,” said Nathan Kalasho, director of Keys Grace Academy, a charter school in suburban Detroit.

Still, some superintendents pushed back on the notion that districts’ long-term financial health changed significantly during the pandemic, arguing that district reserves will drop back to normal levels when federal COVID-19 relief expires in 2024.

“The growth of our fund balance is temporary and directly correlates with the one-time federal funding that must be spent by specific deadlines,” said C. Martin James, superintendent of Central Montcalm Public Schools, a rural district in central Michigan.

Indeed, some districts have already laid plans to spend down their reserves within a few years. Consider the Detroit Public Schools Community District, where the fund balance is projected to skyrocket from $101 million in 2021 to $788 million in 2024. Most of that additional money — $700 million — will then be used to fund a long overdue overhaul of the districts’ school buildings.

Graphics for Detroit. September 2022. Lauren Bryant / Chalkbeat

Whitmore Lake is in ‘spending mode’

In the suburbs north of Ann Arbor, Whitmore Lake Public Schools has been spending aggressively on a coaching program for teachers and additional classroom aides to help offset the academic impacts of the pandemic. While the district’s fund balance rose thanks to federal COVID-19 relief, the district is still operating in “spending mode,” said DeKeyser, the superintendent.

Behind that spending, said DeKeyser, is a bet that the district can find a way to shore up its finances later on when the federal money dries up.

Years ago, Whitmore Lake made a similar bet — and lost. During the Great Recession, when he was an assistant superintendent, DeKeyser watched Whitmore Lake spend down its federal relief funds in anticipation of additional support from the state or the federal government. But the additional help didn’t come.

“In 2009 we got to the end of our [stimulus] funds and it was like ‘Oh, what do we do now?’” he said.

This time, the answer for Whitmore Lake is retirements. DeKeyser says he’s anticipating staff turnover of about 50% over the next four years. By not filling some positions, he hopes to downsize the district’s budget enough to keep its finances stable after the federal aid expires.

But he knows there are no guarantees for his district and others statewide.

“If we maintain this spending, things could get catastrophic,” he said. “Any time you get a federal boost like this, you can look good in the short term. But it’s how you look four years out that defines how well you’re managing your funds.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit district struggles to solve its problem with math learning loss

2022-09-08T19:09:45+00:00

In a summer-school classroom at Detroit’s Foreign Language Immersion and Cultural Studies School, Aladdin Posey and his third-grade classmates were given a math problem to solve: Organize the digits in the number “36,892” into their respective place values — ones, tens, hundreds, and so forth.

Aladdin glanced at his seat partner’s paper, then hurriedly changed the numbers on his own table, before instructor Natalege Sims stopped him.

“I don’t want you to change it to what she put … ,” Sims said. “Because mistakes are proof that you’re — what?”

“Trying!” the seven-student math class responded in unison.

Over at Detroit Public Schools Community District headquarters, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti has a tough math problem to solve, too: Across the district, student math performance, which was already alarmingly low before the pandemic, has gotten even worse since then.

“A lot of the attention has been on literacy as far as the pandemic is concerned, but the actual impact of the pandemic was seen largely in math more so than literacy,” Vitti said in a July school board meeting. The trend has been mirrored nationwide.

Sims’ summer class was one of many pockets of support across the district for students who need the most help, made possible by the $500-per-student in federal COVID relief funds that individual schools in the district received. The lesson used problem packets, multicolored place-value coins and other materials from Curriculum Associates’ Focus on Mathematics program.

But for all the money and trying, district officials are still laboring without a clear formula for how best to tackle the problem. While there’s growing consensus on the benefits of one-on-one and small-group tutoring for literacy education, math experts and educators continue to debate the most effective solutions to the more recent learning loss and the longstanding insufficiencies that have plagued math education in Detroit and across the country.

Intensive tutoring is one near-term solution some experts have proposed. But DPSCD hasn’t been able to find enough vendors or people available to provide tutoring services at the scale it needs. That has left officials scrambling to come up with a comprehensive, district-wide approach to math intervention.

Left unchecked, the math learning loss could have grave long-term implications, experts say. Children who miss out on quality K-12 math education risk failing out of beginner-level math and science courses in higher education and may lack the kind of quantitative literacy needed to decipher life-or-death information, such as medical risks.

How online learning during the pandemic undermined math learning

At the end of the 2020-21 school year, 26% of DPSCD students who took the end-of-year iReady assessment for reading were scoring three or more grades below the standard — a 1.6-percentage point increase from 2018-19 school year.

But the blow to math learning over that same period was greater: At the end of 2020-21, 24% of students who took the test scored three or more grades below the math grade standard — a 5.8-percentage-point increase from before the pandemic.

On Michigan’s high-stakes standardized exam, the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, math performance was similarly troubling last school year. The percentage of students in grades 3-7 who were proficient on the exam was 6.2%, according to results released Sept. 1. That’s down from pre-pandemic levels of nearly 14% in 2018-19.

Detroit isn’t struggling alone. A handful of national studies from Curriculum Associates and the education research group NWEA indicate that since the pandemic, more of America’s K-12 students are scoring two or more grade levels below the standard in math than in reading.

In Detroit, Vitti attributed the gap to the fact that “foundational principles of math” were particularly difficult to teach and learn online.

Outside experts say there’s something to this. Teaching math well involves being able to physically circulate the room and see how the students are taking in the content by observing what they’re expressing on their faces and on paper, said Kevin Dykema, president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The switch to virtual learning prevented teachers from being able to do that.

Sims remembers how, in December 2021, when DPSCD switched to online school for three Fridays of the month, teaching math to her third-grade students at Bates Academy became trickier.

Sims said she had gotten used to observing their body language and inviting them to share their work on the whiteboard to track their learning. Being online meant she suddenly had to rely on online platforms like Schoology to gather work from students. And they had to do without “manipulatives,” or tangible objects like place-value coins or popsicle sticks used to visualize math concepts.

A lot of her third-graders passed up the online platforms and stuck with old-fashioned pencil-and-paper work. Students would do their work on a piece of paper and hold it up to their laptop camera or take a picture of their work with their phone and send it in, Sims said.

Some experts say the stress of the pandemic worsened students’ existing math anxiety, causing them to feel tense and distracted in remote class.

Determining which students need intervention and deciphering how students are communicating their math needs are two of the trickiest parts of remote teaching, said Tamala Wiley, director of business development for Teaching Lab, a nonprofit organization specializing in teacher professional learning.

Detroit struggles to find tutoring vendors

Acknowledging the profound impact of the pandemic on education, the federal government appropriated $190 billion in COVID relief funds to America’s schools throughout 2020 and 2021, but left it largely to states and district leaders to figure out how to spend it in the interest of student success. Detroit received nearly $1.3 billion of these funds.

For many districts, including Detroit, the spending plans have involved offering intensive tutoring to help students recover from learning loss. Some states, such as Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee, launched their own statewide tutoring programs for reading and math. Michigan did not, so the Detroit district has worked primarily with outside vendors.

The school board recently voted to renew a contract with Beyond Basics, a literacy nonprofit, to provide one-on-one reading intervention to over a thousand of the district’s K-12 students. The initial contract, valued at $9 million to $12.62 million, was paid for largely by COVID relief funds and money DPSCD received after settling the federal “right to read” lawsuit.

There has been no commitment yet on that scale for math intervention. It’s not for lack of trying.

More than a year ago, the district put out a request for proposals notifying 22 math tutoring services of the district’s need for Tier 2 and Tier 3 math intervention for more than 1,000 students beginning fall 2021. Tier 2 intervention involves teacher-led small group support, and Tier 3 intervention involves one-on-one support.

Ultimately, the district didn’t find a vendor that could handle the job.

“We did not believe that the vendors who applied to do so had the ability to scale across multiple schools and provide direct math intervention to students,” Vitti said. “The vendors may have had products for intervention, but we were looking for the product and people to provide that intervention, as we did with literacy.”

Experts find the lack of math tutors in Detroit unsurprising, given similar shortages nationwide. People qualified in math education are opting for higher-paying teaching jobs over tutoring jobs, said Dykema, from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Tony Hawk, DPSCD’s executive director of K-12 mathematics, identified math and science as “critical shortage areas” for qualified personnel to hire as teachers or tutors.

Without the resources for a district-wide initiative, the district is targeting math intervention at individual schools, which can use a mix of school-based Title 1 funding, COVID relief funding, and general fund discretionary dollars to arrange math tutoring.

Summer math student Jacob Hill works through math problems in Curriculum Associates’ Focus on Mathematics problem packets.

Following requirements outlined by the Michigan Department of Education, the district analyzes school-specific data to determine which schools should receive more support, said Leenet Campbell-Williams, the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

Just last month, the school board approved a $319,500 contract with Math Corps, a nonprofit tutoring group housed at Wayne State University, to provide Tier 2 and Tier 3 support for students at Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School.

Select K-8 schools get math tutoring services from City Year, a volunteer-based AmeriCorps program, and use the Focus on Math instructional resources from Curriculum Associates.

In Aladdin’s summer school class, Sims uses the Focus on Math multicolored place-value coins and other handheld tools to help students grasp concepts.

“That way when students say they’re ‘carrying the one,’ they’re really carrying it,” Sims said.

Meanwhile, the district is looking for longer-term solutions. After struggling to find outside support, DPSCD plans to build up its internal resources, investing in academic interventionists, peer educators, and its current teachers to offer math intervention across the district, Hawk said.

Dykema says his organization has seen the same strategy of investing in classroom teachers adopted in other urban districts, such as Baltimore, Washington D.C., and the Tampa area.

The long-term focus will benefit students long after the COVID dollars run out, he said.

After the pandemic, a call to overhaul math education

While Detroit struggles with remedying math learning loss from the pandemic, it’s also confronting a decades-long trend of underachievement in mathematics. And that trend stretches well beyond Detroit.

Across the country, leaders in math education are trying to direct the current conversation about pandemic recovery toward reforms that will address the longstanding difficulties that educators face in engaging students with math.

The concern around pandemic-related learning loss doesn’t begin to reflect what education leaders have been dealing with for years in terms of how to support student learning in math, said Kevin Dykema, president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Some experts say that too often, students are learning how to regurgitate math concepts, but lack an awareness of real-world applications. Schools are teaching students how to perform well on math assessments, they say, rather than how to understand and apply math concepts.

This approach deprives students of the skills to knowledgeably apply the concepts they’ve memorized to real-world scenarios, Dykema said. So students soon become convinced that they’ll never use what they’re learning in math class.

Returning to a pre-pandemic norm is simply not good enough, Dykema said. Math education, he said, is due for a wholesale rethinking.

“Math education should not look like the way it did 20 years ago, because society has changed … math education needs to change,” Dykema said.

For one thing, he said, “the teacher should no longer be at the top of the room talking to students.”

By encouraging student-to-student discourse and de-emphasizing the need for students to memorize calculations as they once did before calculators were widely available, Dykema believes math education can evolve to serve 2022’s K-12 students.

William Schmidt, a university distinguished professor at Michigan State University and director of the Center for the Study of Curriculum Policy, said structural reform needs to come from the root of all math education: textbooks.

In a study of 23 math textbooks across 19 countries, Schmidt found that fewer than 1% of the problems in the books dealt with higher-order applications — that is, problems that asked students to apply mathematical reasoning to real-world matters. One eighth-grade math textbook in the U.S. contained only seven such problems.

Making up for this gap, Schmidt said, “is not the parents’ responsibility. It’s not the teachers’ responsibility. It’s the textbooks.”

The current state of math education, Schmidt said, is jeopardizing American students’ quantitative literacy at a time when institutions around the world are generating enormous amounts of quantitative data and need people who can analyze them.

Schmidt said he worries for the livelihood of students who memorize their way through K-12 math classes. He found that the risks of poor quantitative literacy flared during the pandemic as the public misunderstood or misinterpreted statistics about infection rates and vaccines.

He and other educators say that beyond the learning loss, the pandemic has drawn attention to the country’s decades-long struggle with getting students excited about math. And now schools have an opportunity to rethink the ways math is taught.

“Maybe the best way to bring those kids back from the pandemic is to bring them back through the world, and through growing understanding,” Schmidt said. “Don’t bring them back by making them do more of those computations, but rather through showing them how math is important to them. Give them a reason to want to come back.”

— Grace Tucker

Grace Tucker is a reporting intern at Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach her at gtucker@chalkbeat.org.

Private schools get COVID relief funds, too. Here’s how they’re spending them.

2022-08-01T16:58:57+00:00

The same mental health crisis plaguing Michigan’s public schools is also plaguing its private schools.

Many teenagers attending Michigan Lutheran Seminary, a private high school in Saginaw, have struggled with anxiety and depression, because their normal school routines were disrupted for months at a time, just as in public schools. Some acted out when they returned to the private school’s campus, said David Koehler, dean of students.

After a schoolwide screening, officials found that roughly 25% to 30% of students needed extra mental health help. Administrators turned to the school’s counselor to work more hours.

That extra help cost money.

The private school used COVID relief funds to help pay for those extra hours, just as many public schools did.

In fact, private schools across the state benefited from federal COVID relief funding, while they also had access to taxpayer money that public school districts did not: Paycheck Protection Program loans. Many private schools received both COVID relief funding and PPP loans, according to an analysis by the Detroit Free Press in collaboration with Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan.

Like Michigan Lutheran Seminary, other private schools appeared to have leaned on public funding to pay for mental health resources, technology and supplies to keep the virus at bay, like massive jugs of hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes.

Whether private schools should receive school COVID relief funds — or any public money — has been a long-running debate nationally and in Michigan. Federal lawmakers sent a windfall of $6 billion to Michigan to help schools recover from the numerous crises brought on and exacerbated by the pandemic.

Largely, federal relief money has gone to public schools. But through smaller and lesser-known programs, more than $92 million has made its way to private schools, largely religious and nonprofit schools, due to federal restrictions, with more than $80 million more to come. The federal relief funds were limited to nonprofit schools.

Critics say programs that share taxpayer dollars with private schools disregard that private institutions receive tuition dollars every year, are subject to few government regulations, and can turn away students with disabilities or students from low-income homes.

“Private schools don’t need to receive public dollars,” said Arlyssa Heard, a parent organizer with 482Forward, a grassroots Detroit organization dedicated to education access. “They have parents who are either able to afford it or who can work something out.”

But advocates for private schools said they experienced the same crises public schools are facing, and the pandemic similarly created an urgent need for funding to address pandemic-related learning loss and mental health concerns.

“No matter if it’s a private or a public education, kids need support,” said Mark Luetzow, president of Michigan Lutheran Seminary. “It was good in a lot of ways.”

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

How much did schools get?

Michigan private schools received $10,655,401 in what’s called equitable services through the CARES Act and subsequent federal relief measures, according to the Michigan Department of Education.

The schools have to request that funding through their local school district. The private school does not receive the funding directly. Instead, the public school buys the requested services or items, then hands them off to the private schools.

In addition, MDE has awarded $82 million in federal Emergency Assistance to Non-Public Schools funding so far, but the funding period has not closed. Federal lawmakers approved two rounds of the funding during the pandemic. The department is gearing up to give out an additional $80 million to private schools through EANS II once the first round of EANS is distributed.

Private schools applied for EANS funding, and more than 200 received it. Several schools were awarded more than $1 million, according to preliminary data.

PPP loans, which were meant to keep small businesses afloat in the pandemic’s early days, also came from the federal government. Private schools receiving a PPP loan on or after Dec. 27, 2020, were not eligible for EANS funding. But many schools received PPP loans before that date, so they received all three streams of funding.

For example, Powers Catholic High School in Flint received roughly $904,000 in EANS funding, according to the preliminary data. Powers was also approved for a $823,700 PPP loan in April 2020. According to Powers’ website, families pay about $5,500 to $9,975 annually for tuition, depending on financial need.

University of Detroit Jesuit High School received $1.2 million in EANS, according to the preliminary data, and a $1,786,100 PPP loan. Jim Adams, spokesperson for the school, wrote in an email that it also benefited from $303,038 in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding. Tuition is $14,950 annually for University of Detroit Jesuit High School students. The school offers financial aid.

How schools spent the money

About 190 students attend Michigan Lutheran Seminary’s campus on a quiet block in Saginaw.

The preparatory school opened in 1910. Its mission has long been dedicated to preparing students to enroll in Lutheran ministry, becoming pastors or teachers in the church. About 40% go on to ministry, said Luetzow, the president.

The school received $270,895 in EANS funding and $494,000 in PPP loans.

Michigan Lutheran Seminary private school in Saginaw on Thursday, July 7, 2022.

Tall stacks of new Chromebooks sit in the school’s library. Much of the funding went to upgrading technology, which was desperately needed, Luetzow said. In total, $56,662 went to buy 181 Chromebooks.

About $18,000 went to expanded counseling services at the school.

Koehler, the dean of students, said he’s seen an increase in students experiencing depression and exhibiting worrisome behavior through the pandemic.

“The more we address it, the more we work with it, the more we are in touch with parents and counselors, we can help fill the different voids that kids have,” he said.

Each family of a child who lives in the school’s dorms also received a $1,100 rebate in 2020, for the missed time living in the dorms. Some families donated the funds back, Luetzow said. Much of the PPP funding went to covering staff salaries during the early days of the pandemic, he said.

Funding proposals reviewed by the Detroit Free Press include a range of items, from disinfecting supplies to mental health supports. The proposals, included in early ESSER data from the MDE, are preliminary.

While some schools asked for a laundry list of spending items, many received a fraction of what they requested.

Powers Catholic School in Flint, for example, shows $1.3 million in requested ESSER funds from Flint Community Schools. Powers will likely receive a very small fraction of that request, said Kevin Walters, with the office of school support services at the MDE. Under the process of allocating the funds, the Flint school district helps Powers narrow down the proposed spending, which then goes to MDE for approval.

Other private schools provided more vague explanations on how they used the money.

Holly Fournier, a spokesperson with the Archdiocese of Detroit, an organization that oversees dozens of Catholic schools across metro Detroit, wrote in an email that she could not provide exact spending figures.

However, she said much of the public money went to supporting staff.

“For the majority of our schools, EANS and PPP dollars were used to support additional personnel needs during the height of the pandemic, including school counselors and interventionalists, like reaching and math coaches, who work one-on-one and in small groups with students needing extra assistance in various subjects,” she wrote.

“Some schools also used these funds to enhance the online learning experience: subscribing to educational apps, covering wifi for low-income families without internet access, and equipping teachers and students with the tools necessary to teach and learn remotely.”

Adams, with University of Detroit Jesuit High, said his school spent much of the ESSER money on technology to assist in remote learning, including equipping classrooms with video cameras, speakers, and microphone so students could log into class from home.

Public funds for private schools?

The debate over whether private schools should benefit from taxpayer money is long-running, and began long before the pandemic. Some states have school voucher programs, which allow funding to go to private schools per student, in scholarship form. A ballot initiative in Michigan would create such a program, but the proposal will likely not make the ballot this year. Michigan’s Constitution forbids voucher programs, and an effort on the ballot in 2000 to change that was rejected by voters.

Brian Broderick, executive director of the Michigan Association of Non-public Schools, said the need for extra funding from federal COVID relief funds was clear.

“COVID impacted you no matter where you went to school,” he said. “You can’t make a distinction between going to a public school or private school.”

Others have criticized schools for taking multiple streams of funding.

Heard, with 482Forward, once tried to get her son into a private school, she said. Her son was denied, with little explanation. She would have needed significant financial assistance to send him to the school, which usually costs thousands in tuition every year.

She said the experience taught her that private schools can turn away children for any reason — which is why she opposes any public funds crossing over to private organizations, including PPP loans and federal COVID relief.

“It all boils down to the same thing: Public money for private schools, and I still say no,” Heard said.

How much relief funding should go to private schools was also hotly contested early on in the pandemic.

Michigan, led by Attorney General Dana Nessel, sued former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2020 over an initiative DeVos spearheaded that would have led to private schools receiving $16 million in federal COVID relief.

Nessel’s suit disputed a U.S. Department of Education rule that would have led to more funds going to private schools, with fewer restrictions over which schools were eligible, namely private schools that serve fewer low-income students.

Nessel accused DeVos of trying to “siphon away funds from public schools to private schools.”

A federal judge permanently blocked DeVos from implementing the rule, leading to private schools receiving a smaller amount of money.

Others have criticized private schools for taking PPP loans.

COVID Stimulus Watch, a progressive government watchdog based in Washington, found in 2020 that 5,400 private schools nationally received $4.5 billion in PPP loans, at about $855,000 per school. In Michigan, 97 private schools received PPP loans, according to the report. U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia who chairs the Education and Labor Committee, said the report revealed a “disturbing imbalance” between the relief available to public schools and private schools.

“Congress must focus on putting resources where they are most needed,” Scott said in a news release from 2020.

Accountability

MDE officials have pledged to hold schools, private and public, accountable for spending.

“We will know where the funds are spent,” Walters said.

But there are some quirks in accountability measures for the funding.

For example, local school districts, rather than the private schools, will be on the hook to pay back funding if ESSER money is misspent, even though private schools ultimately benefit from the funds.

“It’s appropriate for the monitoring to focus on the local district,” DiSessa wrote, because the funding is spent by the public school for the benefit of the private school.

The Michigan Department of Education is monitoring how private schools benefit from EANS funding through its application process. Schools must get approval for their spending proposals from MDE and then present an invoice for reimbursement for the spending.

But, as with ESSER funds sent to public schools, the allowable uses for EANS funding are broad, and include supplies for disinfection, ventilation system improvements, training for staff, resources to expand COVID-19 testing, educational technology, curriculum development, reasonable transportation costs, and resources to address learning loss.

While private schools are subject to financial monitoring by the state, there are no requirements for private schools to engage with community members around the money or report publicly online how they’re spending it, a U.S. Department of Education spokesperson confirmed over email. Public schools are subject to both of those requirements.

Some private schools responded to reporter emails with specific information about how they spent the public funds, others did not respond at all or gave broad information.

Luetzow and other Michigan Lutheran Seminary administrators were among those who responded to questions with specifics. Luetzow said that he wants to be transparent about funding, keeping in mind that it’s public money.

But he also wants the public to know that there was a need for such funding at his school.

The pandemic created a need for all schools, he said. And while private schools may get support from parents and other donors, the pandemic created extraordinary needs for many schools, both public and private.

“There’s a church and state, there’s a difference between the two and we value that,” he said. “I think the state values that as well. Having said that, I think there are times where students can use support that parents just simply can’t afford. All of our parents are taxpayers.”

Lily Altavena is an education reporter for the Detroit Free Press. You can reach her at laltavena@freepress.com

Having trouble reading the graphic below? Try this link: https://infogram.com/the-three-streams-of-covid-relief-funding-explained-1hdw2jpj7gm3j2l?live

Detroit superintendent’s wife leaves literacy nonprofit following backlash over contract

2022-07-22T20:21:23+00:00

Rachel Vitti, a longtime literacy advocate and the wife of Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, has resigned as a director of Beyond Basics, a nonprofit group that the district contracted with to tutor the most academically challenged high school students.

She resigned July 11 after two years at the Southfield-based group.

The resignation came amid questions and criticism raised by some in the community about the superintendent’s family connection to a company that received a multimillion-dollar tutoring contract in August 2021, funded in part with federal COVID relief dollars.

The district had disclosed the relationship when it presented the contract for board approval a year ago. When Chalkbeat reported on the issue this June, the superintendent said the company’s strong track record, and not his wife’s employment there, is the reason the board approved the contract. Board members contacted by Chalkbeat affirmed that.

But several Detroit residents, some with ties to another tutoring organization that has sought work with the district, have criticized the contract in recent meetings, and the controversy has put the superintendent and the district on the defensive.

“It was clear that the conversation regarding my employment at Beyond Basics was becoming a distraction to the literacy reform effort,” said Rachel Vitti in a statement provided to Chalkbeat Friday afternoon. She added: “The results of my most recent accomplishments are evident, and I look forward to continuing my professional work in the literacy effort.”

During the board’s meeting last week, the superintendent shared data showing that 10th and 11th graders who were tutored through Beyond Basics this past year saw nearly two years’ worth of gains in their reading level.

“Rachel Vitti was a great asset to the Beyond Basics mission, providing one-on-one tutoring to students who need it most,” company officials said in a statement provided to Chalkbeat Friday morning, adding: “We are grateful for the positive impact she made on Beyond Basics, literacy, and the children we serve.”

Beyond Basics has been active in the district for two decades, providing tutoring and other services paid for with philanthropic dollars. The district contracted directly with the group last year for the first time in order to address the academic needs that have grown since the beginning of the pandemic.

At a meeting Friday morning, the school board’s finance committee approved an extension of the contract for the 2022-23 school year. Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the decision to seek a renewal was based on recent literacy results, as well as interest from school principals to continue the partnership.

The contract extension has to go before the full board, which meets on Aug. 9.

The Beyond Basics program aims to improve students’ reading level by two grades in the span of six to 10 weeks. It relies on Orton-Gillingham, a multi-sensory, structured approach that tends to work for students with dyslexia or other reading problems, and emphasizes phonics-based instruction. The program uses paid tutors to work with students during the school day.

The district’s 2021 contract with Beyond Basics — costing between $9.9 million and $12.62 million — covered small-group and one-on-one tutoring to K-8 students and high schoolers who were two years or more behind grade level. Under federal rules, some of the contracted amount — $2.1 million — will go toward serving private school students in the city. The money left over from the contract will go toward funding the tutoring program in this coming school year.

Critics of the contract include William Davis, president of the Detroit chapter of the National Action Network. He told board members during the July 12 board meeting that he was disappointed the board approved the contract knowing the familial connection.

“The superintendent sounds like a paid lobbyist for Beyond Basics,” Davis said.

But those who have been helped by the program said it works well.

“Beyond Basics helped my son,” said parent Misharon Craft during the July school board meeting. Craft’s son, Elijah, was a senior at Central High School when he received literacy support from a Beyond Basics tutor in 2017. “He feels confident enough to approach people without being illiterate.”

Elijah Craft’s experience with the program was spotlighted in a short documentary film titled “A Day in the Life of Elijah Craft.”

“Beyond Basics changed my life,” Elijah Craft said at the July board meeting. “I went from being a number zero to a number 1,000. … Now I’m trying to be a doctor and go into sports medicine.”

At its current enrollment level of roughly 650 students, the superintendent said, Beyond Basics appears to have operationally “hit their limit.”

If the full board approves the contract extension, he said, the district intends to expand Beyond Basics into more K-8 schools, so that they can address literacy gaps earlier. But he said doesn’t believe that the program will show the same growth that it shows in high school.

The district’s plans for Beyond Basics and its literacy intervention strategy after next year will depend on enrollment numbers in the spring of 2023. If enrollment continues to improve, and per-pupil funding increases, the district could move to hire full-time academic interventionists and contract with tutoring programs to address student illiteracy in specific schools.

Beyond Basics is one of several tutoring programs the district uses to improve literacy. Last year, it awarded a nearly $1 million contract to the company Brainspring to provide literacy intervention for K-3 and virtual school students. Another program, Let’s Read, connects adult volunteer tutors with K-3 students to help them improve their reading comprehension.

The superintendent said health concerns from the pandemic have hampered recruitment of volunteer tutors for Let’s Read, but some advocates of Let’s Read have complained the district hasn’t reached out to many of the volunteers who signed up.

Following Friday’s finance committee meeting, district parent Aliya Moore told board members during public comment that she appreciated the transparency about the district’s literacy intervention strategy for the coming year, but believed the controversy surrounding Rachel Vitti’s employment of Beyond Basics could have been avoided if the family connection was better disclosed to the public from the beginning.

“You all are not as proactive as you should be,” Moore said. “This conversation about Beyond Basics should have happened in July 2021.”

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

COVID aid is a lifeline for financially troubled Michigan districts. Can they stay healthy?

2022-07-18T11:00:00+00:00

The federal COVID relief aid flowing into Michigan schools to help students overcome two years of learning loss has helped some school districts climb their way out of financial trouble.

Eight years ago, 55 Michigan school districts operated under some form of state oversight because they ran operating deficits, spending more than they received in revenue. By the end of the 2020-21 school year, after the first batch of federal COVID aid arrived, that number was down to just a handful.

A review of districts that have faced the longest-running fiscal shortfalls showed that several of them used their federal COVID relief aid, known as ESSER funds, to cover basic operating costs, such as staff salaries and supplies, and reallocated their general fund dollars to shore up their reserves and eliminate deficits. The review is part of an ongoing effort by Chalkbeat Detroit, Bridge Michigan and the Detroit Free Press to track the impacts of an unprecedented infusion of federal funds into Michigan schools.

Take, for example, the Benton Harbor district, which the state had threatened to shut down in 2019 because of persistent deficits and academic struggles. The district had shuttered its library and staffed nearly half of its classrooms with underqualified long-term substitutes, but it still struggled to eliminate its deficit as enrollment fell. In recent years, fewer than 10% of district seniors met college readiness benchmarks in reading and math.

But with the help of federal aid, the district’s general fund balance went from a deficit of $3.7 million in 2018-19 to a surplus of $3.2 million in 2020-21. And for the first time in nearly two decades, it’s no longer under state oversight.

“It’s just good decision-making,” said Andraé Townsel, who was superintendent of Benton Harbor Area Schools until last month. “You were able to, by law, utilize those funds for some routine expenses.”

Suddenly free from an era of forced belt-tightening, Benton Harbor and other districts now find themselves in the same position families might be in when they pay off their credit card balances or student loans: pondering the possibilities. For school officials, the new financial freedom could bring an opportunity to refocus on neglected educational priorities, such as improving academics and teacher pay, or reviving depleted elective programs such as art and music.

At the same time, districts are under pressure to make sure the intended uses of the COVID aid, including tutoring and mental health support for students, aren’t shortchanged in the quest for balanced budgets — and that the balance can be sustained once the federal dollars run out.

Along with Benton Harbor, the Pontiac, Pinckney, Vanderbilt, and South Lake school districts — all of which had been under state oversight at some point in recent years — swung to a positive fund balance in the 2020-21 fiscal year. In addition, Flint Community Schools, which still had a deficit, got out of state oversight by using its $156 million in COVID relief to create a temporary reserve.

School fund balances grew statewide this year, suggesting that financially stable districts, too, have used COVID dollars to boost their reserves.

What is a deficit?

Education experts use fund balances — or the amount of money a district has in its accounts at the end of the year — as a rough measure of districts’ financial health.

Negative fund balances, or deficits, occur when districts spend more than they bring in. One common reason for this is a decline in enrollment that leads to reduced state funding, while costs remain roughly the same.

When a district has a deficit, it may have to put off paying bills and take cost-cutting steps, such as increasing class sizes or eliminating electives such as music. And the state gets involved.

Districts with deficits are required by the state to submit a plan to eliminate them. If the deficit is projected to last more than five years, districts face additional financial reporting requirements from the Michigan Department of Treasury. The state may also appoint an emergency manager, who is given broad powers to cut spending to eliminate the deficit. It can even shut the district down.

Deficits are different from long-term debt, which is typically paid for by taxpayers rather than the school district directly.

Why districts have an incentive to tackle deficits

Federal funds weren’t solely responsible for the improved finances, said Chad Urchike, a financial specialist at the Michigan Department of Education. Even before the pandemic, state education budget increases were helping more districts improve their financial health. Measures designed to reduce the financial impact of pandemic-related enrollment losses also helped.

But superintendents say last year’s federal aid provided enough breathing room for several perennially struggling districts to move into the black and clear a crucial hurdle: escaping state oversight.

After the Great Recession walloped the state’s economy more than a decade ago, Michigan moved aggressively to head off fiscal emergencies at the municipal level that threatened to leave the state on the hook for unpaid debts.

Laws passed since then have greatly expanded the state’s oversight of local school district finances, making it easier for the state to assume control of struggling districts, said Mike Addonizio, professor of education and finance at Wayne State University.

In 2015, “an early warning system” signed into law by then-Gov. Rick Snyder created a set of financial reporting requirements for school districts operating with a deficit, including the filing of a deficit elimination plan that satisfies the state Treasury Department. The legislation also gave the department more authority to recommend an emergency manager to take control of a district’s finances and operations.

The deficit elimination plans may require a district to make spending cuts such as building closures, staff reductions, and wage concessions — changes that risked contributing to enrollment declines. If a district failed to make enough changes, a state-appointed emergency manager might override the elected school board to impose cuts, as has happened in Detroit and Highland Park.

“When a district is trying to eliminate its deficit, they really have to take a hard look at those personnel expenditures, cuts to their academic program options, and think about things like band, art, foreign language, those electives,” Addonizio said.

Given that prospect, he said, using federal funds to stabilize budgets made sense for districts.

“School districts have an incentive now to eliminate budget deficits to basically keep the state off their backs, or out of their local affairs,” he said.

Crisis and opportunity

Pontiac School District spent five years under state oversight as it wrestled with a 2013 deficit of $52 million, brought on in part by a decline in enrollment and the collapse of the city’s tax base after the 2008 financial crisis.

Under a consent decree with the state that ended in 2018, the district froze teacher pay scales, sold vacant buildings, and restructured debt with the state and community banks, school board President Gill Garrett said.

Last year, Pontiac finished with a positive fund balance of $7.9 million, its first surplus in a decade. This year, it has grown to $9 million. Garrett said the use of federal pandemic-related relief money was “a contributing factor.”

Laura Parker, a parent in the district, said she backs the district’s decision to use federal funds to shore up its finances. She feels the district could do more to help students recover from the pandemic, such as extend summer school by a few weeks. But she says as the mother of five children, she knows what it’s like to struggle to pay bills.

“If I got a lot of money, I’d probably pay off my debts first,” she said.

When Rick Todd was hired in 2013 as superintendent of Pinckney Community Schools, the district had a nearly $2 million deficit.

Enrollment declines accelerated after the Great Recession, and the rolls have shrunk by more than half since then thanks to a low density of affordable housing and an aging population.

Pinckney fell into a deficit in 2012-13, and was required to submit a series of increasingly aggressive deficit elimination plans to state education officials and the Department of Treasury.

The year before the pandemic, the district had begun its deepest cuts yet, laying off 23 teachers, and was still at the risk of running a deficit. When the federal government began sending billions of dollars to schools to deal with the pandemic, Todd says, the district saw a chance to further stabilize its finances.

“Where some schools were giving large bonuses and stipends for extra work, we chose not to do that,” he said. “Whatever we could do to offset costs for our general budget, we took advantage of that.”

Pinckney used COVID relief funds to maintain and improve air filtration systems and purchase new technology and software — costs the district would have had to cover on its own if not for the federal aid. The district’s maintenance director became the director of COVID response, and his salary was paid using federal funds.

“The pandemic was looked upon as a very challenging thing for schools, and it was,” Todd said. “I knew from a financial standpoint we could use this as an opportunity.”

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Better than a Band-Aid?

But the question remains: How long can these struggling districts keep their budgets balanced? Some observers worry that COVID relief funds only offer a temporary fix.

Federal spending guidelines don’t prevent districts from using the money to cover teacher salaries and other recurring costs. But if they do, some fear, they’ll find themselves scrambling again when the federal aid runs out in 2026. Indeed, when the first federal COVID dollars arrived in Michigan school coffers, experts began warning of a looming “fiscal cliff.”

“For certain distressed districts it’s very plausible that [federal aid] is just going to mask financial troubles temporarily,” said Randy Layman, a director for S&P Global Ratings who specializes in credit ratings for U.S. local governments, including school districts.

Many districts have responded to these concerns by focusing their COVID spending on one-time costs, such as upgrades to ventilation systems or temporary expansions of summer programming. As part of their deficit-reduction plans, some districts have also cut their operating costs through measures such as teacher layoffs.

And for urban districts, the COVID grants are so large — in Benton Harbor, it’s equivalent to roughly twice the district’s pre-pandemic yearly spending — that they could provide a financial cushion well beyond 2026 if managed conservatively.

Now that Benton Harbor is free from state oversight, it’s up to the district to protect its positive fund balance, said Angel Crayton, a school board member.

“It’s something to celebrate,” she said at a June meeting. “But it’s like being on the basketball court: We can’t celebrate and then allow the other team to score while we’re celebrating.”

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

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit district embraces intensive tutoring to try to close literacy gap

2022-06-03T12:00:00+00:00

William Wheeler was working his way through a phonics exercise with his tutor on a rainy Thursday morning.

“Night. Coupon. Disease,” William said out loud, reading from a list of words as his tutor, Erica McLemore, looked on in a classroom at Osborn High School in Detroit.

By the end of the minute-long exercise, William had run through a long list of words three times, reading nearly all of them with precision and faltering only once, for a split second, on the “ow” sound of the word “ouster.”

When he was done, he high-fived McLemore.

William, a sophomore, wasn’t always so confident. A year ago, he shied away from reading out loud in class, fearing he “was going to mess up.”

That was before he began working with McLemore five days a week, through a nonprofit organization called Beyond Basics, which has provided tutoring in Detroit schools for more than two decades. The tutoring has given William strategies to use to make “big” or multisyllable words easier to decipher.

“I’m not afraid to sound out a word,” he said. “I’ve improved. Everything I do here, I try to use in my other classes.”

The work students like William are doing with tutors is critical to recovery efforts in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, which was struggling academically before the pandemic, and has seen failure rates rise since.

Like many other districts across the U.S., DPSCD is investing heavily in literacy tutoring, in part using federal COVID relief dollars — the district received nearly $1.3 billion — to provide intervention to students who are two or more grade levels behind.

Tutoring has proven to be one of the most effective ways to catch students up, and the Detroit district appears to be doing much of what experts say is critical to the success of such programs, including providing tutoring during the school day, at least three days a week, in small groups, and with well-trained tutors.

That’s despite a lack of leadership or guidance from the state, and it contrasts with other school-based tutoring programs around Michigan that are hampered by poor coordination, resource shortages, and divergence from best practices.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

In August, the district’s school board approved a contract with Beyond Basics for between $9.9 million and $12.62 million. Much of that will be covered by federal COVID relief dollars, as well as money the district received through the settlement of a federal “right to read” lawsuit.

Under federal rules, some of the contracted amount — $2.1 million — will go toward serving private school students in the city.

Beyond Basics had been serving 300 students annually in district high schools prior to the pandemic. The contract calls for the Southfield-based organization to scale up its operations over two years to serve 1,500 students.

In June, the district awarded a nearly $1 million contract to Brainspring, a company that is providing literacy intervention for students in grades K-3 as well as students attending the district’s virtual school.

Meanwhile, the district has continued efforts that were underway before the pandemic, such as using academic interventionists to help struggling students. And a volunteer program the district created with longtime community activist Helen Moore, called Let’s Read, is also connecting adults in the community who help K-3 students with reading.

Moore, who has advocated on behalf of Detroit children for decades, said the extra help is sorely needed.

“The kids are even farther behind than they were before the virus,” Moore said. “If you sit in the room with the children as they read … you almost cry because they are so far behind.”

Finding a solution to student literacy woes

Many districts, including Detroit, faced profound challenges after the pandemic disrupted education in March of 2020, forcing schools to shut down with little preparation. While some wealthier communities were able to quickly pivot to online instruction, it took weeks for that to happen in the city, largely because so many homes didn’t have adequate technology.

The following school year saw most Detroit students still learning online, but the extended remote-learning experience was ineffective for most students here and elsewhere in the country, and left schools grappling with learning losses.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the number of students in the district who are now two or more grade levels behind is on the rise. That’s a big setback for a district that was starting to see a small improvement in test scores before the pandemic. Worse, the poor test results are coinciding with an increase in chronic absenteeism.

“If students are frequently absent, then that negates the literacy intervention impact we can make,” he said.

He said the district has turned to organizations like Beyond Basics and Brainspring because they have a track record for improving literacy, and because their programs use Orton-Gillingham, a multi-sensory, structured literacy approach. School districts have increasingly adopted literacy approaches such as Orton-Gillingham because they tend to work for students with dyslexia or other reading problems, and emphasize a carefully sequenced approach to reading instruction, including phonics.

School districts have increasingly adopted literacy approaches such as Orton-Gillingham, because they tend to work for students with dyslexia and reading problems, and emphasize phonics-based reading instruction.

Beyond Basics officially launched in 2002, with a focus on reducing gaps in learning between city and suburban children.

Pamela Good, the organization’s co-founder and director, describes youth illiteracy as an “epidemic” that should warrant more national attention.

“Without being able to read you cannot really plug into society,” said Good. “If you graduate (without) being able to read, there really isn’t a place where you’re going to get that intensive intervention.”

The Beyond Basics program aims to improve students’ reading level by two grades in the span of six to 10 weeks. Its approach has evolved over the years to adopt the Orton-Gillingham method and shift from using volunteers to paid tutors trained in that method.

The organization has long had a business relationship with the district. There’s also a family connection: Vitti’s wife, longtime literacy advocate Rachel Vitti, is a director at Beyond Basics and has been an employee of the organization for two years. The connection was disclosed to the Detroit school board as it considered the contract.

Board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo said Rachel Vitti’s employment at Beyond Basics “didn’t jump out at me initially” in the materials the board reviewed.

“I did learn of it afterwards,” Gay-Dagnogo said. “But I felt that there was some measure of separation, the way it was conveyed. But be that as it may, I could see how that could be considered a conflict.”

Still, she said Beyond Basics’ track record was the reason she voted for the contract.

“Anytime you’re seeing the level of literacy challenges that we’re having … if this is a company that is capable and has demonstrated the ability to advance and scale its work, then certainly we want to be supportive in that regard,” she said. “That was my rationale.”

Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, the board president, expressed similar feelings about the company’s track record, and added that the district will be using literacy growth data to evaluate the company’s progress.

“The Board made a decision based on who could deliver the needed services at scale and did so with full transparency,” Peterson-Mayberry said.

Vitti told Chalkbeat last week that he recommended Beyond Basics for the contract based on its long track record in the district, not his wife’s employment there. The group had previously provided tutors to the district using philanthropic dollars.

Vitti said the district was expanding its work with Beyond Basics before his wife joined the organization. And he said the organization “has demonstrated very clear results.”

For example, he said, 300 students received tutoring from Beyond Basics during the last semester of the last school year, and the average student demonstrated 1½ years of growth in literacy after a semester of the intervention. During the first semester of the current school year, the average student gained 1.8 years.

Beyond Basics’ own research suggests its program helps students see significant gains in four to 14 weeks.

Vitti attributed the program’s success to the Orton-Gillingham approach as well as strong training for tutors.

The program, though, is expensive.

The district’s contract with Beyond Basics will pay for 300 literacy tutors to serve 1,500 10th and 11th grade students.

“Unfortunately, many students need this type of tutoring but their families cannot afford it,” Vitti said. “Middle- and upper-middle-class families pay for it privately, and school systems are just now talking about it, but not implementing it.”

High dosage tutoring — defined as one-on-one or small group tutoring at least three times a week — is found to be effective and improves academic performance.

Tutoring programs offer needed one-on-one relationships

At Osborn High School in northeast Detroit, 50 students are participating in Beyond Basics, with the tutoring taking place daily in a classroom across the hall from the main office.

Principal Jamita Lewis says the individualized tutoring is “making an impact,” which she hopes will be evident in their performance on spring exams.

Beyond the impact on reading skills, Lewis said, “the students get mentoring, they get some leadership development, they have these one-on-one relationships.”

“I’ve never seen it anywhere where you have one-on-one tutors as part of a student’s schedule, where they’re in the school, giving that live, authentic help in real time,” Lewis said. “It’s not simulated on a computer.”

Tutoring is essential at a school like Osborn, where just 6.3% of the students were proficient in reading and writing on the SAT exam given the year before the pandemic. A pattern of such deficiencies across the district were at the heart of the 2016 “right to read” lawsuit filed by seven families alleging the state didn’t provide a basic education to Detroit students. Osborn received some of the money from a 2020 settlement of the lawsuit with the state.

The infusion of federal COVID relief money gives more Detroit schools an opportunity to benefit from programs to boost literacy. Tutoring has been spotlighted as a top priority for school districts seeking to use their federal investment to address learning loss.

Growing research suggests high dosage tutoring — defined as one-on-one or small group tutoring at least three times a week — is effective and improves academic performance.

Even under short time spans, districts like Detroit attempting to scale up tutoring to more students could see success, said Beth Schueler, a University of Virginia professor who co-authored a policy brief examining best practices for student tutoring.

Accelerated tutoring, even under a tight timeframe, Schueler said, has the potential to “make some pretty important gains.” And if the program proves successful and popular, she added, it could help make the case for a more sustained investment in tutoring, after the federal help expires.

That’s a nagging concern for Vitti.

In any other year, he said, the Detroit school district would have limited funding to employ academic interventionists to work directly with students in grades K-8.

“It will be difficult to sustain the amount of funding for this beyond next year,” he said.

So as the school year winds down, tutors and students must make the most of the time they have.

William, the Osborn sophomore, said his biggest goal this semester is to work on his reading fluency. Before the hour-long session wrapped up, he asked Marketia White, the Beyond Basics program manager at Osborn, for one last word to test him out. This time it was a polysyllabic word: “maladjustment.” William paused for a couple of seconds, while White encouraged him to remember how to break it down.

“Start from the end and work your way back,” White said.

William looked for the base word, “adjust,” and the suffix “-ment.”

“Ment. Just. Ah. OK … Mal … adjustment,” he said. He looked back at White for confirmation and grinned.

“See? Like magic.”

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

Correction: June 15, 2022: This story has been updated to correct the amount of the contract with Beyond Basics, and the timing of the approval.

Gov. Whitmer proposes $280 million tutoring investment for Michigan

2022-05-23T22:18:42+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to spend $280 million to vet and pay tutors in an effort to help Michigan students recover from pandemic learning loss.

The proposal, which requires approval from Republican lawmakers, marks a shift for state leaders who have not previously emphasized tutoring as an academic recovery tool even as researchers made clear that many students were falling behind.

“I am calling on my fellow Michiganders who want to see our kids succeed to join the effort to get our kids back on track,” Whitmer said in a statement.

Tutoring, if done right, is “among the most effective education interventions ever to be subjected to rigorous evaluation,” according to a 2021 paper that laid out a blueprint for expanding tutoring in public schools following the pandemic. Those interventions are badly needed in Michigan, where academic growth slowed down sharply during the pandemic, particularly for students who are female or Black, or who come from low-income families.

Yet only about a quarter of school districts statewide mentioned tutoring in COVID spending proposals totaling $62 million, according to research by reporters from Chalkbeat Detroit, Bridge Michigan and the Detroit Free Press. The reporters analyzed more than 800 district spending plans that were submitted to the state by December.

Unlike at least 14 other states, Michigan did not spend any of its state-level share of COVID aid to support tutoring programs, the reporters found. State leaders did little to encourage districts to make tutoring a priority. Whitmer declined to comment on the group’s reporting earlier this month.

Now, with state revenues forecast to continue climbing, Whitmer is proposing to get the state more involved in tutoring. She proposes spending state dollars to run background checks on potential tutors and pay them for their work with students. Tutoring programs could run before, during, or after school.

It’s not clear what standards the state program would use to evaluate tutors or identify tutoring programs.

“It is a state responsibility to provide leadership and ensure that best practices are followed in this new effort,” said Jennifer Mrozowski, director of communications for Education Trust-Midwest, a nonprofit advocacy group that has called for an expansion of tutoring services. “The state also should have a plan in place to see to it that the dollars are actually being spent on best practices and districts are held accountable for the work.”

The Michigan Department of Education’s current guidance on tutoring best practices, which it provided to districts in presentations about federal COVID-19 relief dollars, includes making tutoring part of the school day; making it school-wide; maintaining low student to teacher ratios; creating consistent relationships between students and tutors; using high-quality curriculum; ensuring tutors get ongoing support and training; and offering frequent tutoring sessions, which typically means three or more times per week.

Thomas Kane, an economist and the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University wrote in The Atlantic this month that there are few evidence-based strategies that can catch students up at the level of the instruction they missed. But he said high dosage tutoring, where a trained tutor works with no more than four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year, can produce “an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction.”

A Whitmer spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for clarification about how the program, called MI Kids Back on Track, would work.

In a statement, Whitmer asked citizens to sign up online. The form asks would-be tutors to indicate their preferred grade levels, subjects, and school districts, and whether they would need to be paid in order to work as tutors.

State Sen. Jim Runestad, R-White Lake Township, told Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan he needs to see more details of the proposal before deciding whether to support the initiative. He said he is unsure who would serve as tutors.

“I just don’t believe you’re going to be able to have the current overworked, understaffed teachers do this,” he said.

Runestad, who serves on both the Senate Education and Career Readiness Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he supported GOP-backed legislation last year that would have allowed private donors, including businesses, to contribute to scholarships that could be used for education expenses including tutoring.

Whitmer vetoed that legislation in November, saying it would unfairly divert public money to private donors through tax credits.

Whitmer’s new plan follows a GOP-backed tutoring proposal that takes a different approach.

Rep. Julie Alexander, R-Hanover, and Sen. John Bizon, R-Battle Creek, are proposing a program that would give students grants of up to $1,500 for education expenses, including tutoring, courses, software, curriculum, before- and after-school programming, academic day camps and other education services. The funds could not be used for tuition or expenses at a private school.

The plan would give priority to students from low-income families and those who can demonstrate “academic deficiency” through report cards or test scores, for example.

The House and Senate education committees have both passed the bills with the grant program.

Democrats called the program another attempt at school vouchers and said it would distribute funds inefficiently.

The lack of state-level leadership on tutoring until now has left a small-scale, uneven patchwork of tutoring programs around Michigan that falls far short of the broad effort that experts say would be needed to make a major dent in student learning loss statewide.

Along with analyzing over 800 district spending plans submitted to the state, Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan surveyed, interviewed or visited 16 school districts across the state and found that districts primarily offered tutoring in before- or after-school programs, the student-tutor ratios were often higher than the recommended ratio and districts were often relying on their own personnel for tutors.

District leaders also often chose to use their own staff, citing highly trained individuals who already had built relationships with students. But reporters found this often limited the scale of tutoring initiatives as districts cope with staffing shortages and teacher exhaustion.

Some schools reported higher student confidence and higher benchmark scores among students who received tutoring.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Isabel Lohman covers education for Bridge Michigan. You can reach her at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Detroit school board approves $700 million facility plan

2022-05-11T03:09:13+00:00

The Detroit school board unanimously approved the district’s ambitious $700 million facility plan, setting up major renovations and rebuilds for school buildings across the city over the next half a decade.

The district will spend $281 million to rebuild five schools, $296 million to renovate buildings, and $128 million to reopen previously closed school buildings, expand pre-K, build additions onto existing schools, and demolish or sell some vacant buildings.

The major building changes would include:

Constructing new buildings on the current sites of Cody High School and Paul Robeson/Malcolm X Academy.
Reopening Paul Vetal Elementary, which closed in 2011, with an expanded pre-kindergarten program.
Building new additions at Charles Wright Academy, Communication and Media Arts High School, and John R. King Academy.
Closing Ann Arbor Trail Magnet Elementary-Middle School and Thurgood Marshall Elementary School by phasing out enrollment over the next several years.
Demolishing or selling active and closed school buildings, including Post Middle School, and Biddle and Larned elementary schools.

The district’s decision also lifted the district’s moratorium on selling vacant properties. An earlier board decision halted any discussions related to former school properties and buildings until the board approved the facility plan.

The approved plan includes four significant changes to the original proposal presented in February, among them a reversal of a decision to phase out Sampson-Webber Leadership Academy, a K-8 school northwest of downtown. The changes come partly in response to community feedback.

Seven community meetings were held online and in person for community members to offer feedback to the district, along with meetings with faculty and parents and individual schools subject to phase-outs or major rebuilds.

“We’ve tried to do our due diligence and do our research before coming into this space to make a vote that we’re comfortable with,” said Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, president of the school board. “What you see today is a result of all of that work.”

The decision met some opposition from parents who want to see the district spend more of its federal COVID relief money on things other than construction projects.

While the district is spending $700 million of its $1.2 billion of COVID relief funding on building improvements, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the district has used the COVID money to increase funding for mental health support, the hiring of school nurses, and hazard pay for employees.

One parent and teacher in the district said the relief funds should go toward hiring more teachers and reducing class sizes.

“I really was hoping instead of just seeing the facility plan and the new blueprint and updated blueprint that we would really get an overhaul of staff within our buildings to really supplement the learning through the building,” the parent said.

Another parent, Aliya Moore, suggested that the district continue to “think outside the box” as it plans out the remaining spending of the district’s COVID relief funding.

“We still have money that has to be designated to the right spots,” Moore said.

“We can have air conditioning, we can have better buildings,” Moore added, “but the quality of their education when they get there is top.”

Under the plan, construction and renovations will begin by fall 2022, and wrap up by fall 2025.

Without state leadership, Michigan’s patchwork tutoring programs struggle to address learning loss

2022-05-02T10:00:00+00:00

The lightbulb went on for Cahni James as she sat on a brightly colored rug with a tutor and three other third graders at her school in Ecorse, a city just outside Detroit.

“Ooh, I get it,” she said, after an explanation about units of measure.

“When I’m alone with my teacher, I can concentrate,” she explained later, noting that she finally understands fractions thanks to after-school tutoring sessions.

Scenes like this one were widely envisioned when the federal government sent an unprecedented $190 billion to schools nationwide to help students recover from the academic and emotional effects of the pandemic. Tutoring is among the most powerful learning accelerators that have ever been studied in depth, experts say. Top policymakers, from President Joe Biden on down, named tutoring as a key piece of the post-COVID comeback for American schools and encouraged schools to spend COVID funds on tutoring programs.

Michigan could use such a potent catch-up tool. A quarter of K-8 students tested made no academic growth between fall 2020 and fall 2021. Experts warn that unremediated learning delays could eventually translate into lost wages and lower educational attainment. A January poll found that Michigan voters considered tutoring to be their top priority for federal COVID dollars for education, which are known as ESSER funds, for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief.

But tutoring has yet to emerge as a central feature of Michigan’s effort to use federal dollars to spur an educational comeback.

State leaders have not provided the coordination and financial support that have been central to tutoring expansions in other states, leaving individual school districts to develop their own programs or take other approaches to learning delays. At the same time, staffing challenges have crimped districts’ ability to start new initiatives.

The result is a small-scale, uneven patchwork of tutoring programs that falls far short of the broad effort that experts say would be needed to make a major dent in student learning loss statewide.

It remains to be seen if districts’ other efforts to help students catch up academically — such as reducing class sizes or expanding summer school — will be enough to reach all students statewide.

A few indicators of Michigan’s tepid commitment to tutoring:

Only 223 of 818 Michigan districts mention tutoring in their ESSER spending proposals submitted in December. Districts may be spending federal dollars on activities that resemble tutoring but are called something else, or they may be using other funding sources, such as state dollars.
Each state was allowed to keep up to 10% of its federal COVID education funds to spend on its own, without sending it to school districts. In Michigan, that amounts to $576.8 million. But Michigan is not dedicating any of that share to support tutoring, unlike at least 14 other states, including Illinois and Tennessee.
Michigan hasn’t gone beyond providing technical guidance on tutoring. Meanwhile, 20 other states, including Indiana and Louisiana, are helping to recruit tutors or dedicating state funds to expand tutoring.
Districts have proposed to spend at least $62 million of COVID funds on tutoring programs. That’s about 2% of the total spending proposed by districts as of December. Districts propose to spend another $71.5 million on academic interventionists, whose role is similar to tutors, though in some cases those teachers are already working at schools.
Reporters interviewed, visited or surveyed 16 districts that plan to spend COVID funds on tutoring and found that most are missing at least some best practices that would ensure the effectiveness of their programs.

“Michigan students’ educational recovery needs strong state leadership,” said Jennifer Mrozowski, director of communications for Education Trust-Midwest, a nonprofit advocacy group that has called for an expansion of tutoring services. She called the reporters’ findings “very disappointing.”

Detroit Public Schools Community District plans to pay vendors $14 million on tutoring programs across the district.

Michigan leaders: Districts are responsible for COVID spending decisions

Decades of research clearly show that high-quality, small-group tutoring vaults students forward academically.

A 2021 paper said tutoring is “among the most effective education interventions ever to be subjected to rigorous evaluation” and laid out a blueprint for making tutoring a standard feature of public schools, noting that the multibillion-dollar private tutoring industry is already serving families who can afford it.

Biden took up the cause in his State of the Union address in March, saying “We can all play a part — sign up to be a tutor or a mentor.”

Michigan lawmakers have previously seen the value of tutoring, albeit on a smaller scale. The state’s third-grade reading law includes a range of measures to boost literacy among young readers, including small group or 1-on-1 instruction — tutoring — for students who need extra help.

And many districts confronting learning loss from the pandemic are starting new tutoring programs or expanding existing ones. Detroit Public Schools Community District, for instance, has multiple vendors providing tutoring that meets most of the best practices recommended by experts.

But while some states used their 10% shares of federal COVID school funds to hire and train tutors, Michigan lawmakers sent most of that money to districts in wealthier areas that were set to receive the least federal COVID dollars. That money hasn’t been spent yet as the wealthy districts struggle to comply with requirements that the money must be used exclusively to support students who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

Michigan lawmakers sent most of their federal COVID funding to wealthier districts that were set to receive less funding, making it harder to spend due to federal rules that require the funds be used to support students disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Why didn’t state officials seize on tutoring as a top educational priority? State officials don’t provide a clear answer.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed off on the plan to send state funds to wealthier districts. Her office did not return a request for comment.

Rep. Pamela Hornberger, a Republican and the chair of the House Education Committee, said legislators weren’t aware of the rules attached to the federal COVID funds. Asked whether direct support for tutoring would have been a better use of the funds, she said “it may have been a better plan, but we don’t have an education department that is at all creative.”

“A lot of it falls back on the districts,” she added. “Districts have more money than they’ve ever had, and we’re hoping that they’re spending those on learning loss.”

William DiSessa, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education, pointed out that the Legislature, not the department, was responsible for allocating the state’s share of the funds.

He noted, too, that 90% of the federal funds went directly to school districts, some of which created tutoring programs.

“As Michigan is a local-control education state, local decisions on the use of funds should align with local situations and governance,” DiSessa said in an email.

MDE directed reporters to a U.S. Department of Education handbook that addresses tutoring as one of the ways for students to recover. DiSessa said MDE shared this resource in webinars and presentations. MDE also created a list of best practices for tutoring but stopped short of advocating that districts use federal funds to create tutoring programs.

He did not provide additional examples of MDE advocating that districts spend their money on tutoring programs, nor did he directly respond to Hornberger’s comment about MDE lacking creativity.

Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, a nonpartisan education think tank, cautioned that tutoring is just one way to address learning loss.

“If some districts looked at tutoring and decided to take another approach to learning loss, I wouldn’t want to penalize them for that,” he said. “The districts that should be criticized are the ones that took the money and didn’t do anything to make up for lost time.”

There are several factors that academic researchers say make tutoring most effective. When tutors are well-trained, teach content that’s connected to what students learn during their regular school day and form a consistent relationship with students, tutoring tends to be more effective, according to a report on the feasibility of sharply expanding tutoring services in American public schools.

Tutoring should also occur at least three times a week and in groups of no more than one tutor per four students, the report says. When the groups get larger than that, the teaching becomes small-group instruction, which is less personalized.

Tutoring conducted during the school day, as opposed to after school or during the summer, tends to lead to more learning gains. Generally, more research has been done on in-person tutoring rather than remote tutoring, but there is some “emerging evidence” that distance tutoring can be effective. Students can benefit academically when tutoring is targeted toward low performing students, but there can be negative stigma attached to this.

A tutoring patchwork

At least a dozen states and many large city districts have created large-scale tutoring efforts over the last year and a half, often investing significant shares of their federal funds. Tennessee is spending $200 million to hire and train tutors and provide matching grants to districts. New Mexico plans to spend $62 million to train tutors and support districts in developing programs. Louisiana used COVID funds to create an extensive series of educator trainings and technical guidance on tutoring.

In Michigan, in the absence of a statewide plan, many school districts haven’t indicated any plan to offer tutoring, instead opting for other academic catch-up programs such as expanding summer schools.

Of the 818 districts that had submitted COVID spending proposals in December, 223 districts mentioned the word “tutor.” Those line items totaled $62 million, or about 2% of the proposed spending reviewed by reporters.

To be sure, districts didn’t always call tutoring-like activities “tutoring.” For instance, districts proposed to spend at least another $71.5 million on academic interventionists — teachers trained to work in small groups with students who have fallen behind.

But the interventionists mentioned in many districts’ spending proposals were already employed by those districts doing the same work. Under federal rules, districts can use COVID funds to support activities they were already doing.

Indeed, available data shows a tutoring expansion only in some pockets of the state, experts and educators in Michigan said.

Kevin Polston, superintendent of Kentwood Public Schools near Grand Rapids, said hiring difficulties and burnout among current staff, plus COVID-related disruptions during this school year, have made it difficult to mobilize a large-scale tutoring effort.

Polston was appointed by Whitmer to lead a panel that recommended high-dosage tutoring as a key component of a blueprint for Michigan’s learning recovery.

“We have unprecedented funds and unprecedented need, but we often can’t get the staffing to provide that level of support,” he said of tutoring. He called on the federal government to extend spending deadlines for COVID funding, which he said would give districts more time to make hires and start new programs.

The $6 billion in federal funds came in three rounds. The first round of money came from the CARES Act, which was passed in March 2020, during the Trump administration. Plans for that money must be set in stone — if it hasn’t already been spent — by this September. The CRRSA Act was passed in December 2020 and the money must be committed by Sept. 30, 2023. The latest round of funding comes from the American Rescue Plan which must be committed by Sept. 30, 2024.

“Recovery is not going to happen in a school year,” Polston said.

Student recovery may have gotten a boost in schools that have used federal dollars to mount tutoring efforts. But even there, it is not clear that the programs will live up to the promise of high-quality tutoring.

Staffing and logistical problems have limited several Michigan districts’ abilities to run adequate tutoring programs.

As part of a COVID reporting collaborative between Chalkbeat Detroit, Bridge Michigan and The Detroit Free Press, reporters visited, surveyed, or interviewed 16 districts across the state that are using federal COVID dollars to run tutoring programs.

They found that many districts weren’t able to hit the benchmarks for high-quality tutoring laid out by educators and researchers, limited by issues with staffing and transportation.

Staffing problems limited the scope of tutoring at Oakview Elementary School in Muskegon, where 97% of students come from low-income homes. A federally funded program includes four classroom teachers who get paid a stipend to stay after school to each help a small group of their students recover.

Principal Brian Gamm said that ideally, the program would reach more students, but “we’re asking the same people to do the work.”

School ends for students at 2:12 p.m., but teachers cannot begin tutoring until they have completed their typical day, which includes an hour of planning time at day’s end for regular classroom lessons. So students work independently for an hour while the teacher supervises them during their planning period. Then tutoring begins at 3:15 p.m.

In one tutoring session led by a classroom teacher, seven second-grade students practice math skills in Carla Moffett’s room. According to best practices, tutoring would have no more than four students per tutor.

Moffett, a second-grade teacher, said that it would help if she could focus on, say, only two students, but that there are many students who “need an extra push.”

She said she believes most teachers want to be directly involved with catching their students up, but some teachers have other obligations after school or just don’t have the capacity to teach more because “burnout is real.”

The school has four other after school intervention programs using other sources of funding. One option is a four-week pilot program where building substitutes supervise students learning math with an online tutor. Gamm hopes that if the program proves to be successful, more students can get the help they need without an additional burden on classroom teachers.

The effort underscores the imbalances schools have been struggling with since even before the pandemic.

“The last few years because of COVID, educational systems were totally different,” principal Gamm said. “And now we’re reinventing what we are.

“We don’t want to go back to the way things were because things weren’t always working well for our kids,” Gamm added. “So we’re trying to come up with new and innovative ways, things that we tried to learn from COVID, but it’s just very, very challenging to do. And again, we’re asking the same people … who are in it to be creative and think differently. That’s hard to do.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Isabel Lohman is an education reporter for Bridge Michigan. Contact Isabel at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Growth — and room to grow — in Michigan districts that launched tutoring programs

2022-05-02T10:00:00+00:00

Math games, time with friends, and her mother. That’s how ShaeLynn Troutman, a seventh grader at East Arbor Charter Academy outside Ypsilanti, describes the reasons she stays after school twice a week for tutoring.

ShaeLynn’s grades fell during the pandemic as she — like many students across Michigan — struggled to engage with virtual lessons.

So her mother encouraged her to take advantage of the optional tutoring, paid for through federal COVID relief funds for education. She has had more fun than she expected, and now she says she’s well on her way to recovering that lost learning.

“Class is way easier” now thanks in part to tutoring, she said. “I come in knowing more. My GPA, like, skyrocketed.”

Well-developed tutoring programs represent a potential game-changer for ShaeLynn and students like her across Michigan who lost significant ground academically during the first year and a half of the pandemic. The need for recovery is especially great for students who spent much of last year learning online. These students are more likely to be people of color and come from economically disadvantaged families. Half of Black fourth graders began the 2020-21 school year significantly below grade level on state benchmark math exams. By the end of the year, two-thirds were significantly behind.

But the limited scope of the efforts now under way, and a lack of statewide coordination, may hamper Michigan’s recovery effort. Of the $6 billion in federal COVID relief money that Michigan has to spend on education, only a small sliver is going to tutoring programs. And of the 818 Michigan districts that had submitted COVID spending proposals in December, barely a quarter mentioned the word “tutor,” according to research by Chalkbeat Detroit, Bridge Michigan, and the Detroit Free Press.

Through visits, interviews and surveys of 16 districts that are using some of their federal aid to create or expand tutoring programs, reporters found several examples of the benefits of tutoring programs in action, including higher benchmark exam scores and improved class participation. They also found examples of tutoring programs crimped by poor coordination, resource shortages, and divergence from best practices.

Only a small portion of federal COVID relief money in Michigan is going to tutoring programs.

While the effectiveness of tutoring has been well-documented by education researchers, those studies assume that the programs in question use the best practices.

“It is discouraging” that Michigan schools aren’t consistently following the guidance, said Kim Dadisman, senior policy and research manager at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a Massachusetts-based research center that published a recent report on the power of tutoring for students from low-income families.

“It doesn’t mean no child will benefit,” Dadisman said, “but it just won’t be as effective.”

The Michigan Department of Education’s guidance on tutoring best practices includes making tutoring part of the school day; making it school-wide; maintaining low student to teacher ratios; creating consistent relationships between students and tutors; using high-quality curriculum; ensuring tutors get ongoing support and training; and offering frequent tutoring sessions, which typically means three or more times per week.

Here are some of the patterns reporters observed in the new Michigan tutoring programs they explored:

Districts primarily provide tutoring in before- and after-school programs. Beecher Community Schools and Detroit Public Schools Community District are offering tutoring during the school day. Norway-Vulcan Area Schools has a retired teacher who comes in before school and stays through the first period to help middle and high school students.
Student-tutor ratios are often higher than the recommended ratio. Westwood Community School District based in Dearborn Heights is one district that has maintained small ratios.
After piloting an in-person and virtual summer tutoring program that served 126 students, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools is training an additional 130 employees so that the district can ramp up tutoring for this summer and continue the program into next school year, Chief Academic Officer Beth Rayl said.
While many districts across the state submitted spending proposals for tutoring programs that specified a tutoring vendor, districts interviewed or surveyed by reporters were often relying on their own personnel to lead these tutoring programs.
Several school leaders and tutors reported an increase in student confidence among students who attend tutoring. They said students feel more comfortable answering questions in class.
District leaders say they’d like to continue their tutoring programs, but say they’ll need increased state funding to do so once federal COVID funds run out.

At East Arbor Academy, ShaeLynn’s school in Ypsilanti, Yanfei Clawson, a teacher for at-risk students, receives a stipend to stay after school twice a week and tutor small groups of students.

“I can see the moment when kids really click, and they really understand it more than they did before the tutoring program,” Clawson said.

But a lack of transportation keeps some students at the school from accessing tutoring.

East Arbor, like most charter schools, doesn’t provide bus transportation, and parents would have to change their schedules to pick their children up from after-school tutoring.

“Most of the kids who need it most … their parents opt out because of transportation,” Principal Tanesha Newby said.

Staffing woes related to the pandemic have also hampered new tutoring programs in Michigan and nationwide. A tight labor market has made recruiting difficult, while educators already working in districts are often too exhausted to take on additional work.

Ecorse Public Schools is heavily investing in tutoring, spending $5 million on its program.

Ecorse Public Schools, an urban district that borders Detroit, proposed to spend $5 million in federal COVID-19 funds on its tutoring program, making it one of the largest in the state. The program is staffed by the districts’ teachers and paraprofessionals, who are paid to run 11 tutoring sessions per year under an agreement between the district and its unions.

The program at Ecorse’s Ralph J. Bunche Academy, a K-3 school, is popular. On a typical day, roughly 100 of the school’s 346 students stay after school for a hot meal in the cafeteria and an extra hour of instruction.

The benefits of the program are already apparent in the districts’ benchmark exam scores, which are showing the highest growth levels in four years, according to Principal Wendy Senkbeil.

Still, student-tutor ratios are sometimes so high that tutoring sessions resemble regular classrooms.

On a recent Thursday, students were divided into classrooms by grade level. In one classroom, 18 third-graders were assigned to a single teacher, so Senkbeil stepped in as a tutor. The recommended group size for tutoring is one tutor to no more than four students, according to a report on the feasibility of sharply expanding tutoring services in American public schools.

Down the hall, a second grader wasn’t getting that extra help as she struggled to follow a read-aloud story about a pet turtle. Other students, aided by tutors, were underlining evidence that backed up the story’s main idea, but she didn’t pick up her pencil. There were 16 students in this classroom and only two adults, and neither of them was nearby to help.

She raised her hand to ask a question, but said she forgot what she’d had in mind. A few minutes later, she left the room for a bathroom break.

Ralph J. Bunche Elementary Principal Wendy Senkbeil stepped in to work as a tutor because the third-grade classroom had 18 students to one teacher.

This student had struggled to follow months of virtual lessons and “didn’t learn anything” while taking classes from home, according to her mother, Ashley Reyna. Now she reads on a kindergarten level and is struggling in school.

“I’m not sure tutoring is doing anything,” Reyna said. “But I want to help her, I’m gonna keep trying.”

Josha Talison, superintendent of Ecorse Public Schools, acknowledged that the program’s tutor-to-pupil ratio was sometimes too high.

“If we had to do it over, we would have negotiated with the teachers to stay every week,” he said. “You live and learn in the first year of any program.”

In the Westwood Community School District, leaders have kept student-to-tutor ratios low in part by keeping the program small. Of the district’s 1,400 students, 70 academically struggling students receive tutoring at a time.

The students meet three days a week for one hour either before or after school, with three to four students for each teacher for nine weeks, said Melanie Depray Learst, director of curriculum, instruction, and accountability. Students who tested below their academic achievement targets were invited to attend tutoring.

The district is now in its second round of nine-week tutoring of 70 students, including 15 from the original group who elected to continue for this round. Teachers are seeing an increase in participation and proficiency in classroom activities and assessments, Learst said.

The school district will continue high-dosage tutoring in the fall after students complete assessments.

Learst said tutoring is helping students focus better during the school school day, too.

Behavioral issues are down, she said, “because they have a better sense of what’s going on and how to do the material, versus shutting down and getting frustrated.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Isabel Lohman is an education reporter for Bridge Michigan. Contact Isabel at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Michigan nixes school pool demo; OKs tennis courts using COVID cash

2022-04-12T23:42:20+00:00

The Michigan Department of Education will allow Michigan school districts to spend federal COVID-19 relief funding on a school nutrition room, a food truck, and playground equipment, but not on security equipment or the demolition of an aging school’s pool.

Included in the spending proposed to the department: school playground equipment, updates to athletic equipment and amenities, and security updates including metal detectors and cameras.

The Detroit Free Press, in collaboration with Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan, revealed on Monday that schools had proposed spending federal COVID relief funding in ways not explicitly tied to the pandemic.

Spokesperson Martin Ackley wrote in an email Monday that the department had already denied some spending proposals prior to publication. Among them:

A $500,000 proposal to demolish an aging swimming pool in disrepair at Eastpointe High School.
A $134,000 request from Kalamazoo Public Schools to buy metal detectors and X-ray machines for security for special events.

But while state officials said they did not allow Eastpointe to use COVID relief dollars to demolish a swimming pool that’s sat unused for years, they did approve another school district’s request to demolish and rebuild old playground equipment.

The Department of Education approved some of the other expenses included in the story, like more than $200,000 for new playground equipment in Alcona and nearly $93,000 proposed by L’Anse Area Schools on tennis courts. L’Anse’s superintendent said the courts would promote student well-being through the pandemic.

The state Education Department agreed. Ackley described the tennis courts as an “outdoor learning environment” that aligns with pandemic recovery.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Eastpointe wrote in its proposal to the state that its pool facility would become a green space for outdoor activities, and that getting rid of the pool would free up money to bolster support services for students.

Ackley did not respond to questions asking for a detailed explanation of the denials.

Federal guidance states that school facility repairs and improvements are allowable if the improvements “enable operation of schools to reduce risk of virus transmission and exposure to environmental health hazards, and to support student health needs.”

Officials also initially rejected a proposal from the River Rouge School District to spend $10,000 for a nutrition room to make smoothies, according to River Rouge’s plan.

The room would “provide smoothies and other essential drinks to support the additional calories, carbohydrates, proteins, and a host of other essential nutrients for student athletes participating in rigorous after school athletic conditioning and programming.”

But, Ackley wrote, the department later approved River Rouge’s nutrition room after discussions with the district, modifying the proposal so it would include all students, not just athletes.

River Rouge also proposed spending $120,000 to buy a food truck for a mobile culinary arts program for high school students. Ackley wrote that officials also initially denied that request, but approved it after discussions with the district “on alignment to pandemic” and career and technical programming.

While Kalamazoo’s security proposal was squashed, the state OK’d a nearly $9,000 proposal from a Detroit charter school for security cameras. In its proposal, Hope Academy said the cameras would be used for contact tracing.

The department is monitoring spending of relief funds, Ackley wrote, and has the power to deny proposals that officials believe don’t adhere to federal guidelines.

“Staff at MDE follow the federal guidance with fidelity and work with local districts so their expenditures are allowable and reimbursable,” he wrote.

Ackley wrote that the state has been “clear with local school districts as to what are allowable expenses.”

But experts also say allowable uses of the funds under federal guidelines can encompass a wide range of uses.

The U.S. Department of Education, in its own guidance in spending the money, includes “other activities that are necessary to maintain the operation of and continuity of services” as an allowable use.

“That is about as flexible as you get,” Craig Thiel, research director with the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, said.

School districts in other states have directed their funding to athletics, including a district in Iowa that voted to use $100,000 to renovate its high school weight room, according to reporting by the Associated Press.

But Ackley wrote that if districts misuse the funds, they will have to give the money back.

“In the end, if districts misuse these funds on non-allowable projects, those funds will be subject to recapture by the Michigan Department of Education,” he said.

Lily Altavena is a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. You can reach her at laltavena@freepress.com

How dogs help Michigan’s student mental health crisis

2022-03-14T10:00:00+00:00

There are many ways to address a youth mental health crisis, including throwing a massive birthday party for a dog named Gravy.

A sweet-natured chocolate Lab, Gravy quickly became a celebrity to students at Grand Ledge High School after she started working there as a therapy dog in September. She showed off tricks in the hallways with her handler, Dean of Students Maria Capra. When students knelt to pet Gravy, she crawled onto their laps.

So when students learned that Gravy’s first birthday fell just before Thanksgiving break, they asked Capra if they could throw a party.

She said sure, thinking it wouldn’t amount to much. Then the student council put up posters around the school, inviting all of the school’s 1,600 students to attend. Students made a crown and a skirt for Gravy, while others set up a donation drive for the local animal shelter in her honor.

On the big day, “I really didn’t know what to expect,” Capra recalled. “I thought it might be a classroom of 30 kids.

“There were several hundred students in this gymnasium.”

The pandemic has been hard on students in Grand Ledge and across the U.S. Many young people experienced isolation, disruption, and the loss of loved ones, leading to an alarming rise in suicide rates and prompting the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare a national emergency in children’s mental health.

Schools have responded by hiring social workers, expanding their social-emotional learning curriculums, and, in some cases, purchasing dogs.

Gravy is one of at least a dozen dogs who have been introduced to students during the pandemic in schools across Michigan.

Students at Grand Ledge High School threw a party, created a costume, and signed a birthday card for Gravy, a chocolate lab who began working at their school this year to provide emotional support during the pandemic.

Districts are buying dogs and covering the costs of their training with their share of Michigan’s $6 billion in federal COVID-19 funds for education.

One reason: The dogs make kids happy.

“He’s kind of like a rock star; when the kids see him coming, they smile,” said Traci Souva, an art teacher at North Huron Schools who handles Chipper, the district’s new golden mountain doodle. “A lot of times the kids will tell Chipper what’s wrong rather than adults, and that’s pretty magical.”

Another reason: The dogs appeal to administrators wary of using one-time federal funds to incur recurring costs like hiring new people.

“We wanted to ensure that we were using the funds in a way that was going to make a lasting impact,” said Bill Barnes, assistant superintendent for Academic Services at Grand Ledge Public Schools. “We’ll have the dogs for their lifetimes.”

And one more: Research suggests that the presence of a trained dog lowers children’s stress, fosters a positive attitude toward learning, and smooths interactions between students and other children.

The potential downsides of having dogs in schools — especially sanitation, allergies, and student fears — are manageable, Barnes said. The new Grand Ledge dogs are highly trained and hypoallergenic, and they are always with a handler who ensures that no student is forced to interact with the dogs. He said the district hasn’t received a parent complaint about the dogs.

A dog trained to work in a school typically costs between $10,000 and $15,000. Districts plan to spend at least $182,000 of their COVID funds to either purchase or rent dogs for emotional support, according to spending plans reviewed as part of a collaborative project involving Chalkbeat, the Detroit Free Press, and Bridge Michigan.

That’s a tiny sliver of the federal COVID money available. Districts are spending most of their funds on ventilation improvements to school buildings, hiring additional social workers and counselors, expanding summer school, and providing teacher bonuses.

The court system has long used therapy dogs to ease the nerves of children giving difficult testimony, said Nikki Brown, a dog trainer, school counselor, and the executive director of Canines for Change, a nonprofit that trains dogs for work in schools.

Since the pandemic, demand for trained dogs in schools “has just exploded,” she said. Over the last year, she said, her organization has provided dogs to at least seven districts in Michigan, including Grand Ledge.

“The dogs are highly trained to be in a school environment,” she said. “They are trained to work with kids with autism and kids with emotional issues. They sense stress. By the dogs’ behavior they might alert a teacher or a counselor to a kid that is maybe struggling emotionally.”

Souva recalled a moment earlier in the school year when Chipper had seemed to sniff out stress.

“A child had broken up with his significant other, and Chipper decided to lay right next to his chair,” she said.

Bringing dogs into schools for emotional support is not new to Michigan. Grand Ledge administrators were already considering the idea before the pandemic after visiting Brighton Public Schools, which has had dogs on staff for years. Then COVID hit, and the federal government sent a record amount of money to help schools support students through hard times. The Grand Ledge district decided to put a dog in all eight of its schools.

Staff members applied to handle the dogs — meaning they would train with the dogs, provide a home for them, and manage them during school days.

The dogs were ready to work with students by the time school resumed this fall. The impact was obvious right away, said Jill Ford, a fourth grade teacher in Grand Ledge who handles a goldendoodle named Alfie.

“There were a few students at the beginning of the school year who wouldn’t get out of the car to go into school,” she said. “The counselor would use Alfie to get them out of the car, and they would get a few minutes of Alfie time in the counselor’s office. Now they don’t need her anymore.”

Gravy’s birthday party ranks high on the list of factors that helped Grand Ledge high schoolers get comfortable with their return to in-person learning, Capra said. Gravy has been off work for two weeks after getting spayed, and students ask about her every day.

Said Capra: “I’ve had kids ask me, ‘Can we have a welcome back party for her?’”

Chipper, a golden mountain doodle, doesn’t drive school buses, but he does provide emotional assistance to students at North Huron Schools.

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@Chalkbeat.org.

How COVID cash could help Michigan schools tackle a mental health crisis

2022-03-14T10:00:00+00:00

Mariana Hernandez knew her son was struggling through the first year of COVID. His normally stellar grades had dropped to F’s, and he didn’t seem like himself.

But she wasn’t prepared for her quiet, bright child to ask, “If I wasn’t here, how would you feel, mami?”

Hernandez was used to taking action when her kids needed her — a few years earlier, when her children’s Detroit charter school was failing, she helped teachers unionize.

Now she was at a loss. “I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled. She reached out to one of her son’s former teachers, who referred her to a counseling center.

“You think your kid’s OK,” Hernandez said. “But then I talked with a psychologist and she said, ‘Actually, these are suicidal thoughts.’”

Two years of frustration, disruption, and loss have taken their toll on Michigan students, exacerbating a youth mental health crisis that has been building for more than a decade. Michiganders want schools to take action, polls show, and educators are stepping up to the challenge, drawing on research showing that emotional distress and student learning do not mix well. Michigan schools have no shortage of funds on hand, thanks to $6 billion in federal COVID relief, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is recommending a budget that includes an additional $361 million for student mental health.

Yet it’s not clear how far that money will go. Districts have hired social workers and counselors, selected new social-emotional learning curriculums, and purchased therapy dogs (see below for a detailed list). But students’ needs are immense, and the pandemic-roiled labor market is limiting districts’ efforts to hire additional staff.

At stake is the post-pandemic recovery of Michigan’s youngest citizens, not just emotionally but academically.

“We have kids that are chronically depressed and addicted,” said Paul Liabenow, executive director of the Michigan Elementary and Middle School Principals Association. “There is a massive backlog of need.”

Second graders at Becker Elementary School in Dearborn cut out paper hands and wrote their own best qualities on the fingers, part of an activity designed by the school social worker.

On a recent snowy Thursday, fifth graders at Becker Elementary in Dearborn lit up at the sight of Kawkab Hachem.

Hachem is the school social worker at Becker — and only at Becker.

Before the pandemic, Dearborn Public Schools social workers were assigned to several schools, moving between buildings to work only with the most severe needs. Now, with help from federal COVID funding, the district expanded its social work staff, and Hachem works full time at Becker. That means she’s gotten to know all 226 students at least a little bit, even as she spends focused time with certain students. And it means she has time to visit every classroom for weekly lessons on managing emotions, self-compassion, and connecting with peers.

Nearly a year has passed since these fifth graders last had an online lesson. Kassem is an outgoing child who smiles behind his glasses as he talks. But his face darkens at the memory of sitting in his bedroom all day in front of a computer screen.

“Virtual learning made me so angry,” he said. “I felt like I was stuck.”

Today, though, Kassem and his classmates are making a list of 15 kind things students can do for another person. At another table, students are instructed to write kind notes to friends. “Dear Rached,” one student writes. “You are always there for me and you are the kindest person that I met in my life.”

Their teacher, Kristin Koss, has been with the Dearborn district for decades. In previous years, she said, social workers visited her classroom for social-emotional learning twice a year — not once a week.

“This is money well spent,” she said of the district’s new social worker hires. “The kids came back to the classroom (after virtual learning) and they didn’t know how to do school, they were so immature. These lessons help.”

Hachem’s presence also gives teachers space to focus on students with the most pressing academic needs — no small matter for teachers working to help students catch up from lost learning. While Hachem worked with the class, Koss pulled a single student aside to help him with a math concept he’d been struggling with.

At Kassem’s table, one of his neighbors, Mazen, agreed that lessons with Hachem are paying off.

“To care for other people, you have to care for yourself,” she said. “I learned that here.”

Michigan has taken notice of the mental health struggles of students like Khyiana Tate.

“Students — me included — we’ve been isolated, ” said Khyiana, a senior at the Michigan School for the Deaf. “I was stuck at home. A lot of times I was depressed. They don’t know what it’s like to have outside socializing just be snatched right from under us.”

For Tate, one solution is to hire more social workers and counselors.

Many Michiganders would agree. They put higher priority on addressing student mental health than almost anything else schools can do with federal COVID funds, according to a January poll conducted by Chalkbeat and the Detroit Free Press. Policymakers, too, have turned their focus to student mental health with budget proposals and efforts to revamp a health care system that lacks enough beds and providers to meet the needs of youth who are battling mental illness at growing rates.

Yet schools are struggling to find mental health workers to hire. The pandemic caused turmoil in labor markets, adding to a shortage of trained school social workers that began years before, said Kim Battjes, a professor at Michigan State University who trains school social workers. If districts can find someone to hire, Battjes said, they must often find ways to train them on the job.

“It’s like, ‘Yay, we’re getting money! Oh no, we don’t have people to fill these positions!’” she said. “School districts are hiring people who have never even worked with a kid a day in their life as therapists in schools.”

COVID funds alone won’t be enough to improve working conditions in schools, which have been deteriorating for years and making hiring more difficult, said Elizabeth Koschmann, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan and the director of TRAILS to Wellness, a nonprofit that shares research-based mental health practices with schools.

“The environment inside our schools is one of unimaginable stress, pressure, and relentless competing demands that all present as urgent priorities,” she said in an email. “And yet, the salaries for the staff remain largely the same. Burnout is driving staff away from the entire field of education and districts can’t find enough people willing to take open jobs.”

Surveys of parents and teachers in Coloma, a small town on the west side of the state, suggested that social and emotional health should be top priorities, echoing statewide poll results. But the district decided not to expand its staff of social workers, instead opting to purchase software that promotes social-emotional learning. District leaders were wary of funding the positions with one-time money, and they worried they couldn’t hire social workers if they tried.

“We didn’t try to allocate funds for social workers because we knew we couldn’t find them,” said Dave Ehlers, superintendent of Coloma Community Schools.

In Detroit, the district opted to contract out for additional mental health services rather than temporarily hire new counselors and social workers, said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.

Dearborn, a large urban district bordering Detroit, took another path. The district hired new social workers using federal funds on the assumption that it won’t replace employees in other areas, if need be, as the funding runs out.

“A lot of how we look at funding is through attrition,” said David Mustonen, director of communications for Dearborn Public Schools. “Being a big district, we know we can lose anywhere from 80-100 instructional employees every year. It may mean we don’t replace a resource teacher, or maybe instead of four custodians in a building, there’s three.”

And that might not even be necessary, Mustonen said, if state funding for education rises, something Whitmer is proposing amid a historic budget surplus.

Students at Becker Elementary School in Dearborn wrote letters to friends saying what qualities they liked best about them. “Dear Rached,” one student wrote. “You are always there for me and you are the kindest person that I met in my life.”

After asking her son’s former teacher for help, Hernandez found a therapist for her son at Southwest Counseling Solutions, a nonprofit in southwest Detroit, where she lives.

His depression has lifted somewhat, she said, and the suicidal thoughts stopped, though he felt anxious and isolated when his school in the Detroit Public Schools Community District reopened this fall.

“He has ups and downs, and the lows we have are still really low,” she said.

The episode left Hernandez with feelings of guilt. Was she prepared for something like this? Should she have noticed sooner how badly her son was struggling?

She said she would have benefited from training on how to recognize mental illness in a child. And she said she is glad that many districts, including in Detroit, are looking to expand their mental health staff.

Parents: Resources if your child is having a mental health crisis

Mental illness or distress can be scary and confusing to parents. But there is no shortage of resources for parents worried that their children are not well.

In the Detroit area, parents can find help from organizations such as the Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network, Caleb’s Kids, and Central City Integrated Health.
Parents anywhere in Michigan can reach out to health officials in their county for help with mental health. Find a list of mental health services by county here.
The Stay Well Project at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services offers free, 24/7 mental health counseling during the pandemic. Just dial 1-888-535-6136 and press 8.
TRAILS to Wellness offers tips for maintaining students’ mental health during the pandemic. TRAILS also has a self-care guide to help teens cope with COVID.
The Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a national group, has a list of coping tips and other resources, and a 24-hour hotline that families can call if a child is expressing suicidal thoughts at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). There is also a guide for youth struggling with mental health challenges.
Some schools also offer mental well-being training to students and parents, and school social workers are trained to support children in distress.

School districts across Michigan are using COVID funds to do those things and more:

In response to the pandemic, the federal government poured a record amount of money into schools — $6 billion in Michigan alone. Chalkbeat, the Detroit Free Press, and Bridge Michigan are collaborating to track where the money is going and how it is helping students.

To report on how schools are using the money to support student mental health, we pored over state records showing how districts planned to spend their share.

Lansing Public Schools is creating mental health programs with TRAILS to Wellness, a school-based program based at the University of Michigan. TRAILS provides brief lessons on mental health designed to be delivered to entire classes, student well-being surveys, mental health activities for staff, and suicide protocols.
In Grand Blanc, a suburb of Flint, the school district plans to hire seven new staffers to work one-on-one with students on social and emotional issues — one for every two elementary buildings, one for each middle school, and one for the high school. Students will be selected to work with the new staffers based on a mental health assessment or referrals by an adult.
The Kalamazoo district plans to pay 100 teachers an annual stipend to meet with small groups of students in advisory sessions that will focus on the challenges students are facing in life.
In Grand Rapids, the district plans to cover the cost of additional social workers and therapists.
Detroit Public Schools Community District will spend $10 million to contract with five organizations to provide mental health services, including therapy and diagnosis, to 3,700 Detroit students with the most severe mental health needs. The district expanded its full-time counseling staff in recent years, but demand for their services became overwhelming during the pandemic.
In Battle Creek, the district plans to hire a student support coordinator, an administrator who will help schools develop plans to address severe mental health issues among students and work with community agencies to connect students to mental health services outside of school.
In Flint, the city district contracted with a behavior specialist to address student trauma when classrooms reopened. When classes were virtual, the district hired a social-emotional learning coordinator to work with 9-12 graders who were learning online during the 2020-21 school year.
In Plainwell, near Kalamazoo, teachers, social workers, and other staffers are set to review district curriculums to bring social-emotional learning into academic lessons. For instance, a math teacher might include instruction on coping with frustration or working with partners to solve challenging problems.
Chatfield School, in rural southeast Michigan, hired an outside firm to provide mental health workshops to parents, students, and staff.
North Huron Schools, a small rural district in eastern Michigan, purchased a therapy dog named Chipper who lives with a teacher and spends his days at school. Teachers can refer distressed students to spend time with Chipper.

At the same time, Michigan has a massive budget surplus. With student activists calling for expanded mental health services in the wake of the school shooting in Oxford, Whitmer is calling for the state to invest an additional $361 million in student mental health. That proposal will likely be challenged by the Republican legislature, which proposes spending the surplus on a tax cut.

Still, these new investments may not be able to keep up with the need for mental health services. Consider the Grand Haven School District in western Michigan, where a string of six suicides between 2011 and 2017 spurred district leaders to expand their mental health staff to the levels that many other districts are trying to reach today.

Even as other districts in the area struggle to hire mental health workers, Grand Haven’s larger staff is struggling to keep up with mental health needs.

“We’re seeing the trickle effects of the constant chaos and uncertainty of the pandemic,” said Katie Havey, a district social worker. “We’re seeing more kids needing major interventions. We’re doing more suicide screenings and seeing higher levels of threat assessments.

“It is crazy to reflect on all of these things that we’re doing really well and realize that we could still use so much more support.”

About this project

$6 billion.

That’s how much Michigan schools are receiving from the federal government to help students and staff recover from the pandemic.

But it isn’t entirely clear how this unprecedented amount of federal cash is being spent and whether it is having an impact.

Please share your thoughts — and tips — with reporters Koby Levin at klevin@chalkbeat.org, Lily Altavena at laltavena@freepress.org, and Isabel Lohman at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Check out a few of the most recent stories from our series below:

Federal COVID relief aid to schools will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

Michigan school districts are flush with cash, but wary

COVID aid helps Michigan school districts plug deficits

How private schools are spending COVID relief cash

New MI ESSER tutoring programs have room to grow

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@Chalkbeat.org.

Poll: Michigan should use COVID money first for tutoring, mental health

2022-01-28T15:00:00+00:00

Michiganders hope schools will spend federal pandemic relief funds on expanded tutoring programs to help students who have fallen behind and on mental health resources, according to a new poll released this week.

The poll by EPIC-MRA of Lansing, provided exclusively to the Free Press and Chalkbeat, also found respondents want the state’s public schools to invest in everything from upgrading heating and cooling systems to more counselors, to investing more in the quality of school lunch. But largely, Michiganders appear to want to spend the recent COVID relief funds windfall on academic intervention to help students recover from the pandemic and enriched mental health services.

Districts across Michigan have $6 billion to spend, the largest single influx of federal education dollars in state history. The money is meant to ease the budget headaches and blows to academic achievement and mental distress created by the pandemic. Some of it has already gone out the door, but much of it hasn’t as districts work to determine their remaining priorities.

“Where are our social workers, and where are our nurses?” asked Monique Bryant, a parent in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. “You have kids with asthma, you have kids with other types of mental illnesses that require that they take medication, and there aren’t trained professionals in the building.”

The poll surveyed 600 people between Jan. 15 and Jan. 20, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The poll found:

82% of the likely voters polled said expanding tutoring programs to help students struggling with classwork is important.
74% responded that additional mental health support for students and staff is important.
71% supported hiring additional staff members and educators to reduce class sizes.
71% supported upgrading HVAC systems in schools.
The results showed that political views may influence how respondents prioritize spending. Voters who were more likely to vote liberal supported improved ventilation, school building renovations and hiring additional staff. Voters who were more likely to vote conservatively gravitated toward expanded tutoring options.
Parents overwhelmingly supported mental health resources over non-parents. A larger proportion of parents also supported additional hiring of staff and teachers over nonparents.

Pollster Bernie Porn said parents, who have had a front-row seat to the damage of the past two years, were more likely to support spending on all types of improvements.

“There’s much more support for all of these among parents than there is among nonparents,” Porn said.

Are districts investing in what Michiganders want?

Research shows that tutoring, particularly high dosage tutoring where students receive multiple 30- to 60-minute sessions per week, is effective in helping students who have fallen behind, according to a report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Michigan districts so far plan to spend $185 million to reduce learning loss, according to state data showing district COVID relief spending plans. The true figure will likely be larger after districts refine their plans.

In this category of spending, many districts are paying for tutors. About 10% of districts reported to the state that paying for tutors was among their top five priorities.

Detroit’s district, for example, plans to spend $14 million on a tutoring program from Beyond Basics over two years, to cover literacy tutoring in 11 high schools.

In neighboring Ecorse, parent surveys paralleled the poll findings, with tutoring a top priority.

The district there plans to spend $3.1 million — about one-third of its total relief allocation, more than any other item — on after-school tutoring, said Superintendent Josha Talison.

The money goes to teachers, each of whom runs tutoring sessions 11 afternoons per year in their subject area for any interested student.

“This will make sure we close achievement gaps,” Talison said. “We know we need to do something different in regard to providing support for students. There are only so many hours in the school day. This is a way of expanding the day.”

About 40% of middle and elementary school students and 25% of high school students attend tutoring sessions, Talison said.

Research showing that academic gaps have grown between students from low-income families and their more affluent peers came as a special concern to the Benton Harbor school district, which was nearly closed in 2019 due in part to poor academic performance.

The district is investing $3.6 million of its federal aid in one-on-one tutoring for students with the highest needs in literacy and math, said Superintendent Andraé Townsel.

“For some of our young people during the pandemic, it was very difficult to completely embrace virtual learning,” he said. The district operated remotely for most of last year. “A one-on-one relationship between educators and students is really the most impactful.”

An infusion of cash doesn’t guarantee that districts will be able to hire more staff members to address learning loss.

Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the district rolled out expanded summer programming to help address academic shortfalls and has beefed up mental health support, including adding one-on-one and group therapy options for students. But staffing is particularly challenging in this moment, when schools are competing with each other and higher-paying industries to hire qualified candidates.

“I think the greatest challenge with using funding for these purposes is it certainly does provide an infusion of support, but the issue is always the same: Human capital,” he said.

The same problem holds true on the other side of the state. Scott Smith, superintendent of the 3,500-student district in Cedar Springs, north of Grand Rapids, said that two posted counselor jobs didn’t yield many applications.

“We couldn’t find a single certified person that we were confident moving forward with,” Smith said. “You never want to settle. If you hire the wrong person you have problems down the road.”

One-time money

School administrators are anxious about what will happen to expanded tutoring programs and other added resources when federal funding dries up, said Bob McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan. The last of the funding must be used by 2024.

“Since this is temporary, one-time funding coming from the federal government, it makes it that much harder to get someone to take a job, knowing that the funding source for your position is going to disappear in a couple of years,” he said.

Families are also looking for transparency about how their schools will spend this money. Selina Ruffin, the mother of two children in Flint, said part of the reason she stopped sending her children to Flint Community Schools was a lack of transparency in district decisions.

Flint spent some of its federal funding so each student could have two laptops, one at home and one at school. But, Ruffin said, the district hasn’t fully addressed building problems, including an issue with mold that closed down an elementary school earlier in the school year.

“The middle school that I went to is still open but when you drive through the parking lot, there’s so many potholes, like they can’t even fix that issue,” she said. “But they get laptops for the students – two – and I’m like, that just doesn’t make sense. Like why? What was the reasoning behind that?”

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

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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.