The Michigan Legislature is scheduled to vote on a State School Budget this week or next week. Since Governor Snyder has been in office, we have known what our state funding is going to be in June of every year. For budgeting purposes and knowing what we have to work with, we truly appreciate that timely process. That wasn’t always the case. Sometimes we didn’t know until October what our funds from Lansing were going to include.

However, there is one part of the proposed budget that concerns many of us in public education. There is a provision to allocate $ 2.5 million to private and parochial schools to reimburse them for the costs of providing required state reports on student health, safety, and school accountability. The state constitution makes it clear that such money should not be provided to nonpublic schools. Article VIII, Section 2, of our Michigan State Constitution states:

No public monies or property shall be appropriated or paid or any public credit utilized, by the legislature or any other political subdivision or agency of the state directly or indirectly to aid or maintain any private, denominational or other nonpublic, pre-elementary, elementary, or secondary school.

Writing and submitting required reports is a task many educators endure without extra payment to their districts from the state for their endeavors. Many people think that as soon as the kids are done with school, administrators have free time. In fact, we get to work on end of the year requirements.

By June 30, we have ending and projected budgets to complete, personnel reviews, student incident reports, school and district improvement plans, program evaluation plans, lunch and breakfast reports, day and clock hours reports, special education, adult education and alternative education reports, and student data reports to complete.

We might grumble and complain about getting all these done by the deadline, but I do not recall ever hearing of any legislators offering our districts extra funds to work on them.

If you are also concerned with keeping public dollars in public schools, let Representative Dave Pagel and Senator John Proos know your thoughts. Here are their e-mail addresses: DavePagel@house.mi.gov and JProos@senate.michigan.gov

 

John Jarpe is the superintendent of Brandywine Community Schools.