michigan – ��

Detroit School Board Considers Changes to PTAs After Complaints About Conflicts

Hannah Dellinger — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The board has not yet voted on the proposed changes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detroit brought back PTAs to ‘heal the divide’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Michigan Lawmakers Aim to Fix State’s K-12 School Literacy Crisis

Lori Higgins — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Lawmakers in Lansing are moving aggressively to address Michigan’s K-12 literacy crisis with multiple pieces of legislation that target training for teachers, retention for struggling third graders, and consequences for teacher preparation programs.

The legislative action comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made addressing literacy a priority for 2026, her last year in office. During her State of the State address last month, Whitmer detailed steps already underway to improve literacy and recommendations in her budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. Among them is additional money she wants to invest in high-impact literacy tutoring, high-quality curriculum, literacy training for teachers, and hiring of literacy coaches.

“This is a serious problem,” Whitmer said in the address. “Our kids deserve better.”

Just 38.9% of third graders were proficient on the English language arts portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history, Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan reported.

On the national front, just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient in 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. Michigan students’ performance has been stagnant and declining even as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved. Michigan now ranks 44th in the nation for fourth-grade reading on the NAEP.

This isn’t the first time Michigan lawmakers have taken aim at the state’s challenges with literacy. In 2016, fueled by similarly troubling test results in reading, lawmakers passed a Read by Grade 3 law that required early intervention, the hiring of literacy coaches, and the retention of third graders struggling to reade. The retention rule has since been rescinded. Ten years since that broad effort, Michigan’s student literacy problem continues.

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

would require that by the 2031-32 school year, all K-5 educators who provide, support, or oversee instruction, including in literacy, must have been , which refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. The bill doesn’t specify a specific training program, but says the current training being encouraged for Michigan teachers — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS — meets the requirements of the legislation.

would require that, beginning Sept. 30, 2027, an individual seeking a teaching certificate in Michigan must have completed a teacher preparation program that included training in the science of reading.

would bring back the third-grade retention policy Michigan previously had in place. The bill would require struggling third graders, who would be identified based on their state test scores, repeat the grade. There would be some “good cause” exemptions, such as for students with disabilities whose educational plan team leader exempts them from the requirement. Michigan’s previous third-grade retention law, which went into effect during the 2020-21 school year, was rescinded in 2023 when Democrats controlled the legislature and the governor’s office. They argued the law was punitive and wasn’t working.

During a Wednesday hearing of the House Education and Workforce committee, Rep. Nancy DeBoer, a Republican from Holland who chairs the committee, said reading gives children the independence to pick up a book and go anywhere.

“Unless you’re in the state of Michigan and you’re three-quarters of the students in eighth grade who can’t read or do math in a competent manner,” she said. “That is a tragedy we are responsible for.”

DeBoer introduced the bipartisan bill that would make training in the science of reading a requirement for K-5 teachers.

The state has funded LETRS training, but thus far hasn’t made it a requirement. In September, the State Board of Education urged that it become a mandate for all K-5 teachers, saying the lack of one “has led to inconsistent participation of Michigan educators and inconsistent access to instruction based on the science of reading for Michigan’s students.”

The science of reading also figures prominently in a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Tim Kelly, a Republican from Saginaw Township. He described the bill as “a long overdue rescue mission for the next generation of Michigan’s workers, citizens, and leaders.”

Kelly said Wednesday that teacher preparation programs that don’t equip teachers with the tools needed to teach children to read have forfeited their right to operate in Michigan.

“We must stop subsidizing failure,” Kelly said.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Michigan Senate Committee Passes Child Care Reform Bills with Mostly Bipartisan Support

Katherine Dailey — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Two bill packages — one seeking to lower child care costs and expand options, especially in areas without significant child care options, and the other to clarify child neglect and abuse statutes — passed through the Senate Housing and Human Services committee on Tuesday morning.

Only two of the bills in the first package, which would essentially codify the state’s and adjust reimbursements under that program, which child care benefits to families under a certain income threshold by splitting the cost of an employee’s child care between the employer, the employee and the State of Michigan, faced opposition from the Republican members of the committee, still passing on party lines.

In a on the bills earlier in March, Sen. Rosemary Bayer (D-West Bloomfield), who sponsored one of the bills in the package, said that the child care system is “in crisis,” which is having a $2.9 billion annual economic impact on the state.

“The system is shrinking. Families can’t afford or find accessible child care providers,” Bayer said. “Providers are losing employees, shrinking or even closing down, and families are struggling to pay for services if they can find one, with costs often over $1,100 a month.”

“The astronomical cost of child care, coupled with the hoops and hurdles providers must jump through to stay open, continues to fuel a crisis that impacts our families, workforce, and broader state economy,” said Sen. Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing), sponsor of , one of the bills which passed unanimously, in a press release following the vote. “By cutting some of the costs and red tape facing providers, we can start to address the child care deserts that exist throughout the state, especially in our rural communities.”

Prior to the vote, Sen. Sylvia Santana (D-Warrendale) emphasized that, though she supports the bills, she also hoped to see further conversations about the impacts of these bills on businesses offering child care programs — which Sen. Jonathan Lindsey (R-Coldwater) added could call into question the need for MiLEAP, the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, more broadly.

“If we’re serious and we’re dedicated to making sure that access to child care is available, definitely there needs to be more oversight in this area, and also maybe just a really a deep dive into how these rules in this book reflect when it comes to the actual common sense of child care and those provisions that we’ve put in place,” Santana said. “So I’m dedicated to this package of bills. I don’t mind getting it out of committee, but I do want to have a broader conversation with stakeholders, as well as those business owners who are definitely feeling the pinch of some of the rules within this book that may not make common sense at this point for them to be able to really continue as business owners.”

The other two bills in that package, which would establish a review and appeal process for certain violations of child care organization rules and set in place standards for investigations, passed unanimously.

Both bills in the second package on altering the child abuse and neglect statutes also passed unanimously. They would specify the definitions of child neglect and abuse, specifically excluding “independent activities” like walking or bicycling to school or playing outdoors from qualifying under child neglect and abuse statutes.

“The idea is to make sure that our childhood welfare laws are aligned with reasonable childhood independence and that parents child care providers, first responders, schools, day cares, everyone has the right information about what is neglect and abuse and what is not, so that we can reduce the number of false reports and unneeded investigations,” said committee chair Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), who sponsored one of the bills, in an on the legislation.

All of the bills will now be reported to the full Senate for a vote.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

Michigan Lawmakers Take Aim at Fixing the State’s K-12 School Literacy Crisis

Lori Higgins — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

“This is a serious problem,” Whitmer said in the address. “Our kids deserve better.”

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

DeBoer introduced the bipartisan bill that would make training in the science of reading a requirement for K-5 teachers.

Kelly said Wednesday that teacher preparation programs that don’t equip teachers with the tools needed to teach children to read have forfeited their right to operate in Michigan.

“We must stop subsidizing failure,” Kelly said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Groups Seek Funding Fix to Help Michigan Grow Dual Enrollment Even More

Martin Slagter — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:30:00 +0000

When Macomb Community College began to notice a sizable increase in high school students enrolling in its classes in 2022, it decided to create its first Office of K-12 Relations.

The small office helped the southeast Michigan community college establish better relationships with 21 neighboring school districts and grow its dual enrollment population by 37% over the next three years.

Like Macomb, many of the community colleges and four-year universities in Michigan have put more of their resources toward a fast-growing demographic: high schoolers. As a result, Michigan’s dual enrollment population grew by 16% in 2023-24, with high school juniors and seniors accounting for .

“We knew that we had a lot of potential to grow that population, but really needed to put more intentional focus on it and additional resources,” said Aimee Adamski, director of Enrollment Services at Macomb Community College.

Across the country, via dual enrollment in 2023-24, with an additional 300,000 students receiving both high school and college academic credits for taking courses. Studies show dual enrollment has been found to have on college access, degree attainment, credit accumulation and completion of high school. But, as has found, these benefits could go even further by expanding outreach to underserved high schools and communities.

Although Michigan is keenly focused on for students to earn college credits during high school, it still lags behind its Midwest neighbors, including states like Indiana, where high school students account for more than a quarter of undergraduate enrollment, .

Community college advocates believe one way Michigan could grow dual enrollment even further is by removing the requirement that school districts pay for the courses. Michigan public schools are funded by a yearly foundation allowance provided by the state of $10,050 per student. Currently, the district is obligated to pay for whatever portion of classes a student takes via dual enrollment, creating a heavy financial burden. So if 20% of a student’s classes for the year are through dual enrollment, the school district will pay around $2,000 of that student’s $10,050 foundation allowance toward those dual enrollment courses.

The Michigan Community College Association, Detroit Regional Chamber have recommended the state for dual enrollment programs, such as a designated categorical grant or the state’s postsecondary scholarship fund.

“We have the right ingredients for a really robust dual enrollment participation in Michigan,” Michigan Community College Association President Brandy Johnson said. “The problem is really aligning the fiscal incentives to make sure that K-12 school districts are truly shouting the benefits of dual enrollment from the rooftops without being nervous about how it’s going to impact their bottom line.”

Michigan Department of Education spokesman Ken Coleman said the state wants to expand secondary learning opportunities for all students, including dual enrollment, Advanced Placement, Early Middle College, career and technical education programs and International Baccalaureate. Coleman said the state’s education department is reviewing the MCCA’s report. In the meantime, the state’s Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential will focused on improving Michigan’s dual enrollment policies and increasing its participation rates.

Meetings students’ evolving needs

Dearborn Public Schools has built one of the most robust dual enrollment and early middle college programs in Michigan, with approximately 56% of eligible seniors enrolled in at least one college course. Its unique K-14 model allows students to blend high school and college classes and to graduate in five years with both a high school diploma and associate degree or trade certificate.

Dearborn’s partnership with neighboring Henry Ford College, for example, opened the door for more than 3,800 students to take nearly 9,000 college classes in 2024-25, Dearborn Executive Director of Student Achievement Diana Shahin said. The district estimated it provided $5.8 million in 2024-25 to pay for dual enrollment and early middle college tuition and books.

The district works with students as early as middle school to identify possible career paths and provides four different early middle colleges to accommodate specific careers in education and engineering. Shahin said it is important Dearborn Public Schools offer a variety of postsecondary education options because it is competing with neighboring schools for the same pool of students.

“I think the way we understand traditional education as we once knew it feels somewhat antiquated,” Shahin said. “I think students want to be able to accomplish more in a shorter period of time, and they have lots of options at their fingertips in the world. So, school districts are having to compete with the various options and really have to listen to their audience. If we’re not serving our students and changing and being innovative and growing and learning with the technology and with the access to information, then we’re behind.”

Providing incentives

Beyond increased outreach from community colleges and universities, Johnson said high school students have plenty of their own motivation to pursue dual enrollment.

Michigan allows high school students to enroll in up to 10 college classes through dual enrollment. While many students choose to take courses toward an associate’s degree or certificate, Johnson said most of them use the courses to make early progress toward a degree at a four-year university.

“There is a ton of motivation to take as many courses as they can,” Johnson said. “The truth is, our dual enrollment students are our most successful students. They have higher course completion rates than the general population, and I think that has everything to do with how much incredible support they get from their K-12 settings. They have other teachers, school counselors, principals, coaches and their parents, who typically they still live with, that are cheering them on.”

While listening to families and building partnerships with surrounding districts helps boost interest in dual enrollment, Macomb Community College’s Adamski said it is undeniable that the motivation for high school students to take college classes is financially-driven.

“It can be a really financially supportive way to help a student access and move through those barriers that they might have to higher education — get them that early start and really help launch them toward their career objectives,” she said.

With this in mind, Johnson said she would like to see the cost barriers district schools face removed so students can take full advantage of Michigan’s dual enrollment opportunities.

“At the end of the day, the system we have now is that (public) school districts bear the full cost of dual enrollment out of their per pupil foundation allowance and it’s exactly the disincentive that we think is a reason for why school districts haven’t expanded more,” Johnson said.

Justice Dept. Probes 3 Michigan Districts Over LGBTQ-Related Curriculum

Linda Jacobson — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:34:19 +0000

The question of whether parents could opt their children out of sex education lessons was a major point of controversy last year when the Michigan Department of Education updated its health education standards.

Now the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether three districts gave parents advance notice of lessons pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity so their children could be excused. Officials are also investigating whether the districts received any complaints “regarding sex-segregated bathrooms” and other spaces, indicating that the federal government is committed to ensuring “the safety, dignity, and innocence of our youngest citizens.”

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On Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon sent letters to the superintendents of the Detroit, Lansing and Godfrey-Lee school districts, asking for all materials that reference sex and LGBTQ-related terms as well as any complaints or inquiries the districts might have received related to those issues.

“This Department of Justice is fiercely committed to ending the growing trend of local school authorities embedding sexuality and gender ideology in every aspect of public education,” she said in a statement.

The letters to the district’s superintendents signal the Justice Department’s willingness to aggressively enforce last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in in which the justices sided with a group of parents who argued they should be able to opt their elementary school children out of lessons related to LGBTQ-themed storybooks for religious reasons. Michigan’s standards, Dhillon wrote, could be at odds with the court’s decision.

If the districts don’t agree to the department’s demands, they could be at risk of losing federal funding, she wrote. Including school nutrition funds and Medicaid, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, for example, receives over $200 million, according to Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer.

Officials with Detroit and Lansing districts did not return phone calls or emails, but in an email, Arnetta Thompson, superintendent of the Godfrey-Lee district, called the investigation a “standard review process.”

“We are fully cooperating with this inquiry and will provide any requested information,” she said. “The district is not facing any charges or findings of wrongdoing. We remain committed to complying with all applicable federal, state and local laws and have consistently operated in accordance with those laws.”

In a statement, Michigan state Superintendent Glenn Maleyko said his department supports the three districts that “have been targeted” by the DOJ and said Dhillon wrongly characterized the health guidelines as state requirements.

Parents, he said, ”retain the right to decide whether their children should participate in sex education instruction. And state officials will work with the districts to “select a curriculum that best supports the needs of their students, consistent with state standards and guidelines.”

The investigations reflect the Trump administration’s parental rights agenda, whose nearly singular focus has been to restrict lessons or policies related to gender identity. In a last September, Attorney General Pam Bondi said state and local officials have “ignored, dismissed and even retaliated against concerned parents who speak out against these morally and factually bankrupt ideologies.” One of President Donald Trump’s earliest rejected the Biden administration’s efforts to extend Title IX protections to transgender students. But some experts say it’s highly unusual for the Department of Justice to get involved in matters related to curriculum.

“These investigations depart from longstanding DOJ practice of not dictating or interfering with school curriculum,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law. A former deputy assistant attorney in the DOJ’s civil rights division, he said previously, the department “intentionally avoided” those issues.

Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, added that the DOJ’s probe is a “blatant attempt to discourage inclusive education” and takes the Mahmoud decision too far. While that case focused specifically on books that the Montgomery County schools in Maryland added to its reading curriculum in the early grades, DOJ is looking at “content in any class” for pre-K through 12th grade.

But Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the DOJ’s action appears “consistent with the degree of parent empowerment under Mahmoud.”

“Parents need a level of trust that schools will reflect their values, or at least not contradict their values,” he said. It’s likely, he added, that other districts will see similar investigations in line with “the Education Department and White House’s goals to protect students from explicit material.”

‘Capacity issue’

The fact that the DOJ is involved instead of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights could reflect a “capacity issue,” Dittmeier said.

In December, Education Secretary Linda McMahon recalled more than 250 OCR employees to handle a growing backlog of complaints. They had been on administrative leave as a result of her attempts to downsize the department.

While McMahon has moved to shift Education Department offices to other agencies, she has not yet announced where OCR would go. in Congress, however, would move OCR to the Justice Department. The Education and Justice departments also formed a last April to speed up Title IX investigations and “use the full power of the law to remedy any violation of women’s civil rights,” Bondi said in a statement.

While Detroit, with almost 49,000 students, is the state’s largest district, it’s unclear whether any specific complaints triggered the investigations. Lansing, the state capital, declared itself last year.

In 2024, former state Superintendent Michael Rice honored Godfrey-Lee, a small, 1,700-student district south of Grand Rapids, for the state’s 21st Century Model School Library award. He recognized media specialist Harry Coffill for including “diverse books” on the shelves.

The letters to each district ask for an extensive list of materials, dating back to 2023, that include “slideshows, presentations, imagery, posters, signage, recordings and handouts” that reference a variety of terms like “gender spectrum,” “gender expression,” “puberty blockers” and “transitioning.”

Dhillon wants leaders to turn over any forms, notices or permission slips that demonstrate how the districts notify parents when a lesson references sex and gender. She also asked for detailed records of any complaints or questions from parents related to topics such as “queer culture,” “LGBTQIA+,” “Pride Month” or “drag queen.”

note that parents should receive prior notification of sex education classes and curriculum and that they have a right to “opt out their child from all or some” of those lessons. Lansing’s related to controversial issues, for example, says schools will “honor a written request” for students to be excused “for specified reasons.”

State Superintendent Maleyko said the “breadth and scope” of Dhillon’s requests “place a significant administrative burden on local districts and risk diverting time and resources away from the core mission of educating students.”

Whitmer Aims to Boost Literacy As Michigan Students Struggle With Reading

Lori Higgins — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her final budget proposal this week, is set to unveil a budget proposal for funding schools that invests $625 million in programs aimed at addressing the state’s K-12 literacy crisis.

The literacy investment would come at a time of increased focus on the troubling performance of Michigan students in literacy in the early grades. Just portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history, Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan reported last year.

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On the national front, , an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. More concerning is that Michigan student performance has been stagnant and declining as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved.

Whitmer, during her State of the State address last year, called for urgency in addressing the low performance, noting that Michigan spends more than most states.

“It’s not acceptable,” Whitmer said. “For our kids, let’s do better. Let’s face our literacy crisis with fierce urgency.”

“When every child reads, Michigan wins,” Whitmer said in a statement provided by the governor’s office. “As we face a nationwide literacy crisis, my education budget proposal includes big investments to build on the work we’ve done to help kids read.”

For the budget proposal she will deliver to the Michigan Legislature Wednesday, Whitmer’s Every Child Reads plan notes that investing in preschool and wraparound programs is just as important as improving curriculum and ensuring teachers are trained.

Here are some specifics of the plan the governor’s office shared with Chalkbeat this week:

Part of the $625 million investment includes expansion of the state’s initiative, which aims to provide free preschool to children regardless of income. “It starts with high-quality early learning, because the sooner kids start learning to read, the better they become,” the governor’s office said in a media advisory.
The budget would also invest more in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (or LETRS) training. LETRS is a professional development program based on the science of reading. The refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge.
The budget will include funding that helps districts implement new science of reading-aligned curriculum. The Michigan Department of Education recently published a list of curriculums aligned with the science of reading. School districts aren’t required to adopt from the list. However, the current state budget has language requiring schools or risk losing a small percentage of their state funding.
The budget proposes additional funding to expand summer, before-school, and after-school programming.

Additional details, such as information on how the additional funding would help districts implement curriculum aligned to the science of reading, weren’t available.

State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, in a statement included in the governor’s advisory, said Whitmer’s focus on literacy is one shared by the Michigan Department of Education, which he oversees, and the State Board of Education, the elected board that hired him last year.

“Nothing is more important to our students and our state than improving literacy,” Maleyko said. “Reading and writing are the foundation for long-term success, and I look forward to working with the Legislature through strong teamwork and shared responsibility to advance these priorities and continue improving student outcomes statewide.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Teachers, Parents Increasingly Back Cell Phone Bans in Michigan Schools

Martin Slagter — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

In his 30 years as teacher and administrator, Jason Purcell felt the weight of responsibility that often fell on his shoulders in enforcing the prohibition of cell phones in the classroom.

When Purcell was convinced to come out of retirement this past fall to teach at Mackinaw City High School, he saw a remarkable difference teaching students in a district that had long banned cell phone use during the school day.

“It makes a world of difference when there is a school wide policy that is enforced by all the teachers consistently and supported by the administration,” said Purcell, who has taught math, been an academic counselor and served as an assistant principal throughout his career. “Students have and always will find ways to be distracted from the learning, but not having cell phones may take away the biggest distraction that students face.”

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Mackinaw City Public Schools’ cell phone ban was instituted around 2010, coinciding with the rise of teen cell phone ownership, longtime Superintendent Jeffrey Curth said.

Teachers have all taken on the responsibility of enforcing that students’ cell phones are left in their locker with the ringer off from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m, Curth said, removing a major source of distractions and potential source of cyber bullying.

“Because we’ve just had it in place so long, it’s just what’s expected,” Curth said. “I think when you see the amount of cyber bullying and things that it’s raised to the level that it has in society today, I think it’s just further strengthened our stance that we feel that we’ve done the right thing.”

As the state considers a school cell phone ban that received , an increasing number of Michigan school districts have followed Mackinaw City’s lead by enacting bans and passing cell phone policies limiting use in the classroom in recent years.

Nationwide, 26 states have passed full bans on cell phone use, while six others have required districts to establish their own policies or limited cell phone use in class, . A 2024 American Association of Educators survey of 1,517 teachers from across the country, on the other hand, found that 70% want cellphones to be banned during the school day.

From passive presence to active participation

Anchor Bay High School student success teacher Jamie Pietron said she was initially apprehensive about how students would adjust to the districtwide ban that started this fall, wondering how the policy would be enforced by administration.

There have been consequences for students who violate the district’s “away for the day” cell phone policy, Pietron said, helping contribute to a more connected learning atmosphere.

“In the past, when kids were done with their work, they went on their phones,” Pietron said. “Teachers are making lessons and activities more engaging to cover any ‘down time’ and students are focused on what they need to do.

“… It is amazing to walk through the cafeteria and see kids actually talking, playing cards and having conversations with each other instead of staring at their screens.”

Northville Middle School teacher Richard Tabor said he also has seen a shift from “passive presence” to active participation in his classroom since the district enacted its cell phone ban in 2024-25 for students in grades K-8 during class time, requiring them to be collected by teachers at the start of the day.

Prior to the ban being in place, Tabor said it was teachers’ responsibility to enforce their own policies on student cell phone use, leading to inconsistency in where students were allowed to use cell phones and where they weren’t.

Without the option to scroll during downtime, students are able to engage with the classroom environment,” Tabor said. “Students are more likely to ask questions, take physical notes and participate in discussions because they have no alternative ‘escape’ during moments of boredom or difficulty.”

Mackinaw City special education teacher Elizabeth McNeil said her transition from teaching in a district without a cell phone policy to one where a ban has long been in place has been a “breath of fresh air” in removing “distraction and drama.”

“At my previous district, there were daily arguments about giving up phones and discipline problems, even when just asking a student to put their phone away,” she said.

“In a society where adults are addicted to their phones, it is encouraging to see that we are encouraging students here at MCPS to realize that their phones are not part of their lifeline,” McNeil said”

Parental approval

Beyond support from teachers, bans have largely been met with approval from parents, who acknowledge that devices that continually cause them distractions throughout the day shouldn’t be in the hands of their children during school.

Heather Gatny’s opinion has evolved on the issue, from trying to hold off on getting her son a cell phone until he is in high school to recently getting him one as an eighth grader for Christmas.

She likes the idea of him having one in his possession, even if it is kept off while he is in class at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, but stressed that in the classroom it can only cause distractions.

“If the kids were allowed to have their phones in the classrooms, they’d be looking at them the whole time,” she said. “I think that’s for the best for them to not have access to it, because they’re just on apps. They’re goofing around. They’re not paying attention to what the teacher is saying. They’re paying attention to what their friends are texting them.”

With two young children in second and fourth grades at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, Sarah Krzyzanski said she is for cell phones being stored in a central location in the classroom for those who are concerned about students being able to respond to an emergency.

In the classroom, however, she said schools should be aiming to keep the focus on learning and not conditioning students to be dependent on having a cell phone by their side.

“These kids are at the point where they’re kind of addicted to that ‘ding,’ and they get to where they crave it, and it becomes an impulse,” she said. “I don’t believe that a child with a phone on their person has the ability to pay attention to the teacher and actually follow lessons and do it with enough of their brain engaged to be taking that educational content out the way that they should be.”

Study: Switching to Charter School Improves Performance for Special Ed Students

Lauren Wagner — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:30:00 +0000

Students with disabilities who leave a traditional public school to enroll in a charter school experience improved academic outcomes along with their general-education peers, according to a new study. It’s a sign, researchers say, of the possible benefits of charter schools for some students who receive special education services.

The , published Jan. 13 from the , analyzed records from more than 1.7 million Michigan K-8 students who switched from a district to a charter school between 2013 and 2018.

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The nonprofit concluded that while students with disabilities spent more time in general-education classrooms and received less intensive services than their peers in traditional public schools, their standardized test scores increased along with those of their classmates who didn’t qualify for special ed.

Charter enrollment for students with disabilities has historically trailed behind that of public schools. While parents sometimes charter schools after poor experiences with traditional districts, charters also have a regarding special education. One found that charter schools may discourage parents from enrolling their children with disabilities because of concerns about how special education students impact overall academic performance and budgets.

But the results in Michigan show that children who receive special education services do well academically with fewer supports when they enter charter schools, “suggesting charters may have adopted, identified and developed approaches to teaching students with disabilities that warrant further study,” the research says.

“Charter schools can be a useful educational tool for parents with students with disabilities,” said Scott Imberman, one of the study’s authors. “They shouldn’t be quick to rule it out, because it does seem that, for at least a substantial segment of disabled students, charter schools are helpful for them — at least for their academic performance.”

The study found that math and reading test scores improved for both special education and general education students for at least two years after they enrolled in a charter school. Absence rates also decreased.

These findings match a in Boston, which revealed that children with disabilities who were accepted at a charter school through a lottery system were more likely to meet college-ready benchmarks than special education students in traditional public schools.

Imberman said that because children with complicated special education needs tend not to enroll in charter schools, the study’s results suggest students with less severe disabilities can thrive alongside the general-education population.

The study used students’ individualized education plans to see how special education services changed after enrollment in a charter school. Before switching, all students spent an average of 2.3% of their school day in a special education setting. The rate dropped to 1.2% immediately after entering a charter school but rebounded to pre-charter levels by the third year of enrollment.

Identification rates for special education students also mostly stayed the same — around 14.5% — when students switched, but then gradually increased. Two to three years after charter school enrollment, special education identification rates increased 1 to 2 percentage points.

The study also analyzed the use of resource and cognitive programs, two areas of special education services that are tailored to specific student needs. Resource programs often provide services to students who spend most of their school day in a general education classroom, while cognitive programs include more costly and intensive therapies, and students usually work with a designated special education instructor, according to the study.

Once Michigan students with IEPs switched from a traditional public school to a charter, participation in resource programs increased by 4 percentage points, while cognitive programming decreased by 5 points.

A key limitation of the study is that the research only shows what was written in students’ IEPs and what changed post-enrollment in a charter. It does not reveal whether the school actually followed through with required services.

“Our data also does not reflect the perspectives of students and families,” the study said. “It is essential that students with disabilities are included in future research on school choice to understand whether their needs are being met in different choice contexts.”

Recently, charter schools in and were found to have violated special education laws, and one in suspended students with disabilities at three times the state average.

Imberman said many charter schools aren’t set up to effectively serve some special education students, especially those with severe disabilities that require costly therapies and assistance.

“This is a large concern in the back and forth with traditional schools and charter schools, particularly when it comes to students with disabilities — that even if students with disabilities are entering charters, the ones who are most expensive are the ones who remain in the traditional public schools,” he said. “That creates a disproportionate burden on the traditional public schools.”

Whitmer Calls Literacy Her ‘Number One Priority’ for Final Year as Governor

Katherine Dailey — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 11:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

In a keynote speech at the Michigan Literacy Summit, held Tuesday at the Michigan Science Center, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said that improving literacy rates would remain her top priority in her final year as governor.

“Helping every child read is tough. It’s a worthwhile goal,” she said. “It’s a long term project that will pay off in decades, not days. It’s a team effort that requires buy-in from students, parents, teachers and policy makers.”

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She referenced the increased implementation of the “science of reading” , which she signed in October 2024, as part of this priority. That law standardized literacy teaching methods across the state and implemented regular dyslexia testing for students up to third grade. She also touted the free school breakfast and lunch program, a key piece of the , and funding to reduce class sizes.

Michigan currently ranks 44th in the nation for 4th grade reading skills, Whitmer said, calling it a “crisis.”

“The vast majority of people in our state agree this isn’t the fault of any one person or any one policy or any one political party,” she continued. “I know how hard every one of our educators works every day, but we’re all feeling the impact of our literacy crisis.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko pose for a photograph before her speech at the Michigan Literacy Summit. Dec. 16, 2025. | Photo by Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance.

State Superintendent Dr. Glenn Maleyko, who officially the role leading the state’s department of education on Dec. 8, introduced Whitmer to a crowd of educators and advocates, who had gathered in Detroit for the day-long event that included panels with teachers and school leadership.

“What stood out to me the most was the governor’s genuine commitment to partnership,” Maleyko said. “She understands that improving outcomes for students is not about politics, it’s about listening, working together and staying focused on what matters most.”

This was Whitmer’s first public appearance since Michigan House Republicans nearly $650 million in spending for departmental projects, a move heavily criticized by Democrats as “untransparent” and “cruel”. While Whitmer’s press secretary shared similar criticism from the governor’s office, Whitmer herself has yet to make a statement on the cuts, and left the summit before speaking to the press.

Michigan School District Embraces New Approach to Teaching Kids to Read

Martin Slagter — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:30:00 +0000

The students in Emily Hoard’s first-grade class trace letters in their sand trays, then break down the sounds the letters make in simple words. This is what the science of reading looks like as Hoard and her fellow teachers at Stockbridge Community Schools in Michigan go all-in on their new approach to literacy instruction.

“The kids know exactly what to expect, and they’re so much more confident when they come to a word that they don’t know, or a big word in text, because they’ve been taught all of those little, tiny skills that they need, and the concepts of how words are made up,” Hoard said, who teaches at Emma L. Smith Elementary. “It’s not like a guessing game for them anymore.”

A small mid-Michigan district of 1,075 students, Stockbridge is among the first districts in the state to fully embrace training its teachers and building a curriculum that is supported by the science of reading, a body of research explaining how children develop reading and writing skills. This instruction relies heavily on phonics in the early years of schooling before building other essential skills like fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and the syntax of grammar and sentence structure in the later elementary grades.

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After the district’s teachers and literacy coaches on how to implement the curriculum, they built a new foundation to teaching literacy that helped third-grade students increase English proficiency by 12% on standardized tests.

Now in its second year of structured literacy strategies, including daily small group and one-on-one literacy interventions and games that are scored with data tracked in real time, Stockbridge Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Amy Hodgson said the new approach has worked so well, the district has implemented a similar teaching method in math through daily, classwide interventions.

Building those skills in the younger grades will help them have success across subjects as they get older, she said.

“If students don’t have fluency and automaticity in math or reading, it’s very difficult for them to have the cognitive load to access the higher skills that are being demanded of them in life and in standardized testing and in all these other places,” Hodgson said. “If I’m asked to do calculus, or if I’m asked to read a complex text, and I’m still sounding out words, there’s an exhaustion that comes with that.”

A shifting focus to phonics

The school district is part of a recent nationwide shift back toward phonics-focused curricula and rather than a balanced literacy approach that incorporates a “whole language” method focused on meaning and context of words.

While the two approaches should be seen in some respects as complementary and integrated, Harvard Professor of Cognition and Education Catherine Snow said they are typically pitted against each other, with schools choosing to change approaches when a new “literacy crisis” emerges.

“It’s kind of a pendulum shift every 15 or 20 years that you get some report saying our kids can’t read, and whatever is the dominant procedure at the time gets suppressed in favor of the other one, but in both cases, they go too far with it,” said Snow, an expert on language and literacy development in children.

“You can’t just do code-focused instruction, because you will drive the kids crazy and you will teach them that reading is about pronouncing words correctly, not about meaning. You can’t just do whole language instruction, because many kids need a little bit of help getting into the system. They need someone to explain to them very systematically.”

Along with 39 other states across the country, Michigan has embraced the science of reading, a buzz term that is neither a program nor an instructional approach, said Kim St. Martin, director of the Michigan Multi-Tiered System of Supports Technical Assistance Center and consultant to the Michigan Department of Education. Instead, it is a body of research schools can choose to build their curriculum, training and assessments around, she said.

In 2024, Michigan passed a pair of K-12 literacy laws aligned with this research in an effort to boost third-grade reading scores and better identify and support students with dyslexia. In addition to aligning its curricula and assessments with lists approved by the state’s Department of Education, notes that instruction must not include methods or curricula that emphasize memorizing words or prompt students to guess unknown words using pictures.

Commonly used within whole language and balanced literacy programs, this “three-cueing” system model relies on word meaning and sentence context; as such, it does not serve students well in learning the foundations of reading and writing, St. Martin said.

“If I’m a second-grader, when I’m reading the words, there’s nothing wrong with me having pictures in text for the purpose of me getting a visual representation in my mind of understanding what it is that this text is about,” St. Martin said. “What is inappropriate is if I’m using the picture to try to decode the word, because that would prevent me from understanding how to put together the letter-sound combinations to read that word.

“Unfortunately, there have been strategies that have been taught for several years that frankly, are causing kids to guess and to use those types of three-cueing strategies.”

Michigan has committed toward creating a committee that will vet curricula aligned with the science of reading and allow schools to purchase materials approved by the committee. The state also provided $34 million to train elementary teachers on how to teach the curricula via Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), with more than 5,000 teachers and literacy coaches completing the training to date.

The laws and funding efforts are concentrated on providing teachers with the tools they need to teach all aspects of reading to young learners, Michigan Department of Education Literacy Unit Manager DeNesha Rawls-Smith said.

“We believe that it is foundational for students that are learning to read to decode unknown words,” Rawls-Smith said. “But again, we don’t believe that phonics, or word recognition in and of itself, makes a good reader. We believe that a good reader has the ability to recognize unknown words, and they have a knowledge about language. So together with word recognition and language comprehension, you have a reader that can read and understand what they’re reading.”

How a child learns best

After studying years of student achievement data, Stockbridge K-6 Literacy Coach Cindy Stacy learned the school was doing the same thing and getting the same results that were “not amazing.”

The district used state grant funds to invest in the , an approach initially developed to support students with dyslexia which has proven successful with other students as well. It worked with Institute for Multi-Sensory Education instructors to train its teachers and literacy coaches.

“Prior to this latest shift, most elementary education programs focused on balanced literacy,” Stacy said. “There was a small piece of phonics. There was a whole language approach. There were leveled readers. With the science of reading, the whole paradigm just shifted.”

While laying the initial groundwork was difficult, Stacy said mornings at Smith Elementary are now more intentional and bustling, with students reaching for their “OG bags” that allow them to trace letters into their own sand trays.

In Michelle Hedding’s kindergarten class, students are asked what sound letters make before tracing the letter in the sand tray. Different three-letter combinations are broken down by individual letters on a TV monitor, with Hedding asking students to pronounce the word before ultimately asking them if they’re “real or nonsense” words.

Kindergarten teacher Michelle Hedding works with her students during a reading lesson on Oct. 23, 2025. Stockbridge Community Schools’ Emma L. Smith Elementary is among the first schools in the state to align both curricula and training with what is being referred to as the science of reading. (Martin Slagter)

In grades K-5, students receive at least 90 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of writing instruction per day, Stacy said, with several who need more individual support pulled into small group or one-on-one intervention periods for 25-30 minutes. In grades 3 to 5, there is more focus on language and reading comprehension, vocabulary, background knowledge and verbal reasoning.

During intervention periods, literacy interventionist Amy Taylor will drill down on concepts like the sounds that different blends of letters make and how a “magic” e at the end of a word like face or home makes the preceding vowel in the word “say its name.”

Taylor, who has been with the district for 20 years, said the transition was difficult due to the belief from some teachers and staff that the use of sight words, or commonly used words children can memorize from sight, was an effective way to teach all students.

“My kindergarten class at the time, they were learning how to read — but the difference was, they didn’t know why,” Taylor said. “It was all memorization. They did not peel a word apart and talk about the different whys: why the word is ‘pinch.’ So, when we started the [new curricula], that was life changing for our learners and for us.… It’s just changed our whole way of looking at a child and how they learn best.”

Rosa Parks’ Story Didn’t End in Montgomery. These Students Are Proof of That.

Ebony JJ Curry — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 11:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

was originally reported by Ebony JJ Curry of . .

Seventy years have passed since Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, and yet the country still tries to shrink her into that single moment — a tired seamstress who’d simply had enough.

Detroit, the city where she chose to continue her life, insists on remembering her differently. Not as an icon frozen in time, but as a Black woman whose lifelong organizing stretched from sexual violence cases in rural Alabama to open housing fights on Detroit’s west side.

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That fuller story — truth beyond the myth — is exactly what the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation has fought to tell for 45 years.

The Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation (RPSF) has awarded more than $3 million in scholarships to more than 2,250 high school seniors since its founding by The Detroit News and the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) in 1980.

“Most people actually don’t know the story of Rosa Parks,” said Dr. Danielle McGuire, RPSF board member, historian and author of “At the Dark End of the Street”, whose research permanently shifted how historians write about Parks and the civil rights movement. “She’s so much more interesting, so much more radical, and so much more involved in all kinds of things that we forget about. We keep her stuck on the bus in Montgomery in 1955.”

According to Kim Trent, a Detroit civic leader and former board president, the foundation, created through a racial discrimination lawsuit settlement involving Stroh’s Brewing Company, became one of the rare instances where federal accountability for racism produced long-term investment in Black futures.

A judge, DPS and The Detroit News agreed the money should honor Parks — who was living in Detroit and working for Rep. John Conyers at the time — by funding scholarships for Michigan students devoted to service and social change.

It is a statewide program, reaching students from Detroit to Grand Rapids to rural school districts where scholarship dollars often determine whether higher education is possible at all.

That framing makes her legacy active, not ceremonial.

“As part of her family, I feel grateful to be able to work together with my fellow board members to keep fighting for more opportunities to continue to provide scholarships,” said Erica Thedford, Parks’ great-niece and a foundation trustee. “I think Auntie Rosa would be extremely proud of what the Foundation has been able to achieve.”

The numbers tell one story — more than 1,000 scholars, millions awarded, forty $2,500 scholarships each year — and the essays tell another. Applicants must identify a modern social issue and explain how they would confront it using principles Parks embodied: discipline, non-negotiable dignity, community before self.

“Reading the essays of the students who apply is a great reminder that each person doing one act, no matter how small, creates a stronger network of love and kindness,” Thedford said. “Some of these students come from extreme hardship and still find the time and resources to volunteer at food banks, shelters… Some even take it upon themselves to be the organizer of ways to help the less fortunate at their schools.”

The award is one-time, not renewable, yet its impact stretches across decades.

“Once you become a Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation recipient, you are a Rosa Parks Scholar for life,” Thedford said. “These students are now part of a network of people who root for each other, and that kind of support system is important.”

Trent knows that firsthand: She was a Parks Scholar herself when she graduated from Cass Tech High School.

“I received the scholarship in 1987,” she said. “Ironically, not only did I get it, but my best friend… also received the same scholarship. And then her son got the scholarship like 30 years later.”

Trent said the scholarship’s origin mirrors Parks’ life — created in response to injustice and sustained through community action.

“It’s one of those rare occasions where something beautiful grew out of an instance of racism and oppression,” Trent said.

Over the years, some Parks Scholars attended community college. Others enrolled at flagship universities. All had to articulate how their education would serve a community beyond themselves.

Some, like Emmy-winning actor Courtney B. Vance, who’s from Highland Park, Michigan, went on to shape national culture. Others are now attorneys, educators and nonprofit leaders across the state.

“What gets lost in what she did is the reason she did it,” Trent added. “It wasn’t just so she could sit on a bus. It was because she was trying to open up opportunity for people who had been denied opportunity.”

That is the heartbeat of the foundation’s lineage.

Parks was not simply resisting segregation. She was rejecting the entire machinery that kept Black women from safety, education and economic autonomy.

McGuire’s research highlights how Rosa Parks was investigating sexual violence cases long before #MeToo, defending Black girls whose voices were dismissed in courtrooms and newspapers. She worked alongside the NAACP on equity cases. When she left Alabama under threat of death and moved to Detroit, she became the neighbor who knew everyone’s children, the church member who attended every meeting, the woman who collected information and names and needs.

“She was the person in the neighborhood who knew all the kids, who worked in almost every community organization you can imagine, to make life better for her people,” McGuire said. “The scholarship foundation is an example of that — just one of many.”

Every year, nearly 400 applicants encounter that fuller history — the Parks who fought for open housing in Detroit, who believed in Black self-determination, who, as McGuire notes, “never stopped fighting for equality and justice for people who didn’t have a voice that was being heard.”

That is not accidental. It is by design.

“We ask our applicants to become familiar with Rosa Parks and the tactics and strategies she used to make changes in her community and how they will do the same,” McGuire said. “I think it gives them hope. It links them to a tradition and a history of hope and change.”

This anniversary of Parks’ arrest arrives as school boards strip Black history from K-12 classrooms and as scholarship programs for marginalized students come under attack. Thedford sees the foundation’s work as a refusal.

“During this time, when we are hearing of funding being pulled from schools and programs that are needed to serve our youth, the Foundation is able to continue its provision of funds,” she said.

McGuire is blunt about what that represents:

“No matter how hard people try to cancel the past, the past is very much alive,” she said. “Rosa Parks’ history gives us so much honesty about America… and studying her is paramount to getting through any difficult time.”

Seventy years later, the lesson remains unchanged: Rosa Parks did not fight for a place to sit, she fought for the generations who would rise. Today, those students are still applying, still studying her strategies, still refusing to yield.

This was originally published on .

Michigan Sees Record Free Preschool Enrollment, Yet Many Openings Remain

Lori Higgins — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

A record number of children are enrolled in Michigan’s free preschool program this year, the second in which the state has invested in making it available for all children regardless of income.

But programs across the state still have plenty of openings, a sign that many families don’t know the program is available.

During a press conference Tuesday morning, officials from the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education Advancement and Potential announced that 51,000 children are enrolled in the Great Start Readiness Program. That’s an increase of 8,900 over last year.

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During the 2023-24 school year, the last before the state launched its PreK for All initiative, 36,466 children were enrolled. A bipartisan effort in the Michigan legislature has invested additional money in the state budget to fund the expansion, which began with the 2024-25 school year.

The PreK for All initiative has been aimed at removing income and other restrictions on the Great Start Readiness Program, essentially allowing any child to enroll whether they are from a low-income home or not. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her 2023 proposal to gradually expand to a universal preschool program in Michigan, said it would “ensure children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.”

The expansion comes as Michigan’s K-12 system has faced criticism because students have struggled on state and national exams at a time when many other states are showing more impressive gains.

The Great Start Readiness Program is one of four preschool programs in which the state is expanding access by eliminating income restrictions. The others include the federal Head Start program, developmental kindergarten, and early childhood special education.

Beverly Walker-Griffea, director of MiLEAP, said families who enroll their children in PreK for All programs save an estimated $14,000 each year. That’s crucial, she said, “at a time like this, when the cost of just about everything is going up.”

Blake Kish is a parent of six children under the age of 8. Two have been enrolled in the Great Start Readiness Program at St. George School in Flint Township.

“The PreK For All has been a blessing, of course, for the household, but mostly for the kids,” Kish said.

“I recommend any parent that has a child that is 4 years old, get your child in this program. Get your kid in the classroom, give them that head start, give them the winning edge,” Kish said. “We are shaping the future of Michigan.”

Emily Laidlaw, deputy director for early education at MiLEAP, noted that “children who attend a high quality pre-K program are more likely to graduate from high school, go on to college or career training and start their career strong.”

“Pre-K teaches critical social skills, including how to share, work and play together, and get along with others,” Laidlaw said.

Laidlaw said the state will continue to get the word out about the program to families across the state who have not yet enrolled.

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In Michigan’s UP, a Head Start Preschool Closes. Blame the Government Shutdown

Lauren Gibbons — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

After the federal government failed to renew a $1.5 million federal grant by Saturday, officials at the Gogebic-Ontonagon Community Action Agency say they had little choice: They closed a free preschool program that has served two counties in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since 1965.

The program was among that missed expected weekend payments because of the ongoing federal government shutdown. Unlike others, the UP program could not secure alternative resources in time to continue operations.

That means 85 students — along with 30 other families with children in Early Head Start — won’t be getting the education, meals and other services they rely on until funding is restored. And employees are currently out of work, program director Renee Pertile told Bridge Michigan.

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“We’re kind of one big family, and now it seems like a piece is missing,” she said. “It’s awfully quiet here today.”

Funded primarily by the federal government to serve low-income preschoolers and their families, Head Start programs in Michigan and around the country are among the latest to feel direct impacts from the government shutdown that’s dragged on for more than a month.

Coupled with the recent impacting 1.4 million Michigan residents, advocates warn the ongoing turmoil surrounding federal funding is putting vulnerable kids at risk.

While local schools and community groups can in some cases step in to help keep Head Start programs going, those resources are “not going to be universal, and it’s not going to be a one-to-one replacement,” said Bob McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan.

“The longer this goes on, the more damage it’s going to do,” McCann continued. “This is a crisis of choice by (politicians), and it’s kids that are paying the price for it.”

As of Tuesday, the Gogebic-Ontonagon program was the only confirmed closure in Michigan since Nov. 1, , which has so far reported 25 closures nationwide.

Education advocates warned other programs around the state that have missed grant payments are at imminent risk of running out of money, too.

Statewide, Michigan has 48 Head Start and Early Head Start programs that serve nearly 30,000 children, bringing in $423 million in federal funds annually, said Robin J. Bozek, executive director of the Michigan Head Start Association.

Nine of those programs serving 2,944 children, many of them in the Upper Peninsula and northern lower Michigan, saw their funding grants expire Nov. 1, Bozek said.

Though some of those programs have been able to piece together enough funds from local schools or community groups to temporarily keep them afloat, the lack of new federal funding means money is tight and the future is uncertain, Bozek said.

“Anytime there’s a pause or a stop…it totally disrupts the system for this type of grant,” she said.

For the Gogebic-Ontonagon Community Action Agency, there was no money to fall back on. When the grant didn’t come through, the Head Start program had to wind down.

“We started looking at this in mid-October, thinking, we’d better prepare just in case this was going to happen,” Pertile said. “As it got closer to the deadline, we knew that it was highly unlikely we would get our grant.”

In the short term, program employees are able to collect unemployment, and a local daycare offered to open up temporary slots to help care for kids who’d previously been attending the Head Start program, Pertile said.

The agency is also looking at the possibility of setting up a mobile food drive for local families in need, and Pertile is planning to provide weekly updates to staff and parents as they learn more.

Even if the shutdown ends tomorrow, it will still take some time to get operations back up and running, she added, noting that many Head Start participants in their rural community don’t have other options readily available for early learning programs, health checks and meals.

“The longer this goes on, the more concerned we get,” Pertile said. “Because we’re such a rural program, there are limited resources…they might be able to do it for a couple weeks, but then they might have to look for something more permanent.”

Looking ahead to next month, grants for another four Michigan Head Start programs will come up for renewal Dec. 1, Bozek said, meaning the financial pressures felt by Gogebic-Ontonagon and eight other programs could soon extend to others across Michigan.

Losing Head Start options would be “a huge hardship” to families whose parents need a safe place for their young children while at work, Bozek said.

But beyond that, she said, it would put early educators out of work and cut needy families off from a connector for additional resources, including food assistance, health care, and even warm coats for kids as the cold weather creeps in.

“When a Head Start program closes, it impacts the entire community,” Bozek said.

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Can Bikes Reduce Chronic Absenteeism for Detroit Students?

Hannah Dellinger — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 12:30:00 +0000

Some days, it takes Elyazar Holiday two hours and four buses to travel the 20 miles from his home on the far west side of Detroit to his school on the edge of the east side of the city.

The Detroit school district has limited yellow bus service, and none for most high school students. Like , the 17-year-old’s family car. Riding city buses to Davis Aerospace Technical High School is Holiday’s only option, but – with delays and missed buses – it .

Last year, Holiday received a gift from his school that made the trek easier: a bicycle.

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Principal Michelle Davis gave every student at the school a bike as part of a holistic approach to reducing chronic absenteeism. The bikes were funded through community donations.

Many of the nearly 100 students at Davis Aerospace last year said the bicycles helped them safely get to school by reducing the amount of time they had to walk to school or wait for buses. Others said the bikes gave them a new sense of independence, allowing them to travel around the city with their friends, get to after-school activities or jobs, and get exercise.

While Davis believes the bicycles improved attendance during good weather in the fall and spring, she said it’s only one measure the school is taking to get kids to class.

“Giving the students bikes is just one problem that we’ve solved for,” Davis told Chalkbeat. “What we do intentionally is solve for all of the problems that the kids have, because that has to be our major responsibility.”

The principal wanted her students to feel the same sense of independence she did as a teen when her mother bought her a pink Huffy.

So, Davis wrote “bikes” at the top of a white board next to her desk that lists her “big ideas.” And soon the vision came to fruition.

Other high schools in the district may also soon give bikes to their students. Last school year, the district surveyed high school students who were chronically absent about why they missed too much school. Some of the students said having a bike would help improve their attendance.

After the district’s school board , some members said they wanted the superintendent to follow up on whether a stock of “dozens” of bicycles in a storage warehouse could be used for that purpose.

Can bikes reduce chronic absenteeism in Detroit?

Chronic absenteeism, defined for Michigan students as missing 10% of the school year, has long been a problem in DPSCD. Issues such as high rates of poverty, , , and keep many children from missing crucial instructional time.

Students at Davis Aerospace say the bikes have helped address some of those barriers.

Holiday, for example, said his bike allows him to get to bus stops more quickly.

The first bus Holiday usually rides is regularly late by 20 minutes to an hour, he said.

If that bus doesn’t come in time, the teen has to decide whether he’ll go to another stop to try and catch a bus on a different route.

“I might miss those if I walk too slow, or I might be tired from trying to run to make it there,” he said.

Now, if the bus that runs on Plymouth Road doesn’t arrive, the teen can ride his bike to another stop. Or if Holiday isn’t able to catch a transfer due to delays, he can ride his bike the rest of the way to school.

“With the bike, I can still make up the distance or go to a different street to get on a different bus and still make it there on time,” he said.

His bike also makes him feel safer.

While violent crime rates have in recent years, many young people . Their sense of safety is shaped by many factors, including .

“A bike in itself is protection,” said Holiday. “You can use that to get away from the situation. You can use that as a barrier between you and something coming at you in the heat of the moment. You can even throw it.”

The bikes also help students left without a ride because their parents have to get younger kids to school earlier in the morning.

Myron Dean, a senior at Davis Aerospace, said while his parents take his five younger siblings to their schools, he has to get to school on his own.

With a bike, Dean can get to school in about seven minutes.

Dean is also using the bike to get to driver’s education classes so he can eventually drive himself and his siblings anywhere they need to go.

Junior Tryve Roberts said when no one in his family was able to give him a ride, he used to have to walk to school. It took about an hour, which would make him tardy.

Now, since he can get to school on the bike in about 16 minutes, he’s showing up on time more often.

and in other parts of the country suggest bicycles alone may reduce chronic absenteeism. Those who support the idea say using bikes to get to school gives more students access to transportation they otherwise wouldn’t have, can improve their health and well-being, and adds motivation for kids to improve attendance.

However, the successful examples proponents cite are in parts of the country with warmer climates, such as Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona.

At Davis Aerospace, the students are taught bike safety and instructed to not ride to school in poor weather conditions or during the winter.

There are nearly 165 miles of bike lanes in the city, , but not every neighborhood in the city has access to continuous dedicated bike paths.

Creating a culture of good attendance

DPSCD has made strides in in recent years. Several schools in the district have in reducing absenteeism.

At Davis Aerospace, the chronic absenteeism rate dropped by more than 14 percentage points last school year compared to 2023-24. Since 2018-19, the chronic absenteeism rate at the school fell by nearly 23 percentage points.

Even with that progress, more than 42% of Davis Aerospace students missed too many days of school last year. And the problem is more persistent in the district’s neighborhood schools.

For example, Denby High School, which is also on the east side of the city, had a chronic absenteeism rate of nearly 80% last year.

Some of Davis Aerospace’s progress may be due in part to the bikes, but the school had already been making steady progress in reducing absenteeism before that program.

“What we know is that there’s not just one thing that’s going to decrease absenteeism,” said Davis. “Every kid that has a barrier for attendance, we talk to those students. We see what the barriers are, and we solve for the student and their challenge to getting to school.”

At the school, which requires an application for students to attend, reducing absenteeism is ingrained in the culture.

A poster hanging on a brick wall by the school entrance tracks the daily attendance rate of each grade. Students who miss two days or fewer in the class with the highest attendance each month get rewards like cookies, nachos, or a movie day.

A room on the first floor of the school looks like a clothing boutique, except the clothes “for sale” are all marked “100% free.” Kids can grab the things they need to show up to school, like winter coats, gloves, and new shoes.

In another space, kids can get the hygiene products they need to show up ready to learn. There’s also a washer and dryer in the school where students can clean their clothes.

Davis said there are discussions around creating a parent carpool for kids who live near each other.

‘A form of freedom’

The gift of the bikes was not simply a pragmatic attempt to reduce absenteeism, said Davis. It was an act of love.

“When you’re a teenager, bikes are your first form of transportation, right?” Davis said. “It gives you a form of freedom. You explore the world with your bike.”

Junior Roderic Pippen said his bike helped him find a new hobby.

“I like to adventure on the bike – find new places to be at,” he said. “My bike trips are more fun than just sitting in the car, scrolling on the internet.”

Holiday will use his bike this year to attend biweekly events by the , a mentorship and college readiness nonprofit.

Before they got bikes, seniors Savannah Robinson and Ciana Carter felt stuck at home during summer breaks because their parents were busy with work.

Last summer, the girls had the freedom to ride to meet up and go to places like the beauty supply store and restaurants.

“Anytime she had a bad day over summer, I’d be like, come on, girl, let’s go ride our bikes and get fresh air,” said Robinson. “So it’s really helpful for both of us.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Outgoing State Schools Chief: Students Need More, Not Fewer, Instructional Days

Lori Higgins — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

On Friday, Michigan’s State Superintendent Michael Rice closes the book on a decades-long career as an educator.

Rice, who has been the state’s top education leader since 2019, paving the way for new leadership.

Glenn Maleyko, the current Dearborn Public Schools superintendent, . Until Maleyko starts, Sue Carnell, the chief deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education, .

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Rice led during a difficult time, with the pandemic upending education not even a year into his tenure. Students performed worse on state and national exams, chronic absenteeism surged, and student mental health concerns increased. Academic recovery has been slow, and despite small gains across the board on the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress this year, third graders posted their worst reading scores in the 11-year history of the exam.

In a recent Chalkbeat interview, Rice talked about some key issues that are critical to improved outcomes for students, including his insistence that Michigan lawmakers must act to stop schools from being able to count seven professional development days as instructional days. He said that flexibility, and others, mean students across Michigan could be receiving far less than the 180 days of instruction that are required by law.

Here are four takeaways from that interview:

The state gives schools too much flexibility to reduce the number of instructional days

Rice has repeatedly asked Michigan lawmakers to change state law to ensure students are receiving 180 days of instruction.

Rice is concerned because in recent years, state lawmakers have added flexibility in the law that allows schools to count up to seven professional development days — days when teachers are training and students are not in school — as instructional days.

Professional development, Rice said, “is immensely important.”

“But prior to the 2019-20 school year, professional development did not compete with instructional time,” he said. “It now does. Children shouldn’t have to pay for professional development of staff with lost instructional days.”

Schools also can shift to online instruction — meaning students are taught virtually — for up to 15 days. While those are technically instructional days, pandemic experience demonstrated that many students struggle with virtual learning.

Meanwhile, classes can be cancelled for reasons beyond the control of administrators, such as snow days and emergencies that close buildings.

It’s unclear to what extent Michigan schools are taking advantage of the flexibility lawmakers have given them for counting professional development as instructional days or going online. There is no requirement schools indicate how many of their instructional days include this flexibility.

But Rice is convinced it’s a problem in part because “we wouldn’t have the challenges of getting it rectified in the state legislature.”

Michigan has some deep educational challenges, but there have been some wins

Michigan student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, has been flat, with little improvement while other states are making significant progress. Literacy, particularly in the early grades, has been a challenge on state and national exams.

There have been some encouraging signs, which Rice easily rattled off during the interview as he discussed progress on the . That initiative outlines eight ambitious goals to improve education in the state and includes expanding early childhood learning, improving early literacy achievement, expanding postsecondary learning opportunities, increasing the percentage of students who graduate from high school, increasing the number of certified teachers in areas of shortages, and providing adequate and equitable school funding.

Rice cited examples of progress toward those goals: Lawmakers have allocated additional funding for some of the most vulnerable children — students from low-income homes, students with disabilities, students who are English language learners — to provide more equitable school funding. Substantially more children are enrolled in Michigan’s free preschool program, and the graduation rate of 82% for high school students is the highest it’s ever been.

But challenges persist, and the state hasn’t fully achieved any of the goals.

“If I could paraphrase Frost, and I like my poets, we have miles to go before we sleep on all of the issues. There’s been progress made … on every goal area, arrival on none,” Rice said.

Michigan can learn from Mississippi’s policies that led to big reading gains

A lot has been said about how the state of Mississippi has seen significant improvement in fourth grade reading on the NAEP, while Michigan’s performance has been flat. Mississippi was ranked ninth in the nation in fourth grade reading this year, up from 49th in 2013.

In Mississippi beginning in 2014, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (or LETRS) training was required for teachers in some state schools. LETRS is a professional development program based on the science of reading. The science of reading refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. (Since 2022, training.) Those schools were also required to hire literacy coaches.

Michigan has provided some funding in the state budget for the LETRS training, and more than 5,000 teachers have completed the training and another 7,000 have begun it, but Rice and the State Board of Education wants Michigan to make it mandatory for K-5 teachers. He has pointed to Mississippi as an example of why that’s important.

“The training was a priority, and it was a fundamental part in our progress toward understanding how our students learn to read through instruction aligned to structured literacy,” said Jean Cook, a spokesperson for the department.

Mississippi paid for training for general education teachers, special education teachers, administrators, speech-language pathologists, and other speech-related personnel, Cook said. As the state efforts grew, Cook said, “the training became strongly suggested rather than required.”

Rice said Mississippi “has been more focused than Michigan has,” and has “leaned into high quality, research based early literacy materials long before Michigan did.” He said they also recognized the value of low class sizes in high-poverty schools in grades K-3.

And just as important, Mississippi hasn’t allowed the incursions into student instructional time that Michigan has.

Michigan, to be sure, has focused efforts on literacy. In 2016, lawmakers passed legislation — the — that required schools to identify and intervene with struggling readers. The law also required schools retain struggling third-grade readers based on their performance on the M-STEP, though the law allowed a number of exemptions. The retention part of the law was rescinded in 2024.

Last fall, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed that require the Michigan Department of Education to identify reading curriculum that align with the science of reading, require schools to screen children to identify those who are struggling with dyslexia, and require teacher preparation programs to include instruction on identifying and addressing dyslexia.

Teacher shortages improving, but it’s not over yet

Michigan investments are paying off in reducing teacher shortages. Rice said that when he became state superintendent, there wasn’t any money in the state budget to address shortages. Since then, the state has invested millions of dollars in a number of efforts, including stipends for student teachers, scholarships for those going into teaching, and funding for “grow your own” programs. There has also been growth in programs aimed at strengthening the current workforce.

Teacher shortages “really had gotten quite acute immediately prior to the pandemic, and then exacerbated during the pandemic. We’re coming out of this,” Rice said.

He said the state went from having 23,000 people preparing for the profession in 2011 down to 9,500 in 2017. But now, he said, “we’re up to 18,000 preparing for the profession annually.”

But shortages are still a problem.

“When you go into the communities that are the most challenged, and you look in the classrooms and when they don’t have shortages, when they don’t have openings, when they have fully credentialed, strong teachers in every classroom, then we can say the shortage is over.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Will the Detroit School District’s Enrollment Efforts Pay Off?

Hannah Dellinger — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 10:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Despite the summer heat, Toyia Diab came out to the Summer on the Block at Pulaski Elementary-Middle School to learn what it had to offer the four grandchildren she had in tow.

The family made their way to about a dozen tables snaking around the lawn on the side of the school. Diab listened to staff from the Detroit school district detail all of its resources over the pulsing base of loud music.

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Diab’s family was one of many the Detroit Public Schools Community District courted this summer as part of its efforts to retain families and boost enrollment. With the loss of more than 92,000 students in the last 20 years, district officials devote some of the summer break each year to getting word out about what the city’s schools have to offer.

This year, the district ramped up efforts. It sent 40 people to canvas communities and held 19 events to create excitement about the start of school — nearly double that of previous years. It also started new initiatives, such as putting up billboards around the city. In all, the school system budgeted around this year. School starts Aug. 25.

Though the district has “done a fairly good job” of recruiting new students in previous years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told school board members at a that the main challenge is keeping them.

As a result, this year the school system also has focused on reenrollment rates. Those numbers have become a metric the district uses to “hold schools accountable,” Vitti said, though he didn’t share how many students the district typically loses during the school year.

“We have emphasized … the need to improve customer service and parent engagement, so that parents feel more welcome,” he said. “And we fight harder to keep students at the schools that they’re at, rather than having more of an attitude of, ‘Well, if you don’t like it here, then you can find another school.’”

Sharlonda Buckman, assistant superintendent of family and community engagement, told Chalkbeat the district has seen a lot of “good signs” for this school year because of the number of people her office reached in the summer.

“It’s noticeable for me, and I’ve been at this for a long time,” she said. “We’ll see what that boils down to, in terms of enrollment.”

This year, Buckman said nearly 5,000 people went to the Summer on the Block events, parties held at schools that both serve as a vehicle to sell families on sending their kids to the district and connect them with free resources.

“As a parent, you have to bring your kids to school every day in order to get the education that they need,” Diab said at the Pulaski back-to-school event. “But then you’ll find some schools, they just don’t have enough resources to keep them interested to come to school, to stay in school.”

All of the district’s summer efforts produced 532 leads on parents interested in enrolling their kids by mid-August. Around 80 of those students completed enrollment, according to the district.

Though initial enrollment numbers are up, officials say, the full impact of the district’s efforts won’t be known until the end of the 2025-26 school year.

Myriad factors have affected enrollment in DPSCD

Boosting student numbers has been among the district’s top priorities for years.

The numbers of students attending schools are crucial for districts in Michigan, where school funding is tied to enrollment.

Now that and the federal government has signaled , districts are bracing to rely more on local money.

A number of factors affected the district’s enrollment over the years, including , lower birthrates, the state’s , and . The district also faces competition from Detroit , where around .

High student mobility rates, or the rate at which kids move to different homes, contribute to the district’s difficulty in keeping children enrolled. rates also have a .

Enrollment in the district was more than . Last year, it was 49,000.

When DPSCD was created and the school system began being phased out of emergency management in the 2017-18 school year, enrollment shot up to more than 50,800 from 45,700 during the 2016-17 school year.

The district has struggled to move the needle much since, especially after drops during pandemic-era school closures and .

At the beginning of this month, there were 50,890 students enrolled in the district, Vitti said at the board meeting.

“We have about 1,400 more students than we did at the end of the year enrolled in DPSCD as of today, and about 500 more as compared to the first day of school,” he said, adding that “ “enrollment is trending in a positive direction.”

Early enrollment numbers for the district are usually higher than official headcounts made in October. The number of students recorded on is used by the state to calculate funding for districts.

Making the case for DPSCD face-to-face

Three days before the Summer on the Block at Pulaski, more than 20 people squeezed into a sun-filled classroom at the Detroit School of Arts.

The group was contracted by the district to canvas homes in areas where attendance is low compared to the number of school-aged children living there.

This summer, the district sent canvassers to more than 78,000 homes to inform families about its schools and programs.

The group at the School of Arts was gathered to get their assignments for the day. They waited to pick up hand-out materials, including fliers listing Summer on the Block dates and pamphlets highlighting programs at application schools.

To get the energy up in the classroom before they headed out, the canvassers stood up to form a circle. Buckman, the assistant superintendent, asked them to share what they heard door-knocking.

“We’re getting a good response in terms of some of those students coming back to the district,” said one woman.

Others expressed residents’ hesitations to open their doors or to give their contact information for the district to follow up with them.

Laura Gomez, who has been canvassing for three years, said through a translator that this summer has been different in southwest Detroit, which is home to many immigrant and newcomer families.

People in the neighborhood say they have seen more community members in recent months, including .

“There are some people that are really happy we’re going out to the houses because that way they don’t have to leave their home because they don’t feel safe,” she said.

After the canvassers broke out into teams, they drove to the areas they were assigned to for the day.

Tanya Shelton and her son, David, arrived in the Crary St. Mary’s neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city.

“We’ll ask them what school district are they in, and if they are interested in DPSCD, we give some information on it,” she said as she made her way down a long block adjacent to the Southfield Freeway.

In her conversations with families, Shelton said the district’s free school lunches piqued their interest. Other canvassers said parents were interested in learning more about the academic interventionists available to students.

Most of the doors Shelton knocked on that day, though, went unanswered. She left the district’s literature at dozens of houses.

Families weigh programming, academics, and transportation in selecting schools

At Pulaski’s Summer on the Block Alexa Franco-Garcia saw more students signing up to attend the school than she has in past years.

“Right now, I have three enrollment packets in my hand, so that means they’ve completed enrollment,” she said during a break from talking with families.

Another three parents left their contact information and said they would return the paperwork the next day.

Considering it was about 30 minutes into the event, that was a strong number, said Franco-Garcia, who works in the Office of Family and Community Engagement.

In her time working in the district, Franco-Garcia has learned what kinds of questions families ask: They want to know about the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and class sizes. They wonder whether their children will be supported in special education and if they will get a bus ride to school.

Most of the sign-ups at the Pulaski event were for kindergartners who were new to the district, Franco-Garcia said.

Enrolling early learners is one of the districts’ .

There were 457 students enrolled in prekindergarten by the beginning of August, according to the district, up about 10 compared to the same time last year.

Diab, the grandmother, brought four kids ages 5 to 12 out to learn more about the school. They heard about the district’s community health hubs, parent academy, and mental health resources.

Teachers from the school gathered around a welcome table ready to answer questions as Principal Tyra R. Smith-Bell floated around talking with parents.

The fresh produce boxes, ice cream truck, free books, and kids’ activities also enticed more than 350 people to come – many more than in previous years, Buckman said.

Linn Flake was the first second-grader of the day to enroll at Pulaski, said Franco-Garcia. It would be his first experience at a neighborhood school, she added.

His mom, Roxanne Flake, chose DPSCD over the charter school Linn went to last year.

“I just wanted a different start,” she said.

The charter school didn’t provide transportation, said Flake, which was an inconvenience because she doesn’t currently have a car. But the Detroit school district offered bus service for Linn to Pulaski, the mother said.

Diab said she had more research to do before her family committed to Pulaski.

“We’re gonna come here and we’re gonna figure everything out – ask questions, all of that stuff, and then if it’s the right fit for them, then we’re gonna put them in,” she said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Opinion: Fixing Michigan’s Teacher Shortage Isn’t Just About Getting More Recruits

Gail Richmond — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Nearly 500 of Michigan’s 705 school districts . That’s up from 262 districts at the beginning of the 2012 school year.

The number of vacancies is likely an undercount, because this number does not include substitutes or unqualified teachers who may have been hired to fill gaps.

and suggest that at least some Michigan districts are still struggling to fill open positions for the fall of 2025.

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The , but it is especially acute in Michigan, where the number of teachers leaving teaching and the . This shortage is particularly severe in urban and rural communities, , and in .

For more than two decades, has centered on designing and leading effective teacher preparation programs. My research focuses on ways to attract people to teaching and keep them in the profession by helping them grow into effective classroom leaders.

Low pay and lack of support

Teacher shortages are the result of , especially low salaries, heavy workloads and a lack of ongoing professional support.

A report released last year, for example, found that Michigan teachers and teachers nationwide make about .

From my experience working with teachers and district leadership across the state, I know that beginning teachers – especially those in districts which have severe shortages – are often given the most challenging teaching loads. And in some districts, teachers have been forced to work without the benefit of any kind of planning time in their daily schedule.

The , . Yet another culprit is the many teachers who, in Michigan as well as nationally, were hired during the 1960s and early ’70s, when school enrollments saw a massive increase, .

Creating pathways to certification

One recent strategy to address the teacher shortage in Michigan has been to create nontraditional routes to teacher certification.

The idea . A variety of agencies – from the Michigan Department of Education, state-level grants programs such as , as well as private foundations and businesses – have helped these programs along financially.

Even some school districts, including the Detroit Public Schools Community District, have adopted this strategy in order to certify teachers and fill vacant positions.

Other similar programs are the product of partnerships between Michigan’s , community colleges and four-year colleges and universities. One example is , which targets interested students of college age. Another is MSU’s , designed to attract students into teaching while they are still in high school.

Perhaps even more visible are national programs such as and . Candidates in such programs often work as full-time teachers while completing teacher training coursework with minimal oversight or support.

‘Stuffing the pipeline’ is not the solution

But simply “stuffing the pipeline” with new recruits is not enough to solve the teacher-shortage problem in Michigan.

The loss of teachers is and . This starts while they are preparing to be certified and .

The primary reasons for the higher attrition rates include a lack of awareness of the complexity of schools and schooling, the lack of effective mentoring during the certification period, and the absence of instructional and .

How to repair the leaky faucet

So how can teachers be encouraged to stay in the profession?

Here are a few of the things scholars have learned to and :

Temper expectations. Teaching is a critically important career, but leading individuals to believe that they can repair the damage done by a complex set of socioeconomic issues – including multigenerational poverty and lack of access to healthy and affordable food, housing, drinking water and health care – puts beginning teachers on .

Give student teachers strong mentors. Working in schools helps student teachers deepen their knowledge not only of teaching but also of how schools, families and communities work together. But these experiences are useful only if they are and supported by .

Recognize the limits of online learning. Online teacher preparation programs are convenient and have their place but don’t provide student teachers with real-world experience and opportunities for guided discussion about what they see, hear and feel when working with students.

Respect the process of “becoming.” Professional support should not end when a new teacher is officially certified. Teachers, like other professionals such as nurses, doctors and lawyers, need time to develop skills throughout their careers.

Providing this support sends a powerful message: that teachers are valued members of the community. Knowing that .

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

School Choice: Nonprofits in Blue States See Opportunity in Federal Tax Credit

Linda Jacobson — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:30:00 +0000

For 27 years, the BASIC Fund, a nonprofit, has awarded scholarships to help families in nine Bay Area counties in California to send their children to private school. CEO Rachel Elginsmith likes to collect testimonials from parents about what the financial assistance means to them.

“Private school gives us peace of mind,” Rolando Zamora, a father of two, wrote to her.

With a family of six living on one income, Chris Meija said the scholarship “certainly helped ease some of the financial burden.”

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Organizations like the BASIC Fund, many of which are located in blue states, have operated out of the spotlight, quietly raising money from private donors to support kids from lower-income families. But now, with recent passage of the first-ever for private school choice, part of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” they could soon be thrust into a public debate over the next phase of the school choice movement.

“We’ve been much more focused on just trying to help families and don’t want to get into the political fray, necessarily,” Elginsmith said. This fall, the BASIC Fund will help 3,100 students to attend 260 private schools. But with the federal tax credit coming in 2027, she can’t resist thinking about reaching more of the 300 to 500 applicants each year who don’t receive funding, she said. “We’re not against public schools; we just think that they aren’t the best thing for everybody.”

President Donald Trump signed his “One Big Beautiful Bill” outside the White House July 4. (Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Ever since Trump gathered with Republicans on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4 to sign the bill, commentators have focused on one central question: What will blue states do? The Treasury Department still has to write rules for the program, but overall, the law allows taxpayers to get a dollar-for-dollar credit, up to $1,700, if they donate to a scholarship granting organization, like the BASIC Fund. Because the legislation lets states choose whether to participate, many assume that those under Democratic control will remain firmly opposed to anything that looks like a voucher. But Colyn Ritter, a senior research associate at EdChoice, an advocacy organization, said he “wouldn’t argue with anyone” who thinks states with existing scholarship programs would be in the best position to opt in.

BASIC is among several groups affiliated with the Children’s Scholarship Fund in New York, which annually helps about 7,000 students from low-income families across New York City attend private school. The nonprofit has partners that grant scholarships in Oregon, Massachusetts and New Jersey, to name a few other blue states.

“Those folks presumably have relationships with some state policymakers, which we think could be helpful,” said John Schilling, a consultant and adviser to the conservative American Federation for Children, a school choice advocacy group. He worked to keep the tax credit in the Republicans’ reconciliation bill, but is now shifting his attention to the states. Listing other Democratic strongholds, like Massachusetts and Illinois, he said, “These are places where parents desperately need some additional options.”

Supporters of the tax credit describe it as “” for education and argue it’s misleading to call it a voucher because the scholarships are funded by private donations — not federal funds directly. Still, tax experts predict the could range anywhere from $8 billion to more than $100 billion per year, and opponents hope to convince political leaders and the public that the program is a bad idea.

“Whether you call it a voucher or a scholarship program … this is what’s going to happen,” former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona warned last month on a media call. “Public education dollars will be siphoned off to pay for vouchers for private schools that don’t have to accept all students. If students in many of these private schools struggle, they’re going to be sent back to these underfunded public schools.”

Others argue that private schools participating in choice programs aren’t subject to the same accountability and anti-discrimination requirements as public schools.

“There are no testing requirements, no standards, no teacher certification mandates or any other mechanisms to ensure that participating private schools would provide an adequate education to students,” said Patrick Cremin, a staff attorney for the Education Law Center, which is opposed to the program.

He doesn’t want blue states to be tempted by the fact that the federal program would also allow groups like BASIC to create scholarships for students in public schools. Families could put the money toward tutoring, books, therapies and technology — to name a few uses. Despite their “constitutional obligation to fund public schools,” there’s a risk, Cremin said, that states would shortchange districts if they expect taxpayers’ donations to cover some expenses.

Powerful political forces’

Because the tax credit doesn’t take effect for another year and a half, the debate over opting in could surface in the 38 states where voters will elect governors this year and next.

For now, choice advocates in California, where voters are expected to elect another Democrat when term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom leaves office, aren’t hopeful about their prospects. Lizette Vallas, who runs a in Los Angeles, blamed the .

“The California Teachers Association is one of the most powerful political forces in the state. Any legislation or opt-in mechanism that diverts funding — even indirectly — from public schools to private or nontraditional models is almost always met with unified resistance,” she said. “While federal policy is nudging open the door for school choice, California continues to reinforce the frame around its own tightly held model.”

David Goldberg, the association’s president, “a distraction.”

In other states, like and , the race for governor is , meaning the federal tax credit has the potential to become a central campaign issue, said Joshua Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and Democrat who is also running for Congress.

The bill that included the tax credit is already causing budget challenges for state leaders, he said. Michigan, for one, is facing in extra costs in 2026 because the federal package cut tax rates and shifted some nutrition and health care spending to states..

As a Democrat, Cowen said his party needs a platform that focuses on prioritizing support for public schools, but he said even governors who have been dead set against vouchers may have to consider how the tax credit could support programs like afterschool tutoring.

“States like mine are going to be desperate for new sources of revenue,” he said. “I could certainly see governors’ offices taking a look at this program — not because they necessarily love it — but because you’ve got revenue problems caused by the same exact bill that’s authorizing this.”

Joshua Cowen, right, is an education professor, voucher opponent and Michigan Democrat running for Congress. He said regardless of party, governors may have to consider opting into the new federal tax credit because of budget challenges. (Courtesy of Joshua Cowen)

‘Families who are pinched the most’

Observers speculate that Pennsylvania could be the first blue state to opt in. came close to supporting an education savings account bill in 2023, and the state already offers two tax credit programs for corporations that donate to scholarships.

A from the conservative Commonwealth Foundation showed that only about half of the students who applied for aid in Pennsylvania during the 2022-23 school year received it. Those figures, school choice advocates say, are further evidence that is soaring.

Illinois, another Democrat-led state, had a tax credit scholarship program, serving about 15,000 students, until lawmakers allowed it to . Nonprofits and Republican lawmakers are now urging Gov. J.B. Pritzker to participate in the federal program.

“Families and kids have borne the brunt of the program ending with many being unable to continue at their school or having to give up on the hope of attending their dream school,” said Bobby Sylvester, vice president of the Urban Center, a think tank. The tax credit “will cost Illinois nothing, but would make all the difference to the families who lost their scholarships.”

While not as as Illinois, Colorado is the home state of ACE, another network of scholarship granting organizations. About $400,000 of the more than $11 million it awards in scholarships each year in the state goes to Mullen High School in Denver. The Christian Brothers, a Catholic congregation providing education to the poor, originally founded the school in the 1930s as an orphanage. Today, the 800-student Catholic school serves “some very rich kids and some super poor kids,” said Raul Cardenas Jr., president and CEO.

The financial support from ACE, he said, has been especially helpful to middle-income families who otherwise wouldn’t be able to fit private school in their budget. Two years ago, when he reduced scholarship awards for families in that income bracket by just $1,000, several left the school. This coming school year, leaders, he said “were very intentional about addressing that gap,” and if Colorado opts into the program, he would further expand financial assistance to those families.

“It’s always middle income families who are pinched the most,” he said. “I see this as a way to really help them.”

Mullen High School, a Catholic school in Denver, receives about $400,000 from ACE Scholarships each year. If Colorado opts into the new federal tax credit, leaders would increase financial aid to middle income families. (Mullen High School)

Voters in the Centennial State have resisted private school choice. Colorado is one of where the issue failed at the ballot box last year. A constitutional amendment would have created a right to the full array of options, including private schools and “future innovations in education.” The vote was extremely close, 50% to 49%. In two previous state elections, voters more decisively rejected vouchers, by a 2-1 margin in and with 60% of the vote in .

Colorado might only opt into the federal program if the Treasury Department allows states the flexibility to “carefully regulate” scholarship granting organizations, said Kevin Welner, an education researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Gov. Jared Polis, or his successor in 2026, could find the tax credit acceptable if “students in public schools receive the same level of benefits” as those in private schools, he said.

But Schilling, with American Federation for Children, would have a problem with states that approve organizations providing financial support to public school kids, but not those that supplement tuition at private schools.

“Blue state governors who want to remain in the good graces of the teachers’ unions may say ‘OK, I’ll opt in but we only want to serve students through public schools,’ ” he said. Regardless of which students the nonprofits want to serve, states, he said, “shouldn’t be picking and choosing.”

Detroit Schools Have Highest Cuts to Federal Funding in Michigan

Andrew Roth — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Detroit schools are facing some of the deepest cuts to federal funding in the country as The White House withholds $6.2 billion of funds nationwide.

The appropriations were already approved by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

But the administration informed states that they would be withholding the funding for five programs that support educator development, student enrichment programs, migrant education, English learners and 21st-century learning centers.

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While data isn’t available for the program supporting migrant education, federal data organized by shows that Michigan stands to lose $81.6 million across the other four programs – accounting for more than $65 per student in the state.

The deepest cuts are in areas represented in Congress by Democrats, with those school districts facing a loss of $45 million compared to nearly $36.6 million in areas represented by a Republican.

That’s an average of $7.5 million per school district in Democratic areas compared to $5.2 million per district in Republican areas.

Michigan’s seven Republican members of Congress represent 713,666 students, while the six Democrats in Michigan’s congressional delegation represent 530,785 students.

On average, school districts represented by a Democrat would lose about $84 per student, while school districts represented by Republicans would lose about $51 per student.

That’s a reversal from the national trend, where the average school district represented by a Republican would lose 1.6 times as much funding per pupil than those represented by a Democrat.

That’s in part because while 91 of the 100 school districts nationwide facing the deepest cuts are in Republican congressional districts, Detroit is one of the ten districts with the most funding at risk.

They would lose the third most funding nationwide for student support and enrichment programs and the sixth most funding for education development.

In total, the district has more than $16 million on the line.

U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Detroit) represents the hardest hit congressional district, which stands to lose about $210 per student, followed by U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) at about $87 per pupil.

The school district has the highest poverty rate across the 46 states for which data was available at 46.9%.

Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti could not be reached for comment.

Zahava Stadler is the project director of the Education Funding Equity Initiative in the Education Policy Program at New America.

She told Michigan Advance that highly impoverished districts are likely to face significant cuts since poverty rates are a consideration for some federal grants.

“Higher poverty districts are going to be hit again and again and again as the federal government dithers over whether or not to release all of these individual funding streams to which school districts are legally entitled,” Stadler said.

The federal government withholding the already-allocated funding has made it even more difficult for schools to plan their budgets after the Republican-led Michigan House of Representatives by their deadline of July 1.

Even if school districts are able to maintain the programs through other funding sources, Stadler said they wouldn’t be able to then reimburse those funds later on if the federal funds came through.

“Money can’t just get moved around at will,” Stadler said. “Federal dollars have rules. And the administration is throwing districts into chaos as they are rapidly approaching a new school year.”

Beyond the programs themselves having an impact on students, Stadler said the fight over funding also symbolizes the wrong message for the students who benefit from them.

“The message that these kids are getting is that their country doesn’t want to invest in them, their schools aren’t able to invest in them,” Stadler said. “And that is a really difficult and tragic thing to hear as a young person who is just trying to grow and thrive in a community of which they’re a member.”

Michigan’s State Superintendent Demands Release of $160 Million in Federal Funding

Lori Higgins — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Michigan’s top education leader is urging the Trump administration to release nearly $7 billion in funding the federal government is withholding from schools nationwide.

In Michigan, that includes nearly $160 million.

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The funding, approved by Congress earlier this year as part of a continuing budget resolution signed by President Donald Trump in March, was supposed to be distributed Tuesday. But the Trump administration said Monday it would not release the funds, .

“These federal dollars support some of our most economically disadvantaged and vulnerable students,” Michigan State Superintendent Michael Rice said in a statement Wednesday. “The U.S. Department of Education should provide the approved funding immediately.”

The money funds programs that support migrant education ($5.4 million), services for English learners ($12.8 million), staff professional development ($63.7 million), before- and after-school programs ($36.7 million), and academic enrichment ($38.3 million), Rice said.

Rice said that based on past practice, “local school districts were rightly counting on this approved funding by July 1.”

He said the Michigan Department of Education, which he oversees, “is working with colleagues across the country and with legal counsel to reflect upon the adverse impact to students, staff, and schools of this withholding.”

It was unclear Wednesday afternoon if the department is considering legal action.

A spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said Wednesday that the move to withhold the funding was part of an ongoing programmatic review of education funding, and that no decisions had been made yet.

Initial findings, the spokesperson said, “have shown that many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Detroit Teen Detained by ICE Has Been Deported to Colombia, Attorney Says

Lori Higgins — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Maykol Bogoya-Duarte, the Detroit teen whose detention by federal immigration authorities last month caused an outcry and led to calls for his release, has been deported, his attorney said Friday morning.

Attorney Ruby Robinson said he learned late Thursday night from Maykol’s mother, in an 11:15 p.m. voicemail, that the teen was back in his home country of Colombia.

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Robinson said he hadn’t yet spoken with Maykol, but hoped to do so later Friday. He said the teen is now with his grandmother in Colombia.

Chalkbeat reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to confirm the deportation, but did not get a response. His information is no longer available on .

while he and a group of other newcomer boys attempted to join a field trip at Lake Erie Metropark, about 25 miles away from Detroit. Rockwood police stopped the teen for allegedly tailgating another car. Maykol did not have a driver’s license, only a City of Detroit identification card, Robinson has previously said.

His detention prompted advocacy from his teachers, fellow students, community members, and lawmakers who pleaded for Maykol to be allowed to remain in the country to finish high school. He was 3.5 credits shy of a high school diploma at Western International High School, where he was enrolled.

“I’m devastated,” said Kristen Schoettle, who taught Maykol at Western.

“The cruelty of this country really shakes me,” Schoettle said. “This kid, my bright student, was passed along to prisons for a month, scared and facing awful conditions I’m sure, for the crime of what — fleeing his country as a minor in search of a better life? And the US government decided his time was better spent in prison than finishing out the school year.”

Schoettle said she hopes to hear from Maykol today.

“I hope he’s safe with his grandma. I hope he can recover from this traumatizing experience and still will dream of a better life. I’ll miss him in my classroom next year and our city and our country are worse off without people like him,” she said.

Schoettle shared examples of Maykol’s classroom work with Chalkbeat, including what he wrote when asked earlier this year to write about freedom.

“I think the freedom in this moment is a little confusing since we can’t leave safely since we don’t know what can happen and it seems strange to me since we have to be more careful than usual,” he wrote in Spanish.

Thousands of people signed a petition earlier last week .

for more than 2½ hours at the district’s school board meeting on June 10. Afterward, the board released a statement saying it wanted Maykol to be able to stay in the country to earn his diploma.

Maykol’s mother attended that school board meeting, though she didn’t speak. Robinson, senior managing attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said the organization isn’t representing Maykol’s mother.

“But I would suspect she will try to return to Colombia at her own expense based on what she learned with Maykol’s month-long, taxpayer-funded, and entirely unnecessary and harmful detention.”

During the May 20 traffic stop that led to his detention, police officers could not communicate with him in Spanish and called Customs and Border Protection agents to translate.

Maykol, who came to the U.S. when he was 16, had already been going through a legal process to return to Colombia after receiving a final order of deportation in 2024. He was working with immigration officials and the Colombian Consulate to obtain the documentation he needed to fly out of the country with his mother.

While he made those arrangements, Maykol planned to finish high school in Detroit.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Michigan Senate Democrats Won’t Consider a Trans Athlete Sports Ban. Will Trump Target the State?

Hannah Dellinger — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

The Republican-controlled House passed two bills last week that would bar transgender girls from competing on girls sports teams. But Democrats, who control the Senate, say they will not consider the legislation.

“Our legislative agenda is long and attacking kids is not on it,” Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, a Democrat from Grand Rapids, told Chalkbeat in a statement.

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Failure to take up the Republican-sponsored bills could draw unwelcome political attention to Michigan at a time when the Trump administration has targeted for investigation states that don’t comply with its view on Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on sex.

Since taking office for the second time, targeting the rights of transgender Americans. One in January said the U.S. government would only recognize two genders, male and female, while another issued that month attempted to ban gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. A February called for schools to block trans girls from competing on girls sports teams.

Trump has funding from schools that don’t comply with his executive orders.

Executive orders cannot override existing state and federal statutes, though, and there have been to the constitutionality of Trump’s executive orders.

But the Trump administration’s have stoked fears over how he intends to enforce it. Multiple federal agencies into Maine this year after a heated exchange between Trump and the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, in which she promised to follow the state’s law protecting transgender rights.

In one of those federal cases, a judge issued an injunction to stop the government from freezing federal funds to the state. But there are to enforce.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has said other states are at risk of losing federal funding for Title IX violations, specifically singling out California and Minnesota. Officials in those states have with Trump’s executive order. Bondi’s office announced Wednesday that it has .

Like some other states, Michigan recently expanded state protections from discrimination on the basis of sexuality and gender identity and expression. The expansion of those protections two years ago has long been a signature issue for Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

She signed the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act in 2023, saying in a statement that “Michigan is a place that will fight for your freedom to be yourself.”

It is possible what has happened in Maine could happen in Michigan, said Nancy Chi Cantalupo, associate professor of law at Wayne State University.

“But what is happening in Maine is in no way a success for the current administration at this point,” she said, noting that the federal government has never withdrawn funds from a state under Title IX or any other civil rights statutes it enforces.

“It’s not like there’s a light switch the federal government can use to just turn off federal funds at its whim,” she said. “There are a lot of steps it has to go through.”

Brinks did not respond to a question about whether she or others in the Democratic Party have concerns Michigan may be targeted by the Trump administration.

Whitmer’s office did not respond to questions about the bills.

In Michigan, a prohibition against trans girls competing on girls sports teams would affect few athletes statewide. The Michigan High School Athletic Association, the private organization that runs the state’s high school sports competitions, said there were no trans girls competing on spring sports teams this year. None played on winter sports teams, while two played on fall teams.

About 25 states similar laws restricting trans girls from playing on sports teams aligned with their gender identity.

Advocates for transgender rights say sports bills aren’t really about limiting the teams trans girls and women can play on.

“If this bill were just about sports, it wouldn’t be proposed in coordination with all of these other anti-trans bills [nationwide,]” said Kye Campbell-Fox, a research assistant and laboratory manager at Michigan State University, who studies the impact of legislation targeting the rights of trans kids. “This is a coordinated campaign to push trans people out of public life.”

Advocates say trans youth don’t feel safe as their rights are attacked

Though the Michigan bills have effectively died, advocates say lawmakers’ focus on the issue — and the language they often use to talk about trans athletes — is still harmful to all trans children.

The Michigan bills, for example, referred to trans girls as “biological males,” ignoring their gender identities. And some lawmakers have said that the presence of trans girls in locker rooms could lead to sexual violence against other girls.

Rep. Mike Harris, a Republican from Waterford, said during a hearing for the bills that he was concerned about the potential for sexual assault if trans girls use girls locker rooms.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to place biological boys and girls in the same room, to strip down naked next to each other,” he said.

There is no evidence to support the idea that trans girls will assault other girls, though there is evidence that when they use bathrooms according to the sex they were assigned at birth.

Republican lawmakers’ rhetoric students and adults to feel freer to make hateful remarks, and LGBTQ+ youth are being affected by it.

“I’m hearing a lot of fear from youth,” said Jude Krajnyák, a regional coordinator for a research policy project at the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health. “Things everyone else gets to take for granted — like playing soccer in middle school — are rights that are being taken away from us.”

Krajnyák said he heard from a trans girl in middle school who gave up on playing soccer because she said “it’s just not worth” the backlash.

Currently, the Michigan High School Athletic Association determines eligibility for trans girls to play on girls teams on a case-by-case basis. The executive director of the association, Mark Uyl, makes the determination based on a number of factors, including what gender is recorded on the students’ school documents and other paperwork. Students are also asked whether they’ve begun hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries.

“The MHSAA asks for documentation on therapy and surgery as our policy allows for a waiver to be both approved and denied — and part of that decision is based on where in the transitioning process a student is at the time,” Geoff Kimmerly, director of communications for the association, told Chalkbeat.

The policy went into effect in 2012, according to the association. It aligned with federal law during the Obama administration, as well as federal requirements from the Office for Civil Rights during Trump’s first term and Biden’s presidency.

“The MHSAA follows and will continue to follow all applicable state and federal laws,” said Kimmerly in a statement. “We are monitoring developments in this regard closely.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Detroit’s Lack of Affordable Housing Pushes Families to the Edge – and Children Sometime Pay the Price

Meghan Wilson and John Kuk — Thu, 01 May 2025 12:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

As outside temperatures dropped to the low- to mid-teens Fahrenheit on Feb. 10, 2025, of in a family van parked in a Detroit casino parking garage.

We are who study , and in the months since this tragedy, we took a deep look at the trends in homelessness and housing policies that foreshadowed the events of that night.

More kids are experiencing homelessness

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One important trend is that the number of homeless children in the city reached a record high in 2024. This is true even though the overall numbers of people experiencing homelessness in the city is declining overall.

According to the Point-in-Time count, , up from 312 the year before. The count captures data for one night each year.

Most of these children were unhoused but considered sheltered because they had a place to sleep in an emergency shelter or transitional housing, or were able to temporarily stay with family or friends.

Nineteen of the kids were unsheltered – meaning they were sleeping in places not designed for human habitation, like cars, parks or abandoned buildings.

A different set of data comes from the Detroit Public Schools. The district looked at the entire and found that roughly 1 in 19 students were unhoused at some point during that nine-month period — more than double the number in the school year.

A lack of temporary solutions

The lack of adequate funding and staffing means unhoused people often struggle to access temporary shelter beds.

That includes kids. Even though , the number of unsheltered children of school age has nearly tripled in three years, rising from an estimated 48 in the to 142 in the . These figures align with the rise in unsheltered children recorded in the one-night Point-in-Time count, which increased from four in 2016 to 19 in 2024.

The is likely to increase the need for shelter and put additional strain on Detroit’s response to the crisis.

Gaps in a vital system

Children who experience housing insecurity are often caught in the middle of bureaucracy and failed regulation.

The mother of the children who died in February in November 2024 when they were staying with a family member. The mother noted that she wanted to keep all five of her children together.

According to a report issued by the city, . Her situation was not considered an emergency at the time of contact since she was sheltered with family.

At the time of the call, the family was a – in other words, not the . If the city had deemed the situation an emergency, protocol would be to dispatch immediate support for the family.

The mother moved her family to the van after the request for help failed to provide a solution.

The Detroit mayor’s office and promised and require homeless outreach employees to visit any unhoused families that call for help.

“We have to make sure that we do everything possible to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Deputy Mayor Melia Howard told local media.

More than 8 in 10 placed on wait list

According to , the system responsible for connecting individuals to shelters, 82% of calls do not result in immediate help but rather being placed on a shelter waitlist. Similar to , the wait time is long.

Families in Detroit face , while unaccompanied youth typically .

The long wait for shelter has contributed to the rise in people living on the streets or in their vehicles. The number of unsheltered individuals — including both adults and children — doubled from to 305 in 2024. This trend of increasing unsheltered homelessness contrasts with the overall decline in the total number of homeless people in the city, which is down from a peak of 2,597 in 2015.

Children need to thrive.

Their access to stable housing depends on their parents and what the adults in their life are able to provide. As , some children are .

Stricter regulations

Over the past decade, Detroit, like many other U.S. cities, has experienced rising housing costs while wages , .

Since 2021, the number of rentals in the city has .

. Since 2017, the average rent in Detroit has increased 55% for single-family homes and 43% for multifamily homes.

While inflation and to this rise, stricter like the , and have played an important role.

Some landlords pass the expense of these regulations on to tenants, making housing less affordable. Others leave their properties vacant, pushing up prices by lessening the supply.

The current average fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Detroit is . For the typical household in the city, this basic shelter cost, not including utilities, .

For the lowest-income households, any unexpected expense can disrupt a delicate financial balance and lead to eviction and homelessness. Children in these situations often face major instability, moving between shelters – or, as in the case of the children who died in February, sleeping in cars.

This kind of displacement , and .

Detroit’s stricter housing regulations may have improved conditions for some renters, but a report by Outlier Media shows that of landlords are in compliance, in subpar rentals at higher prices.

And these new rules have victims who are too often ignored until tragedy strikes.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Michigan’s Education Board Passes Resolution Condemning Trump Orders to ‘Defund’ Public Education

Jon King — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

The Michigan State Board of Education has passed a resolution condemning executive orders and directives by the Trump administration designed to “dismantle public education, weaken civil rights protections, and destabilize the economic security of hardworking families.”

Passed at Tuesday’s meeting of the board, the takes aim at Trump’s orders to “defund the U.S. Department of Education,” which it says will jeopardize education funding for Michigan’s schools, as well as the “futures of low-income, special education, and at-risk students.” The board also challenged other Trump executive orders to, among other things; deprive schools of funding if they don’t eliminate initiatives that advance diversity, equity and inclusion, attack curriculum standards, and prioritize privatization and school vouchers which divert funding away from public schools.

“Some would suggest that we accept these changes without question, but let’s be clear—this type of change is not an evolution of policy, it is a dismantling of opportunity,” said State Board of Education President Dr. Pamela Pugh. “More disheartening is that what some call ‘change’ will be detrimental for our schools and most vulnerable children, our economy, and our communities. Our children are already suffering under years of harmful policies, and this will only push them further behind.”

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The resolution passed along party lines, with all Democratic board members voting in favor. Of the two Republican members, Tom McMillin voted no and Nikki Snyder opted not to vote. Snyder had attempted to add an amendment to the resolution to adopt Trump’s executive order “keeping men out of women’s sports,” but that failed, also along party lines, with McMillin and Snyder providing the only two votes in favor.

Prior to that vote, state school Superintendent Dr. Michael Rice noted that the issue of transgender athletes was not one affecting the vast majority of high school athletes.

“Because we can go really deep into the rabbit hole here, I want to make it clear where we are,” he said, adding that the Michigan High School Athletic Association indicated there were only two transgender girls participating at the high school level, both in cross country.

“The board of the MHSAA determined that there were no safety issues in cross country and that there were no competitive disadvantages associated with these two running cross country,” said Rice.

McMillin, however, said that wasn’t the point.

“I don’t care if there’s one or two or none right now or whenever, but we’re talking about in the future,” he said. “This is very simple. You either support boys playing against girls in girls’ sports, or you don’t.”

Board member, and former state Sen. Marshall Bullock (D-Detroit), objected to the amendment even being added, saying it was not germane to a resolution condemning the defunding of public education.

“I get the political play. You guys can play that all day. I’m good at it, but it’s almost insulting to add it because the resolution is about everyone, not just specifically women, not just specifically the disabled,” he said. “This resolution is about the executive orders that infringe upon the rights of everyone.”

Despite the open display of partisanship, Pugh said the resolution had a broader purpose.

“We refuse to stand by while students lose access to funding for their education and while our democracy is dismantled piece by piece,” said Dr. Pugh. “This is not about partisanship—this is about right and wrong. And history is watching. Will we stand up, or will we surrender to these attacks on our schools and families?”

Just hours after the resolution passed, it was after 600 voluntarily took buyouts, reducing the department’s workforce to roughly half the number in place when President Donald Trump took office.

Also passed Tuesday was a resolution in support of all elementary school children having music instruction while in school. According to the resolution, Michigan is currently one of only six states and Washington, D.C. that does not require music instruction in elementary school.

michigan – ��������

Detroit School Board Considers Changes to PTAs After Complaints About Conflicts

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Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

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Michigan Lawmakers Take Aim at Fixing the State’s K-12 School Literacy Crisis

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

Groups Seek Funding Fix to Help Michigan Grow Dual Enrollment Even More

Meetings students’ evolving needs

Providing incentives

Justice Dept. Probes 3 Michigan Districts Over LGBTQ-Related Curriculum

‘Capacity issue’

Whitmer Aims to Boost Literacy As Michigan Students Struggle With Reading

Teachers, Parents Increasingly Back Cell Phone Bans in Michigan Schools

From passive presence to active participation

Parental approval

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A shifting focus to phonics

How a child learns best

Rosa Parks’ Story Didn’t End in Montgomery. These Students Are Proof of That.

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Can Bikes Reduce Chronic Absenteeism for Detroit Students?

Can bikes reduce chronic absenteeism in Detroit?

Creating a culture of good attendance

‘A form of freedom’

Outgoing State Schools Chief: Students Need More, Not Fewer, Instructional Days

The state gives schools too much flexibility to reduce the number of instructional days

Michigan has some deep educational challenges, but there have been some wins

Michigan can learn from Mississippi’s policies that led to big reading gains

Teacher shortages improving, but it’s not over yet

Will the Detroit School District’s Enrollment Efforts Pay Off?

Myriad factors have affected enrollment in DPSCD

Making the case for DPSCD face-to-face

Families weigh programming, academics, and transportation in selecting schools

Opinion: Fixing Michigan’s Teacher Shortage Isn’t Just About Getting More Recruits

Low pay and lack of support

Creating pathways to certification

‘Stuffing the pipeline’ is not the solution

How to repair the leaky faucet

School Choice: Nonprofits in Blue States See Opportunity in Federal Tax Credit

Powerful political forces’

‘Families who are pinched the most’

Detroit Schools Have Highest Cuts to Federal Funding in Michigan

Michigan’s State Superintendent Demands Release of $160 Million in Federal Funding

Detroit Teen Detained by ICE Has Been Deported to Colombia, Attorney Says

Michigan Senate Democrats Won’t Consider a Trans Athlete Sports Ban. Will Trump Target the State?

Advocates say trans youth don’t feel safe as their rights are attacked

Detroit’s Lack of Affordable Housing Pushes Families to the Edge – and Children Sometime Pay the Price

More kids are experiencing homelessness

A lack of temporary solutions

Gaps in a vital system

More than 8 in 10 placed on wait list

Stricter regulations

Michigan’s Education Board Passes Resolution Condemning Trump Orders to ‘Defund’ Public Education

michigan – ��