Charles Honey: All right. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Study Hall from School News Network, your window into the public schools of Kent County, Michigan. Special welcome to the listeners of WGVU. We are glad you're on board to this mini version of our extended podcast, which you can find on our School News Network website or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. Welcome aboard. It's a new school year and we're getting into some big financial issues this school year. The problem being that schools begin this week, but there's a major piece missing, which is the money. The state and federal funding that is either in limbo due to political gridlock, or that's simply been cut in the drastic downsizing of education funding in the Trump administration. Here with us to help understand the situation is a very good source for these kinds of things. Dan Behm is executive director of Education Advocates of West Michigan which is a collaborative of the Kent, Muskegon and Ottawa area ISDs that works for fuller state funding and legislative policy reform. Dan's been in education for more than 30 years, 17 of those as superintendent of Forest Hills Public Schools. Welcome, Dan. Thanks for being with us on Study Hall today.
Dan Behm: Charlie, it's great to be here.
Charles Honey: I'm just going to call this the school funding mess. How much of a mess is it?
Dan Behm: It's a big mess and kind of a needless mess, but it's certainly a mess.
Charles Honey: Let's talk about the fact that the state legislature, although school districts passed their budgets by July 1st as required by law, the state legislature did not pass their budget by July 1st as also required by law.
Dan Behm: Correct.
Charles Honey: Apparently with no penalty.
Dan Behm: Correct:
Charles Honey: They're still working on it. It's an open question as to how soon they can get this budget passed.
Dan Behm: Yeah. The crux of the problem is politics and its politics over the next election. Republicans trying to overtake the Senate controlled by Democrats right now and the governor's office and Democrats trying to hold those spots as well. You know, lawmakers at the state level deal with politics, but the Constitution also requires that they govern and governing that they have to do every year is to put a budget together. It's actually 17 different budgets, but the K-12 budget is a massive one.
Charles Honey: How massive is it?
Dan Behm: It's north of $20 billion. There's plenty of money that is there in the budget. The issue isn't really that there's too little money. It's that they want to use the School Aid Fund for this other political football, which is road funding. They want to be able to push costs out of the general fund and free up a couple billion dollars in the general fund to pave roads and move a couple billion dollars of expenses that the state has and push those expenses into the School Aid Fund. And those expenses are really providing state support for our public universities. An important thing, but it's not what the voters agreed to as part of Proposal A. Proposal A was about a new funding system for K-12 schools, not a funding system for universities.
Charles Honey: Passed by voters in1994 was it?
Dan Behm: 1994. Yeah, and it was really Republicans and Democrats, senators, representatives, people from all walks of state government urging the voters saying this is a really good way to fund our K-12 schools going forward. It provides a fairer and more equitable funding system, and it was going to be a more stable system, and it was going to create this fund that was going to be far more immune to economic downturns and indeed it has and that's why there's money that's there. The problem is lawmakers want to find a way to tap into that money and use it for things that don't have anything to do with K-12 schools.
Charles Honey: So, is the issue not so much a problem with the school funding specifically, and as I understand it the Democratic controlled Senate, the Republican controlled House have passed different versions of the School Aid budget. Is that correct?
Dan Behm: That's correct. They're not that far off on the main funding piece, which we call the foundation allowance. It's the per pupil amount of money for each student that schools would receive. They're $10,008 in the Senate, $10,025 in the House. So, what's that? $17 difference?
Charles Honey: $17 dollars, yeah.
Dan Behm: Do the math quickly. So yeah, they're not that far off. They're further off though on other elements of the state budget that provides support for districts with special populations. Kids who are learning English for the first time that's not their native language, students with disabilities, students that come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and may not have had the opportunity to reach certain developmental milestones before they come to school. So, there's other elements to the state education budget. The House has one plan. The Senate has a different plan and they're off base on that. But our bigger concern is that while they might be able to sort of pace things together with some rainy-day funds, if they were to push new expenses from the general fund into the School Aid Fund next year, they can't do that in perpetuity. And it really undermines the School Aid Fund by a couple of billion dollars annually if they were to push costs from the general fund and the School Aid Fund to free up a spot in the general fund to pave roads.
Charles Honey: And are the school districts locally already feeling impact from this impasse in Lansing, for instance, I notice Okemos Public Schools says we're to have to charge kids for school lunch and breakfast because this hitherto free program funded by the state, we don't know if it's going to be funded or not?
Dan Behm: Yeah, absolutely. We're feeling the effects already. Uncertainty is sort of the word of the day, the month, the year. And there's quite a bit of uncertainty in schools over things like school lunch programs, over all these different support programs for students, like an early literacy program for students that are behind in reading, where we have additional resources to bring in tutors to work with kids. We don't know, will those things be funded? But yet we know there's been changes as a result of the federal budget to state budgets that could undermine some of the support for some of these programs.
Charles Honey: Yeah, let's touch real briefly on the federal. President Trump has repeatedly vowed to close the Department of Education. He's kind of hollowing it out as he goes. What kind of impact on local districts is the federal budget cuts having?
Dan Behm: Yeah, the federal budget makes up anywhere from seven to 14 or 15 percent of a local district's budget, depending upon the makeup of their student population. So. Again, that has a significant impact. If you have a lot of students who are in your district who are learning English for the first time, those federal funds are really important for you. If you're a community in one of our agricultural regions where you have a number of students who come from migrant families who work in the agricultural system and move around the country with the harvest, those migrant education dollars mean a lot in helping those students stay up to speed academically. We are trying to put the best face forward, certainly for our students, in welcoming them in.
Charles Honey: So, what can the listeners do, parents do, to do anything about this?
Dan Behm: You know, listeners can reach out to their state lawmakers, their state representative, their state senator, and urge them to get the budget passed, keep politics out of K-12 budgeting, and keep Proposal A, keep the promise of Proposal A. Use these funds to help K-12 students and our K-12 schools. Don't raid the School Aid Fund for other things that have nothing to do with educating K-12 kids.
Charles Honey: Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate your time to help us untangle these messy financial issues. Thanks to the listeners for being with us. If you want to hear the full podcast, you can find it at schoolnewsnetwork.org or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time and don't forget your pencils.
Full episodes of the Study Hall Podcast from School News Network can be found at schoolnewsnetwork.org and wherever you get your podcasts