DR. JEANICE SWIFT hopes to attract students from districts throughout Washtenaw County in the 2014-2015 academic year. AAPS has designated 100 seats in kindergarten, 100 seats in first grade, 25 seats in grades 3, 4, 5, 50 seats in grades 6, 7, 8, and 150 seats in 9, 10 grades available at Huron, Pioneer and Skyline High Schools. It’s a gambit to raise over $7.1 million in additional state revenues at a time when the AAPS faces an annual $6 million structural deficit due to the construction of Skyline High School.
While Dr. Swift should be applauded for aggressively going after additional revenue for her district, the move is akin to a gang attempting to muscle in on the territories of its rivals in order to expand earnings. The Ypsilanti/Willow Run district can no more afford to lose students (and the state funding those students represent) than can the Lincoln or Dexter school districts. In fact, smaller and under-performing districts need the funding they have in order to improve their services.
Another concern we have with the blatant attempt to poach students from other districts—particularly minority students is that our school district—with one of the most pronounced achievement gaps in the United States—has no business enhancing revenues by marketing academic under-performance as “excellence.”
The slick marketing campaign, aside, the AAPS has been unable to provide an equitable education to the minority students for whom the district is already responsible. Opening up a seat in a classroom is by no means a guarantee to a minority family that its children will fare any better in the AAPS than in the students’ current districts. The Ypsilanti/Willow Run district’s achievement gap is less pronounced than the one in the AAPS.
The Board of Education’s Trustees have allowed various superintendents to go through $31.3 million in savings over the course of the past decade rather than deal with the structural deficit created by constructing a $93.2 million high school. In 2008, Charleston, South Carolina residents built 1,600-student Cane Bay High School for $19.3 million.
District officials and parents can’t go backwards, and district officials have no wiggle room now that the district’s savings are down to $9 million. Insolvency will result in one of the richest school districts in the state being taken over by an emergency manager. Perhaps that would suit some of the Trustees on the Board of Education who are loathe to cut spending overall, and clueless concerning budget overages. In the 2012-2013 financial report, auditors found a $4 million dollar discrepancy between the budgeted costs for general fund ($114 million) instruction and the actual amount spent ($118 million). In addition, the district has $5.58 million in long-term termination pay and accumulated vacation pay obligations. These are perks that must be ended.
Rather than potentially do significant financial harm to surrounding districts in order to bring in more revenue to her own, Dr. Swift should do a thorough evaluation of her district’s programs to see which are working and do away with ones which are not. Finally, we believe Dr. Swift should offer a zero-based budget that includes a profit and loss statement for each of her schools—That way, each school can be managed to a budget, and the school administrators held accountable.