Republican House Speaker Jase Bolger wants you to believe that he’s found a magical way to fund road repairs without raising your taxes! While it’s true that your gas taxes and sales taxes won’t increase, the entire scheme is based on taking nearly a billion dollars more from schools each year. Local municipalities will take a huge hit, too.
How much will schools lose? A report by the Michigan League for Public Policy puts the tally at $634.1 million for this year. That number rises to $888.7 million in 2022-23. The Michigan Association of School Boards calculates that the average loss to schools will be an astonishing $475 per pupil per year.
Here are some of the big losers according to the MLPP (full list HERE):
- Ann Arbor Public Schools – $7,815,175
- Dearborn City School District – $9,205,025
- Detroit City Schools – $22,869,825
- Grand Rapids Public Schools – $7,591,925
- Kalamazoo Public Schools – $5,917,075
- Lansing Public Schools – $5,669,600
- Livonia Public Schools – $6,930,250
- Rochester Community School District – $7,101,725
- Troy School District – $5,959,825
- Utica Community Schools – $13,469,575
- Walled Lake Consolidated Schools – $7,061,350
- Warren Consolidated Schools – $7,197,675
- Wayne-Westland Community School District – $5,681,475
Nearly 2,000 people have signed a MoveOn.org petition demanding that road funding not be done at the expense of our school children.
Keep in mind that this plan would strip nearly a billion dollars from public schools ON TOP OF the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR already taken from them under Gov. Rick Snyder.
This school defunding move, coupled with a package of new bills that would make it easier to declare school districts in financial “distress” and ready to be taken over by the state and put under an Emergency Manager, appear to be an orchestrated and coordinated effort to destroy public schools to allow for more for-profit charters and expansion of the failed experiment on Detroit children known as the Education Achievement Authority. When you look at the entire picture and put together the pieces, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion.
[Photo by Chris Savage | Eclectablog]
