Holland Reporter

As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Legislature take on funding for Michigan’s schools, critics of the formulas used to distribute federal COVID-19 relief are raising concerns that the state could make the current situation worse.

Ben DeGrow, director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, recently addressed some of the inequities he and others feel have been created by the federal formulas.

“The Detroit Public Schools Community District compounded its major funding advantage over the city’s charters after the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act by taking in an even larger disbursement in the latest federal relief package,” he wrote in a blog on the Mackinac Center's website. “When the two packages are combined, DPSCD receives $9,372 for each student, compared with $2,761 for the average Detroit charter school, even though they serve similarly disadvantaged demographics.”

While lawmakers and Whitmer have no say in how much of the school funding in the federal relief packages is allotted, they do have discretion over a portion of the relief funds, DeGrow wrote. Whitmer’s proposed approach does anything but correct the problems in the federal formula.

“Whitmer’s proposal to disburse them, along with state dollars from extra unanticipated tax revenues, would exacerbate some of the COVID funding gaps,” he wrote in the blog. “Districts already favored by federal relief funding are also likelier to benefit more from Whitmer’s proposal. For example, Detroit charters would get $307 per pupil less than the city’s school district, which is bringing in disproportionately large revenues from COVID relief. That disparity is greater than the 2019 veto that aroused pushback from Detroit charter parents.”

DeGrow wrote that it is the state’s leaders on both sides of the aisle who need to make a tangible effort to correct the current disparities in funding, or risk only making the existing gaps between economic groups in the state far wider than they already are.