Bobb: Trade school reform for funds
Additional aid needed for Detroit and other districts
Robert C. Bobb
Public education in Michigan needs an academic and financial renaissance. Forty-two school districts in Michigan, from southeastern Michigan to the Upper Peninsula, are operating under state-mandated Deficit Elimination Plan (DEP) scenarios, and that number is expected to increase significantly each year.
For districts whose legacy or structural deficits exceed 8 percent to 10 percent of annual revenues, especially those whose enrollments are trending downward, which means losses in state funding, there comes a point where administrations cannot cut their way out of the deficit pattern without seriously eroding academic quality.
Intractable deficit
In my own 30-plus years of managing cities with budgets up to $8 billion, I have not encountered a situation where budgets could not be fully balanced. However, in the Detroit Public Schools, the closure of 59 (nearly one in three) schools, $105 million in bargaining unit concessions, elimination of $272 million in budget requests, aggressive outsourcing of major operational areas including student transportation and security,
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20101130/OPINION01/11300312/Bobb--Trade-school-reform-for-funds#ixzz16lwQelsF