Upbeat on-hold music blared from Jerrica Mickens’ cellphone for nearly 50 minutes as she searched on her laptop for affordable housing for a parent in Detroit.

Mickens was on a three-way call with a mother and a legal aide hotline the morning of April 21 in her Central High School office. As the two waited for a representative to answer questions about the mother’s landlord troubles, Mickens asked what else her family needed. Did they want to pick up a box of groceries for the month? Did the kids need new clothes? Did anyone in the family need mental health services?

Mickens is one of nine “navigators” whose job is getting to know school communities and discerning their needs. They play a critical role in the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s 10 Health Hubs. Since , the hubs have contributed to improved attendance in the district and helped thousands of families, officials say.

Mickens’ time and care is often a lifeline for parents in survival mode. Sometimes, she said, families just need someone to listen.

“My passion is serving people,” said Mickens. “So if that’s what a person needs, then I’m gonna be here for that.”

The navigators lead parents through a complex web of district resources, social services, and nonprofit assistance they may not otherwise know how to access. Their offices serve as a one-stop-shop to triage the root causes that keep students from regularly attending school, such as , , and .

At the hubs, students are connected with vision and hearing screenings, as well as medical, dental, and mental health care. The centers connect families with housing, utility assistance, and legal services. The school community can stop in for food and hygiene product distribution.

From July 1, 2023, through June 14, the hubs served families 19,200 times and more than 1,100 referrals were made.

“We know that for students to show up ready to learn and focus on their academics, their basic health and well-being needs must be met first,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. “Schools are the natural, trusted, and most convenient hub for families to access these vital resources.”

Prolonged absenteeism has long been a problem for Detroit schools due to systemic socioeconomic barriers, which in turn severely .

Michigan students are considered chronically absent when they miss 18 days or more in a 180-day school year.

Nearly 61% of the district’s students were . Though the rate was considerably higher than the statewide average of 28%, DPSCD has in reducing absenteeism since the COVID-19 pandemic.

District officials attribute the improvement to many long-term efforts – like creating a culture of improving attendance among leaders, hiring more counselors to address mental health needs, and student incentives – but they believe the hubs are a key piece.

Overall, the district’s chronic absenteeism rate decreased by 5.2 percentage points last year compared to 2022-23, the last year before the hubs opened. Academic performance has also improved, with and reaching historic highs last year.

“K-12 students who accessed the Health Hubs during the 2024–25 school year had better average daily attendance and lower rates of chronic absenteeism than students who did not access the Hubs,” said Vitti, though he didn’t provide detailed numbers.

Jaiden Mabins, who recently graduated from Osborn High School, said his attendance improved and his postsecondary plans were affected by Mickens’ work as a navigator at his school.

In 10th grade, Mabin’s home burned down, which meant moving in with his sister near 10 Mile – a considerable distance from his school on the east side of Detroit. The limited transportation options forced him to stay home many days, he said.

“Ms. Jerrica, she helped us find a new place, still close in the neighborhood for school,” said Mabins.

The navigator gave him new clothes, school supplies, and a laptop. When it came time to think about his post-high school options, she helped him fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Addressing Detroit families’ needs beyond the school day

At 11:50 a.m. at Central High School, 17-year-old Jeremy McKinney was led by a school employee through Mickens’ office door, held open by two stacked boxes of canned green beans overflowing from the hub’s food distribution pantry.

McKinney squinted when he introduced himself, struggling to see. His glasses had been stolen. The navigator got him on the waiting list to get a new pair from that regularly visits the school.

Around 185 pairs of glasses have been given to kids in the district since the hubs opened, according to DPSCD.

As Mickens got back to packing boxes of groceries for scheduled pick-ups, she paused periodically to answer calls from parents.

“Oh Lord Jesus, I hope I can help her,” she said of a mother whose house flooded. Once a new place was secured, Mickens said she knew an for the kids. She could also help them get gas cards to get to school and some clothing.

While DPSCD has always tried to fill gaps for students with attendance agents and wraparound services, district officials say the hubs streamline the process. Navigators have the time for deeper conversations with families and take detailed notes on their case files. They can also better track how the children are served by outside organizations beyond the initial referral.

All of the hubs are strategically placed so every school has a location within 3 miles.

Mickens is currently responsible for 10 feeder schools in addition to Central and Durfee Elementary-Middle School. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she travels to the other schools to get to know parent outreach coordinators, principals, and social workers who relay family needs.

There are currently hubs in 10 DPSCD schools — Central, Denby, Henry Ford, Marygrove, Martin Luther King Jr., Mumford, Osborn, Southeastern, and Western International high schools, as well as East English Village Prep Academy.

There will also be hubs at the new Cody and Pershing high schools when they open for the 2027-28 school year. There are plans for a Detroit Lions Academy location, though an opening date has not been set.

It costs around $500,000 a year to operate each hub, said Vitti. But because most of the expenses are covered by donations from community partners, the actual cost for DPSCD is around $172,000 a year per hub, he added.

Coordinated school health plan models in  and the . Those districts reportedly saw improvements in attendance and academic achievement, as well as lower rates of student discipline.

A third-party evaluator is currently examining how the hubs affect DPSCD student attendance. It is expected to be complete in the fall.

Later that day at Central, Mickens grabbed two tuna snack packs and a chocolate milk for a teen boy in between classes.

The navigator asked if he’d filled out the dental exam permission slip she gave him days before. No, he said, because he wouldn’t be at the school for long.

She consoled the student after learning the reason he had to leave. “No judgment,” she said.

Mickens said she understands some of the challenges the students she serves face. She dropped out when she was a ninth grader at Central years ago.

“A lot of it was because of the disconnect of social services that I needed,” she said. “ I have a heart to not let kids go through what I have.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

That’s why our newsroom recently launched a new on Instagram () spotlighting a handful of important articles, case studies, data analyses and solutions snapshots that might have gotten lost in the noise. (You can also get these kind of daily highlights delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for our national newsletter.)Ìę

From the new demands facing college students in this era of artificial intelligence to a leadership transition at America’s largest union, here are five stories you might have missed this week: 

1. Elementary Principals Are Getting a Crash Course in How Young Kids Learn Best

Young children need different conditions than older students to thrive. Some school leaders are adapting their practices to reflect that reality.

2. Princess Moss Elected NEA President With Votes From 50% of Assembly Members

The former music teacher, who previously served as the union’s vice president, narrowly avoided a run-off in July 5 election.

3. What Today’s College Students Need That Previous Generations Didn’t

College degrees don’t guarantee good jobs anymore, so students must build resumes and AI skills in high school and college, experts say.

4. A Restored Detroit Rail Station Looks to the Future, Offering Training for Teens

Michigan Central Station, long a symbol of decline and decay, is now an innovation hub with workshops and cutting edge equipment for youth.

5. Q&A — ‘Rehumaning’ Education: Banning Screens Is Only Part of the Solution

‘We don’t have to remove all tech,’ author Stephanie Malia Krauss says. ‘We need to remove toxic tech’ and bring back play and adequate sleep.

Now they had to refine them and think about how to pitch them to investors or customers.

“Go back to your product statement, what your product is, and then tell us your core feature,” instructor Brandon Martin, founder of a startup company, told the four groups of high schoolers at a new training center in Detroit. “After we do this 
 we kind of map this out a little bit.” 

The seminar and the training center itself would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when people struggling with homelessness and drug addiction — not young people looking to build their future — overran what was then a crumbling ruin of a building. 

The teens were gathered in a new Boys and Girls Club created on the fifth floor of the old Michigan Central Station. , the 18-story tower was abandoned in 1988 and quickly vandalized, making its surrounded by razor wire .

In 2018, after several plans to restore or raze the station failed, the Ford Motor Company stepped in and spent nearly $1 billion over six years to create a 30-acre innovation campus out of the station and some surrounding buildings, including a former post office that had also been abandoned for decades.

Today, the Beaux Art station’s three-story concourse, designed by the same architects as New York City’s Grand Central Station, is now restored as a showpiece and reception hall.

Floors that had been gutted now serve as Ford offices. A hotel will soon occupy the top five floors. Shops and cultural activities are also being added. And the former post office next door now houses startup companies that use space and manufacturing equipment provided by Ford to try to grow their business.

Youth training is an important part of the mix, with Ford devoting an entire 17,000 square-foot floor to career exposure and entrepreneurship efforts for young people ages 14 to 24.

“If you want to fill the jobs of the future, you’ve got to start with students,” said Janelle Arbuckle-Michael, Michigan Central’s associate director for K-12 initiatives. “You’ve got to start with exposure. You got to start with opportunities. And you have to have a pathway for them to go.”

Arbuckle-Michael said having youth learn about careers in the same campus as innovators and new companies offers chances for teens to learn about — and from — the businesses, who can attract new employees or collaborators as students grow and learn.

The youth training floor’s first tenant didn’t work out — a Google program teaching computer coding launched in 2024 but left a year later. But Michigan Central now splits the floor between a design program run by Grand Valley State University and with a few local nonprofits, including one that trains teens in flying drones. The Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Detroit is by far the biggest, taking over three fourths of the floor.

The Boys and Girls Club spent about $4 million, including donations from the foundations of singers Usher and Big Sean, to turn the shell of brick walls into a training center with cutting edge equipment for broadcast, music and fashion design that teens can use to develop products and businesses. The club also offers classes, mentors and presentations by professionals to guide them, often from young adult business owners who are allowed to share the space in return for being teachers and mentors.

Sean Wilson, CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Detroit, said children born in poverty rarely reach the top without help, so the clubs have made it their mission to offer it. 

“It’s about providing youth with various forms of capital, unique opportunities that act as an intervention and a catalyst to move them up the ladder,” Wilson said. 

“For them to be able to sit right next to startups 
 that proximity is ultimately, I think, the secret sauce, the cheat code to help our kids achieve mobility,” he added.

The club opened in February, but it has already helped students start businesses. 

Meshach Charles, 18, learned some basic business skills at neighborhood Boys and Girls Clubs before graduating from Detroit Public Schools’ Cass Technical High School last spring. The mentoring and guidance at the Michigan Central Club has helped him start his own landscaping business, including just registering as a limited liability corporation and helping him plan to open bank accounts, seek grants and apply for a tax identification number.

Club staff also taught him how to make connections with other businesses and find people he can trust to help guide him.

“I need to be cautious, but I also need to put myself out there a little bit more than I am right now,” he said. “That’s definitely helping.”

Alaysha Hayes, 18, a student at both Roseville High School north of the city and Macomb Community College, is growing her new fashion business, Alay Customs. With that business, she sews outfits on her own, or works with clients to add decorations and highlights to clothes they provide for special occasions such as proms or weddings.

“In the Black culture, they do prom really, really big,” Hayes said. “So they like appliquĂ©s, rhinestones and things like that to go with the women’s dresses. We hand sew all of these pieces onto the suit, and it just really gives it a nice look.”

Hayes learned sewing and fashion design skills at a neighborhood Boys and Girls Club, then applied to take classes and use equipment at Michigan Central. There, the club gives her workspace and she can use high-end equipment — including a $30,000 sewing machine — she’d never be able to afford.

“I’m able to bring my clients here to do fittings.” she said. “It’s a very professional workspace, and I’m able to get a lot of stuff done. When you’re home, you don’t get as much stuff done as if you were in an office space.”

Kevin Haynes, executive director of the club, said the club doesn’t provide the materials for students to mass-produce items. Their businesses have to buy those. But providing computer, film, sound and fashion labs with top equipment gives them a big advantage.

“You gotta understand, some of these young people are working on these designs in a basement and somebody’s second bedroom or something like that, so they don’t have a 
 creative space to work with things,” he said. “We’re giving them access to equipment that they may not have access to. And here they are rent free. They have the workspace. You have a workbench, you have materials, you have a space where you can collaborate with other people. That’s a tremendous value.”

Classes are also a large part of the program, with single-day or multi-week lessons after school, in evenings or on weekends on business topics including finance, branding or marketing. The club also offers how-to sessions on podcasts, aerospace engineering, coding, health technology, and using camera angles, lighting and special effects in film.

The entrepreneurship class Martin taught had a focus on health in sports. Martin’s company, was created in 2022 to prevent football injuries, so he brings recent startup experience to the lessons.

As part of his eight-week seminar, Martin had teens, all 17 and under, come up with ideas to improve sports or make them more accessible to young people. They suggested: creating an app showing how to train different parts of the body; shoes that can swap soles for different sports; listing free athletic opportunities for low income youth and regularly testing reaction times during a season to check for concussion damage.

Martin was pleased with the short “elevator speeches” the teens had for the ideas.

“If you were in an elevator with the CEO, and you told them that, they’d understand exactly what you’re building,” Martin said. “You all did a really, really good job with that.”

He then pushed them further: Figure out how a customer using the product for the first time would experience it and how many steps it would take to be able to use the core function. Are instructions hard? Does it have sign-ons? Privacy checks?

For Wilson, mixing entrepreneurs like Martin with teens just starting to think about running a business is a big step in helping guide them. He considers it one of the core features, as Martin put it, in making the club a great resource for students who would otherwise have little help.

“If you’re 19, 20 and you’re a go-getter, where do you go?” Wilson asked. “That’s the purpose of this floor.”

Employing student influencers is the latest strategy in the Detroit school district’s ongoing efforts to grow enrollment in city schools.

District officials unveiled last week to hire 23 students to share positive messages about their schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. The high schoolers will create and share social media content aimed at winning over prospective students and parents, as well as engaging their peers.

The initiative is one of several new ideas the district is considering to reverse a 20-year trend of .

“Our students are at the center of everything that we do,” said Sharlonda Buckman, assistant superintendent of Family and Community Engagement, during last week’s meeting. “They have real stories, real accomplishments, real growth.”

When families hear students’ stories and see possibilities for their children, their perceptions about the district may shift, Buckman added.

have already opened. One student from each of the district’s high schools will be selected to take on the task. If approved by the board, the influencers will be assigned content and events to promote each month on rotating schedules, earning $250 each month they post.

Many factors have contributed to enrollment declines, including a shrinking, lower birthrates, , and . The district also competes with , which enroll about , as well as suburban districts that heavily recruit Detroit students.

Traditional strategies to attract students – including canvassing neighborhoods, hosting Summer on the Block events, expanding prekindergarten, focusing on reenrollment rates, and putting up billboards – have produced modest results, according to the district.

The district estimates it currently has more than 49,200 students – an increase of about 400 compared to the official count at the end of last school year.

Last summer, board members asked the district to come up with innovative, cost-efficient ways to drive enrollment more rapidly.

Board member Monique Bryant said during a July committee meeting she wanted to see students tell the stories of their own schools.

“I think we have an opportunity to use our students more, and I think we get more bang for our buck than what we’re spending now,” she said.

Students and parents would be ‘brand ambassadors’ for their schools

Overall, the district’s plan to boost enrollment is to shape the public’s perception of DPSCD to be more positive, increasing awareness of its schools with targeted advertising and connecting with more families in the city.

Marketing research supports the board’s idea to center student voices to reach those goals, district officials said.

In a survey of about 300 people conducted by the district, about 30% said they wanted to see student success stories, said Deputy Executive Marketing Director Jessica Byrd.

In addition to winning over parents, students also want to see themselves in district messaging, Byrd said. By partnering with high schoolers who are gifted at reaching peers on social media, the district will reach more potential students, she added.

“They bring their audience to our platforms, and that’s essentially what we want,” Byrd said.

The influencers will participate in monthly content creation workshops with the marketing team. They will post both on the district’s social media and their own.

DPSCD also proposes hiring 10 to 15 parent and community ambassadors to “counter negative perceptions and amplify enrollment messaging.” The presentation did not include how much the ambassadors would be paid.

The ambassadors may be people who are trusted by their communities, such as church leaders, block club presidents, and parents of students in the district. They will have monthly themes for their messaging, including safety, the district’s gains in literacy achievement, and career and technical education programs.

The district has relied on volunteer in previous years, with slightly different roles. In the past, ambassadors represented the district at community and school events.

This year, the district proposes spending nearly $42,000 on both the student influencers and the community ambassadors.

In total, the marketing plan, including other new initiatives such as web content managers, would cost around $1.4 million, according to the district’s presentation.

The district will continue its traditional enrollment campaigns, including canvassing, yard signs, and events.

Board members at last week’s meeting said they were pleased with the new plans, which would be funded in the district’s budget for the next fiscal year. The board must approve a budget by June 30.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The Detroit school district is considering recognizing parent organizations that operate independently from the state and national Parent Teacher Association.

, introduced by the Detroit Public Schools Community District during a Feb. 26 board committee meeting, came after members expressed frustrations over reported dysfunction and conflict within some local PTAs last year. Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said during a June board meeting some PTAs have had challenges with “proper implementation of elections” and “following protocols.”

Board Member Monique Bryant told Chalkbeat this week the proposed policy would create better balance by allowing parents to choose what works best for their individual schools.

Some school communities may not have parents with the time or bandwidth to formally organize and run PTAs, she said. A better option for some parents may be to join an organization overseen by the district’s Family and Community Engagement Department, or FACE.

The proposed policy amendment could mean that formal parent engagement ends up looking different from school to school. It would recognize independent, locally organized parent-teacher organizations, as well as other parent organization models approved by FACE. The proposal would also clarify the voting model all organizations must rely on: Each year, every school would vote on the type of parent organization model it wants to use and submit results to district administrators.

The proposed amendment follows incidents of mismanagement by two parent-teacher organizations reported by the district’s Office of Inspector General over the last seven years.

The National PTA is a nationwide volunteer-led organization with state and local chapters, which organize to fundraise, plan educational events, and advocate for students’ needs. PTAs are self-governed, separate entities from local school districts.

DPSCD’s current policy only recognizes the PTA as its “official parent organization of record” for its schools. There are multiple that oversee school-based chapters in the district.

The board has not yet voted on the proposed changes.

Tonya Whitehead, president of the Michigan PTA, and leaders of several Detroit PTA councils did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But Whitehead said during public comment at a July committee meeting that state and Detroit PTA leadership provided support and additional training to local chapters to address the issues raised by the board and Vitti.

“We are committed to continual improvement within our organizations, including streamlining processes to improve response time, providing additional training to members and PTA leaders at all member levels, and working together with the FACE office to improve two-way communication and behavior problem solving,” she said at the time.

Board members did not discuss the policy when the district introduced the proposal at the February committee meeting. However, members called for change at multiple meetings last year.

Bryant said she complained last year about the handling of a PTA election at Cass Technical High School. Bryant, who is a Cass Tech parent and was a member of the PTA, said the organization did not follow its bylaws when it took nominations for new leadership. The result was that PTA’s entire executive board was reelected before their terms were up, said Bryant.

The Cass Tech PTSA — which also includes students — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bryant added she contacted the Michigan PTA with concerns, but the organization was unresponsive.

“I don’t think we should be moving forward with individual schools still trying to have elections after this,” she said during the June meeting.

Detroit brought back PTAs to ‘heal the divide’

When the state appointed an emergency manager to take control of Detroit Public Schools in 2009, PTAs were removed. That emergency management ended in 2016, and PTAs returned to district schools after Vitti began as superintendent in May 2017.

“We set out to try to heal the divide that was between the community and schools – one of the ways that the board and I thought best to do that [was] bring back the PTA,” said Vitti at the July committee meeting.

Whitehead said during public comment of that meeting that DPSCD staff “were closely integrated in trying to start units in every school in the district” when emergency management ended.

She said their efforts “included collecting dues and being listed as the contractor for PTAs in district documents,” which resulted in “incomplete paperwork” and made it appear that PTA concerns should be directed to district staff.

“Post-pandemic, PTA, in cooperation with the FACE office, has been working hard to end those practices and ensure that adults engaged with PTA and the district know the difference between the roles and responsibilities of each,” she added. “But there is more work to be done.”

Vitti said it is challenging for the PTA “to monitor elections, ensure the training and capacity of officers once they’re elected, and problem-solve through conflict between officers at certain schools.”

Conflict over policy arose at PTAs beyond Cass Technical last year, Bryant said. For example, PTA members at two schools complained it was unfair that school staff who were also parents of students at their school could become executive officers of their PTA, she said. Bryant did not identify the two schools.

Mismanagement of parent organization funds were found in previous years by the Office of Inspector General, or OIG, which serves as an independent oversight office for the district.

In 2019, the OIG received complaints the PTA committee of a district school mismanaged fundraising proceeds. Because the PTA did not properly document the amount of funds raised, the could not determine how much money was reportedly missing.

The district mandated cash management training for all PTA officers and fundraising organizers as a result of the OIG’s recommendations stemming from its investigation. Detroit schools also began requiring PTAs to submit financial statements after every school-based fundraising event.

, the OIG found that a parent organization improperly retained funds for a school field trip, and also reported a lack of district oversight of support organizations. The OIG recommended the parent group pay an outstanding bill of more than $7,200. The OIG also recommended better collaboration between district offices to improve donation tracking, as well as internal controls for parent support organizations.

However, board members did not mention those two incidents when they shared concerns about PTAs, and Vitti did not address them. It is unclear whether they contributed to the district’s decision to introduce the proposal in February to change how parent organizations work.

“I think the issue has been the PTA has not been able to demonstrate the capacity 
 to work within the district at the scale that we operate at, because we’re so much larger,” said Vitti in July.

Vitti said the PTA needed to expedite its response to issues at individual schools and improve its communication with the board.

Some board members raised the option of letting individual schools decide whether to continue their PTAs or start new organizations, a choice that’s included in the new policy proposal.

“Instead of creating a one size fits all approach 
 we might be looking at individual schools that seem to have repeated problems, which is high level conflict, move away from that and run it at the district level in order to create better balance,” said Vitti.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Lawmakers in Lansing are moving aggressively to address Michigan’s K-12 literacy crisis with multiple pieces of legislation that target training for teachers, retention for struggling third graders, and consequences for teacher preparation programs.

The legislative action comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made addressing literacy a priority for 2026, her last year in office. During her State of the State address last month, Whitmer detailed steps already underway to improve literacy and recommendations in her budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. Among them is additional money she wants to invest in high-impact literacy tutoring, high-quality curriculum, literacy training for teachers, and hiring of literacy coaches.

“This is a serious problem,” Whitmer said in the address. “Our kids deserve better.”

Just 38.9% of third graders were proficient on the English language arts portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history, Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan reported.

On the national front, just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient in 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. Michigan students’ performance has been stagnant and declining even as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved. Michigan now ranks 44th in the nation for fourth-grade reading on the NAEP.

This isn’t the first time Michigan lawmakers have taken aim at the state’s challenges with literacy. In 2016, fueled by similarly troubling test results in reading, lawmakers passed a Read by Grade 3 law that required early intervention, the hiring of literacy coaches, and the retention of third graders struggling to reade. The retention rule has since been rescinded. Ten years since that broad effort, Michigan’s student literacy problem continues.

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

would require that by the 2031-32 school year, all K-5 educators who provide, support, or oversee instruction, including in literacy, must have been , which refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. The bill doesn’t specify a specific training program, but says the current training being encouraged for Michigan teachers — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS — meets the requirements of the legislation.

would require that, beginning Sept. 30, 2027, an individual seeking a teaching certificate in Michigan must have completed a teacher preparation program that included training in the science of reading.

would bring back the third-grade retention policy Michigan previously had in place. The bill would require struggling third graders, who would be identified based on their state test scores, repeat the grade. There would be some “good cause” exemptions, such as for students with disabilities whose educational plan team leader exempts them from the requirement. Michigan’s previous third-grade retention law, which went into effect during the 2020-21 school year, was rescinded in 2023 when Democrats controlled the legislature and the governor’s office. They argued the law was punitive and wasn’t working.

During a Wednesday hearing of the House Education and Workforce committee, Rep. Nancy DeBoer, a Republican from Holland who chairs the committee, said reading gives children the independence to pick up a book and go anywhere.

“Unless you’re in the state of Michigan and you’re three-quarters of the students in eighth grade who can’t read or do math in a competent manner,” she said. “That is a tragedy we are responsible for.”

DeBoer introduced the bipartisan bill that would make training in the science of reading a requirement for K-5 teachers.

The state has funded LETRS training, but thus far hasn’t made it a requirement. In September, the State Board of Education urged that it become a mandate for all K-5 teachers, saying the lack of one “has led to inconsistent participation of Michigan educators and inconsistent access to instruction based on the science of reading for Michigan’s students.”

The science of reading also figures prominently in a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Tim Kelly, a Republican from Saginaw Township. He described the bill as “a long overdue rescue mission for the next generation of Michigan’s workers, citizens, and leaders.”

Kelly said Wednesday that teacher preparation programs that don’t equip teachers with the tools needed to teach children to read have forfeited their right to operate in Michigan.

“We must stop subsidizing failure,” Kelly said.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Now the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether three districts gave parents advance notice of lessons pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity so their children could be excused. Officials are also investigating whether the districts received any complaints “regarding sex-segregated bathrooms” and other spaces, indicating that the federal government is committed to ensuring “the safety, dignity, and innocence of our youngest citizens.” 

On Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon sent letters to the superintendents of the Detroit, Lansing and Godfrey-Lee school districts, asking for all materials that reference sex and LGBTQ-related terms as well as any complaints or inquiries the districts might have received related to those issues. 

“This Department of Justice is fiercely committed to ending the growing trend of local school authorities embedding sexuality and gender ideology in every aspect of public education,” she said in a statement. 

The letters to the district’s superintendents signal the Justice Department’s willingness to aggressively enforce last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in in which the justices sided with a group of parents who argued they should be able to opt their elementary school children out of lessons related to LGBTQ-themed storybooks for religious reasons. Michigan’s standards, Dhillon wrote, could be at odds with the court’s decision. 

If the districts don’t agree to the department’s demands, they could be at risk of losing federal funding, she wrote. Including school nutrition funds and Medicaid, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, for example, receives over $200 million, according to Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer.

Officials with Detroit and Lansing districts did not return phone calls or emails, but in an email, Arnetta Thompson, superintendent of the Godfrey-Lee district, called the investigation a “standard review process.”

“We are fully cooperating with this inquiry and will provide any requested information,” she said. “The district is not facing any charges or findings of wrongdoing. We remain committed to complying with all applicable federal, state and local laws and have consistently operated in accordance with those laws.”

In a statement, Michigan state Superintendent Glenn Maleyko said his department supports the three districts that “have been targeted” by the DOJ and said Dhillon wrongly characterized the health guidelines as state requirements. 

Parents, he said, ”retain the right to decide whether their children should participate in sex education instruction. And state officials will work with the districts to “select a curriculum that best supports the needs of their students, consistent with state standards and guidelines.” 

The investigations reflect the Trump administration’s parental rights agenda, whose nearly singular focus has been to restrict lessons or policies related to gender identity. In a last September, Attorney General Pam Bondi said state and local officials have “ignored, dismissed and even retaliated against concerned parents who speak out against these morally and factually bankrupt ideologies.” One of President Donald Trump’s earliest rejected the Biden administration’s efforts to extend Title IX protections to transgender students. But some experts say it’s highly unusual for the Department of Justice to get involved in matters related to curriculum.

“These investigations depart from longstanding DOJ practice of not dictating or interfering with school curriculum,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law. A former deputy assistant attorney in the DOJ’s civil rights division, he said previously, the department “intentionally avoided” those issues.  

Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, added that the DOJ’s probe is a “blatant attempt to discourage inclusive education” and takes the Mahmoud decision too far. While that case focused specifically on books that the Montgomery County schools in Maryland added to its reading curriculum in the early grades, DOJ is looking at “content in any class” for pre-K through 12th grade.

But Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the DOJ’s action appears “consistent with the degree of parent empowerment under Mahmoud.”

“Parents need a level of trust that schools will reflect their values, or at least not contradict their values,” he said. It’s likely, he added, that other districts will see similar investigations in line with “the Education Department and White House’s goals to protect students from explicit material.”

‘Capacity issue’ 

The fact that the DOJ is involved instead of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights could reflect a “capacity issue,” Dittmeier said.

In December, Education Secretary Linda McMahon recalled more than 250 OCR employees to handle a growing backlog of complaints. They had been on administrative leave as a result of her attempts to downsize the department. 

While McMahon has moved to shift Education Department offices to other agencies, she has not yet announced where OCR would go. in Congress, however, would move OCR to the Justice Department. The Education and Justice departments also formed a last April to speed up Title IX investigations and “use the full power of the law to remedy any violation of women’s civil rights,” Bondi said in a statement.

While Detroit, with almost 49,000 students, is the state’s largest district, it’s unclear whether any specific complaints triggered the investigations. Lansing, the state capital, declared itself last year. 

In 2024, former state Superintendent Michael Rice honored Godfrey-Lee, a small, 1,700-student district south of Grand Rapids, for the state’s 21st Century Model School Library award. He recognized media specialist Harry Coffill for including “diverse books” on the shelves.

The letters to each district ask for an extensive list of materials, dating back to 2023, that include “slideshows, presentations, imagery, posters, signage, recordings and handouts” that reference a variety of terms like “gender spectrum,” “gender expression,” “puberty blockers” and “transitioning.” 

Dhillon wants leaders to turn over any forms, notices or permission slips that demonstrate how the districts notify parents when a lesson references sex and gender. She also asked for detailed records of any complaints or questions from parents related to topics such as “queer culture,” “LGBTQIA+,” “Pride Month” or “drag queen.” 

note that parents should receive prior notification of sex education classes and curriculum and that they have a right to “opt out their child from all or some” of those lessons. Lansing’s related to controversial issues, for example, says schools will “honor a written request” for students to be excused “for specified reasons.” 

State Superintendent Maleyko said the “breadth and scope” of Dhillon’s requests “place a significant administrative burden on local districts and risk diverting time and resources away from the core mission of educating students.”

Ten years ago, a big crowd of Detroit teachers and their supporters marched down Jefferson Avenue toward Cobo Hall, where the annual auto show was being held, to draw national attention to the substandard conditions inside city schools.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers timed another rally later that afternoon outside Cobo (now Huntington Place) to coincide with the arrival of President Barack Obama at the auto show, whose appearance drew journalists from across the country.

The protests on Jan. 20, 2016, which closed most schools that Friday, produced stunning headlines that explained why teachers in Detroit Public Schools had called in sick en masse multiple times in that month.

“Rats, roaches, mold – poor conditions lead to teacher sick-out, closure of most Detroit schools,” a Washington Post headline said. “These Photos Will Make You Understand Detroit’s Education Crisis,” a HuffPost headline read. “How Detroit’s teacher ‘sickout’ cast a spotlight on unsafe school conditions,” was a Guardian headline.

The local and national coverage of the crisis proved instrumental, prompting the mayor to order school inspections and the district to begin repairs. After years of emergency management by the state, the new administration and school board that took over in 2017 ordered an audit of conditions in every building. More than $700 million in federal funds went into renovating and rebuilding schools, helping address needs officials say were created in part by . A decade later, the district is still constructing new schools to replace a handful of buildings that were in the worst condition, as well as addressing the biggest needs in other buildings.

But the scale of the challenges — both financially and physically — mean many students still attend school in buildings with significant problems.

“I am proud of the investments we have made and the improvement we are seeing in our infrastructure, but I am not satisfied with it,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti wrote in an email to Chalkbeat. “Our students and staff deserve EXACTLY and even MORE than suburban districts have.”

The $700 million investment, made during the pandemic with federal COVID relief dollars, addresses a fraction of the $2.1 billion infrastructure needs, according to the district.

“Many buildings still require major modernization, and some remain in deficient or failing condition based on industry standards,” Vitti said. “Aging systems continue to drive future costs, and without sustained investment, deferred needs will grow.”

Teachers push for change in building conditions, higher pay

The protests happened in the midst of turmoil and division within the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

The union’s fiery leader, Steve Conn, had been ousted by the union board in August 2015, after a two-day trial that ended with him being convicted of five misconduct charges, .

As part of its attempts to stabilize the union, the American Federation of Teachers, its umbrella organization, asked members to identify the biggest problems facing the district. Building conditions were at the top of the list.

Stories and pictures collected from union members became the basis for the campaign to raise awareness of student and teacher learning and working conditions, said Ivy Bailey, interim president of the DFT at the time. Photos showed ceilings that were caved in and missing tile, vermin infestations, mold, and other troubling conditions.

Contributing to the problems, according to teachers and union officials, were the state-appointed emergency managers who had control of the district. The school board existed but had little power during the years of emergency management, which stretched from 2009 to the end of 2016. Teachers said their complaints about building conditions were often ignored. The emergency managers were tasked with whittling down the district’s debt, but it rose substantially while they were in control.

Nina Chacker, who organized sick-outs as a union representative at Schulze Academy, said areas of some schools would be closed because of water-logged ceilings, forcing students to cram into classrooms that were usable.

Instead of listening to teachers’ pleas to make buildings safe for kids, Chacker said emergency managers sent people into schools “telling us how to teach.”

“We knew things weren’t going to get better as long as they were left in the state’s hands to address,” she said. “We wanted a school board with power. We wanted the democratic process returned to the district.”

Carrie Russell, now a math teacher at King High School, taught at Cody High School before the sick-outs began. An old boiler made it difficult to maintain temperatures in the building. She remembers a teacher who wore hard hats in her classroom at Cody because she feared falling ceiling tiles. (Russell left to teach in the Oak Park school district before the sick-outs and returned to the Detroit district in 2018.)

Teaching in a building with such problems, Russell said, was “demoralizing on so many levels.”

Building conditions were hardly the only issue teachers were concerned about, however. Class sizes were high – one teacher at a rally held a sign saying her class had 39 first graders. Teachers had not received pay raises in years, and many schools struggled with teacher shortages. Many teachers wanted to see an end to the years of state oversight and more attention from state lawmakers in Lansing.

“Everybody deserves a clean and safe environment to work in,” said Bailey, who retired as a teacher in 2018 but remained as union president until 2019. “They shouldn’t have to be worried about if they’re going to get cancer or if it’s going to affect their lungs. I mean, that should not have been an issue.”

The sick-outs started out small in November 2015, but by Jan. 20 they had increased in size, with nearly every building being closed that day. Most were organized by Detroit Strikes to Win, a group of teachers led by Conn.

Conn, who taught math at Western International High School for many years until he retired in 2023, said images of the roofs caving in, mold, and vermin infestations were the best way to demonstrate the inequities in Detroit schools to the public.

By bringing national attention to Detroit schools, he said the movement sparked a larger conversation around inequities in U.S. education.

“It was time to fight for justice, and we did that and set an example,” he said. “I think it was a high point in the struggle. But the struggle goes on for equity in Detroit schools and America’s schools.”

Vitti calls for more equitable state funding to keep improving buildings

When Vitti interviewed for the superintendent job in 2017, he said he was shocked by the conditions he saw while touring schools in the district.

“To actually walk the buildings and see the state of our infrastructure shook me, and in fact enraged me to see that our children have to go to schools where there are holes in the wall, tiles that are not replaced. It’s unconscionable and it’s a clear indication of the injustice our children face here,” he said.

The district during emergency management had “no vision and no resources consistently invested in infrastructure,” Vitti told Chalkbeat in an email.

Since he took the helm, Vitti has focused on tackling the widespread problem — and some teachers say they have seen the changes.

Russell, the math teacher at King High School, has seen improvements since she returned to the district in 2018. While she used to be met with silence when trying to get problems in her classroom resolved, the current administration is more responsive, she said.

“They do a better job of trying to maintain issues,” she said.

She’s happy that the district recently broke ground on a new building for Cody High, where she worked a year before the sick-outs began.

Chacker, who now teaches at Bunche Preparatory Academy, is excited to have enough books for her class now, but the lack of air conditioning in her building is still a hindrance.

“The problem is that we started in such an egregious place,” said Chacker. “There’s a lot of improvement needed and still so far to go as far as getting to the standard our peers in the suburbs are enjoying.”

Funding continues to be an obstacle, Vitti said, because the state funding model doesn’t earmark dollars for school infrastructure, which “indirectly requires districts to either take funding from the general fund” or apply additional local taxes. Federal funds received by the district cannot be used for that purpose. (The COVID relief dollars used for the $700 million plan were one-time funds.)

Vitti said he wants to see more equitable state funding to help close the gap.

“DPSCD receives $10,050 per pupil as the minimum, other districts have as high as over $13,000 per student,” he said of state funding. “This difference results in gaps as large as $168 [million] annually.”

Last week, Vitti presented a new proposal to use $79.4 million in surplus funding to demolish 11 buildings, board up 11 properties, build an athletic complex at the former Cooley High School, re-pave parking lots at 36 schools, improve fencing at 28 schools, and replace the roof at Charles Wright Academy, among other items.

Vitti said the district will continue to recommend shifting unspent funds to one-time building improvements.

“When we have extra surplus funding, we know exactly where to invest whether it is in roofs, windows. HVAC, masonry, fences, paving, or football fields,” he said.

Chacker said the protests were an important moment in the history of the district because teachers shared a unified message that the status quo was no longer tenable.

“It set standards for how students should be treated,” she said. “Before that, we got a blatant no when it came to money even if schools weren’t safe.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The Detroit school district has limited yellow bus service, and none for most high school students. Like , the 17-year-old’s family car. Riding city buses to Davis Aerospace Technical High School is Holiday’s only option, but – with delays and missed buses – it .

Last year, Holiday received a gift from his school that made the trek easier: a bicycle.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Principal Michelle Davis gave every student at the school a bike as part of a holistic approach to reducing chronic absenteeism. The bikes were funded through community donations.

Many of the nearly 100 students at Davis Aerospace last year said the bicycles helped them safely get to school by reducing the amount of time they had to walk to school or wait for buses. Others said the bikes gave them a new sense of independence, allowing them to travel around the city with their friends, get to after-school activities or jobs, and get exercise.

While Davis believes the bicycles improved attendance during good weather in the fall and spring, she said it’s only one measure the school is taking to get kids to class.

“Giving the students bikes is just one problem that we’ve solved for,” Davis told Chalkbeat. “What we do intentionally is solve for all of the problems that the kids have, because that has to be our major responsibility.”

The principal wanted her students to feel the same sense of independence she did as a teen when her mother bought her a pink Huffy.

So, Davis wrote “bikes” at the top of a white board next to her desk that lists her “big ideas.” And soon the vision came to fruition.

Other high schools in the district may also soon give bikes to their students. Last school year, the district surveyed high school students who were chronically absent about why they missed too much school. Some of the students said having a bike would help improve their attendance.

After the district’s school board , some members said they wanted the superintendent to follow up on whether a stock of “dozens” of bicycles in a storage warehouse could be used for that purpose.

Can bikes reduce chronic absenteeism in Detroit?

Chronic absenteeism, defined for Michigan students as missing 10% of the school year, has long been a problem in DPSCD. Issues such as high rates of poverty, , , and keep many children from missing crucial instructional time.

Students at Davis Aerospace say the bikes have helped address some of those barriers.

Holiday, for example, said his bike allows him to get to bus stops more quickly.

The first bus Holiday usually rides is regularly late by 20 minutes to an hour, he said.

If that bus doesn’t come in time, the teen has to decide whether he’ll go to another stop to try and catch a bus on a different route.

“I might miss those if I walk too slow, or I might be tired from trying to run to make it there,” he said.

Now, if the bus that runs on Plymouth Road doesn’t arrive, the teen can ride his bike to another stop. Or if Holiday isn’t able to catch a transfer due to delays, he can ride his bike the rest of the way to school.

“With the bike, I can still make up the distance or go to a different street to get on a different bus and still make it there on time,” he said.

His bike also makes him feel safer.

While violent crime rates have in recent years, many young people . Their sense of safety is shaped by many factors, including .

“A bike in itself is protection,” said Holiday. “You can use that to get away from the situation. You can use that as a barrier between you and something coming at you in the heat of the moment. You can even throw it.”

The bikes also help students left without a ride because their parents have to get younger kids to school earlier in the morning.

Myron Dean, a senior at Davis Aerospace, said while his parents take his five younger siblings to their schools, he has to get to school on his own.

With a bike, Dean can get to school in about seven minutes.

Dean is also using the bike to get to driver’s education classes so he can eventually drive himself and his siblings anywhere they need to go.

Junior Tryve Roberts said when no one in his family was able to give him a ride, he used to have to walk to school. It took about an hour, which would make him tardy.

Now, since he can get to school on the bike in about 16 minutes, he’s showing up on time more often.

and in other parts of the country suggest bicycles alone may reduce chronic absenteeism. Those who support the idea say using bikes to get to school gives more students access to transportation they otherwise wouldn’t have, can improve their health and well-being, and adds motivation for kids to improve attendance.

However, the successful examples proponents cite are in parts of the country with warmer climates, such as Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona.

At Davis Aerospace, the students are taught bike safety and instructed to not ride to school in poor weather conditions or during the winter.

There are nearly 165 miles of bike lanes in the city, , but not every neighborhood in the city has access to continuous dedicated bike paths.

Creating a culture of good attendance

DPSCD has made strides in in recent years. Several schools in the district have in reducing absenteeism.

At Davis Aerospace, the chronic absenteeism rate dropped by more than 14 percentage points last school year compared to 2023-24. Since 2018-19, the chronic absenteeism rate at the school fell by nearly 23 percentage points.

Even with that progress, more than 42% of Davis Aerospace students missed too many days of school last year. And the problem is more persistent in the district’s neighborhood schools.

For example, Denby High School, which is also on the east side of the city, had a chronic absenteeism rate of nearly 80% last year.

Some of Davis Aerospace’s progress may be due in part to the bikes, but the school had already been making steady progress in reducing absenteeism before that program.

“What we know is that there’s not just one thing that’s going to decrease absenteeism,” said Davis. “Every kid that has a barrier for attendance, we talk to those students. We see what the barriers are, and we solve for the student and their challenge to getting to school.”

At the school, which requires an application for students to attend, reducing absenteeism is ingrained in the culture.

A poster hanging on a brick wall by the school entrance tracks the daily attendance rate of each grade. Students who miss two days or fewer in the class with the highest attendance each month get rewards like cookies, nachos, or a movie day.

A room on the first floor of the school looks like a clothing boutique, except the clothes “for sale” are all marked “100% free.” Kids can grab the things they need to show up to school, like winter coats, gloves, and new shoes.

In another space, kids can get the hygiene products they need to show up ready to learn. There’s also a washer and dryer in the school where students can clean their clothes.

Davis said there are discussions around creating a parent carpool for kids who live near each other.

‘A form of freedom’

The gift of the bikes was not simply a pragmatic attempt to reduce absenteeism, said Davis. It was an act of love.

“When you’re a teenager, bikes are your first form of transportation, right?” Davis said. “It gives you a form of freedom. You explore the world with your bike.”

Junior Roderic Pippen said his bike helped him find a new hobby.

“I like to adventure on the bike – find new places to be at,” he said. “My bike trips are more fun than just sitting in the car, scrolling on the internet.”

Holiday will use his bike this year to attend biweekly events by the , a mentorship and college readiness nonprofit.

Before they got bikes, seniors Savannah Robinson and Ciana Carter felt stuck at home during summer breaks because their parents were busy with work.

Last summer, the girls had the freedom to ride to meet up and go to places like the beauty supply store and restaurants.

“Anytime she had a bad day over summer, I’d be like, come on, girl, let’s go ride our bikes and get fresh air,” said Robinson. “So it’s really helpful for both of us.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

On Friday, Michigan’s State Superintendent Michael Rice closes the book on a decades-long career as an educator.

Rice, who has been the state’s top education leader since 2019, paving the way for new leadership.

Glenn Maleyko, the current Dearborn Public Schools superintendent, . Until Maleyko starts, Sue Carnell, the chief deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education, .

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Rice led during a difficult time, with the pandemic upending education not even a year into his tenure. Students performed worse on state and national exams, chronic absenteeism surged, and student mental health concerns increased. Academic recovery has been slow, and despite small gains across the board on the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress this year, third graders posted their worst reading scores in the 11-year history of the exam.

In a recent Chalkbeat interview, Rice talked about some key issues that are critical to improved outcomes for students, including his insistence that Michigan lawmakers must act to stop schools from being able to count seven professional development days as instructional days. He said that flexibility, and others, mean students across Michigan could be receiving far less than the 180 days of instruction that are required by law.

Here are four takeaways from that interview:

The state gives schools too much flexibility to reduce the number of instructional days

Rice has repeatedly asked Michigan lawmakers to change state law to ensure students are receiving 180 days of instruction.

Rice is concerned because in recent years, state lawmakers have added flexibility in the law that allows schools to count up to seven professional development days — days when teachers are training and students are not in school — as instructional days.

Professional development, Rice said, “is immensely important.”

“But prior to the 2019-20 school year, professional development did not compete with instructional time,” he said. “It now does. Children shouldn’t have to pay for professional development of staff with lost instructional days.”

Schools also can shift to online instruction — meaning students are taught virtually — for up to 15 days. While those are technically instructional days, pandemic experience demonstrated that many students struggle with virtual learning.

Meanwhile, classes can be cancelled for reasons beyond the control of administrators, such as snow days and emergencies that close buildings.

It’s unclear to what extent Michigan schools are taking advantage of the flexibility lawmakers have given them for counting professional development as instructional days or going online. There is no requirement schools indicate how many of their instructional days include this flexibility.

But Rice is convinced it’s a problem in part because “we wouldn’t have the challenges of getting it rectified in the state legislature.”

Michigan has some deep educational challenges, but there have been some wins

Michigan student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, has been flat, with little improvement while other states are making significant progress. Literacy, particularly in the early grades, has been a challenge on state and national exams.

There have been some encouraging signs, which Rice easily rattled off during the interview as he discussed progress on the . That initiative outlines eight ambitious goals to improve education in the state and includes expanding early childhood learning, improving early literacy achievement, expanding postsecondary learning opportunities, increasing the percentage of students who graduate from high school, increasing the number of certified teachers in areas of shortages, and providing adequate and equitable school funding.

Rice cited examples of progress toward those goals: Lawmakers have allocated additional funding for some of the most vulnerable children — students from low-income homes, students with disabilities, students who are English language learners — to provide more equitable school funding. Substantially more children are enrolled in Michigan’s free preschool program, and the graduation rate of 82% for high school students is the highest it’s ever been.

But challenges persist, and the state hasn’t fully achieved any of the goals.

“If I could paraphrase Frost, and I like my poets, we have miles to go before we sleep on all of the issues. There’s been progress made 
 on every goal area, arrival on none,” Rice said.

Michigan can learn from Mississippi’s policies that led to big reading gains

A lot has been said about how the state of Mississippi has seen significant improvement in fourth grade reading on the NAEP, while Michigan’s performance has been flat. Mississippi was ranked ninth in the nation in fourth grade reading this year, up from 49th in 2013.

In Mississippi beginning in 2014, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (or LETRS) training was required for teachers in some state schools. LETRS is a professional development program based on the science of reading. The science of reading refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. (Since 2022, training.) Those schools were also required to hire literacy coaches.

Michigan has provided some funding in the state budget for the LETRS training, and more than 5,000 teachers have completed the training and another 7,000 have begun it, but Rice and the State Board of Education wants Michigan to make it mandatory for K-5 teachers. He has pointed to Mississippi as an example of why that’s important.

“The training was a priority, and it was a fundamental part in our progress toward understanding how our students learn to read through instruction aligned to structured literacy,” said Jean Cook, a spokesperson for the department.

Mississippi paid for training for general education teachers, special education teachers, administrators, speech-language pathologists, and other speech-related personnel, Cook said. As the state efforts grew, Cook said, “the training became strongly suggested rather than required.”

Rice said Mississippi “has been more focused than Michigan has,” and has “leaned into high quality, research based early literacy materials long before Michigan did.” He said they also recognized the value of low class sizes in high-poverty schools in grades K-3.

And just as important, Mississippi hasn’t allowed the incursions into student instructional time that Michigan has.

Michigan, to be sure, has focused efforts on literacy. In 2016, lawmakers passed legislation — the — that required schools to identify and intervene with struggling readers. The law also required schools retain struggling third-grade readers based on their performance on the M-STEP, though the law allowed a number of exemptions. The retention part of the law was rescinded in 2024.

Last fall, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed that require the Michigan Department of Education to identify reading curriculum that align with the science of reading, require schools to screen children to identify those who are struggling with dyslexia, and require teacher preparation programs to include instruction on identifying and addressing dyslexia.

Teacher shortages improving, but it’s not over yet

Michigan investments are paying off in reducing teacher shortages. Rice said that when he became state superintendent, there wasn’t any money in the state budget to address shortages. Since then, the state has invested millions of dollars in a number of efforts, including stipends for student teachers, scholarships for those going into teaching, and funding for “grow your own” programs. There has also been growth in programs aimed at strengthening the current workforce.

Teacher shortages “really had gotten quite acute immediately prior to the pandemic, and then exacerbated during the pandemic. We’re coming out of this,” Rice said.

He said the state went from having 23,000 people preparing for the profession in 2011 down to 9,500 in 2017. But now, he said, “we’re up to 18,000 preparing for the profession annually.”

But shortages are still a problem.

“When you go into the communities that are the most challenged, and you look in the classrooms and when they don’t have shortages, when they don’t have openings, when they have fully credentialed, strong teachers in every classroom, then we can say the shortage is over.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Titi Adams wanted to help others with disaster recovery after her own family struggled to get federal aid following last year’s tornado in Cypress, Texas. 

For Parv Mehta, years of computer science classes sparked his desire to teach kids in Washington state about the dangers of artificial intelligence and deepfakes. 

And Jackson Simmons-Furlati’s passion project of buying a hydroponic planter for his California high school turned into a mission of supplying fresh salads to schools across his community.

These four teens were recently awarded fellowships, under a new program from the national nonprofit . For the 2025-26 school year, 100 teams of five participants each will receive up to $7,500 to address real-world problems in their communities. The 500 fellows, ages 14 to 24, will implement their projects during the next school year, with the help of a mentor. 

The program was piloted in a couple of states in recent years, but this is the first time it’s been offered to students nationwide, said Beverly Sanford, the institute’s vice president. The 500 students come from 27 states and the District of Columbia, and a second cohort will be selected for the 2026-27 school year.

“These are big, ambitious efforts, and we think they’re really going to both bear fruit for their communities and help cultivate a new generation of leaders,” Sanford said.

Here’s what four of the fellows have come up with:

Angela Choi, 17

Junior at Greenhills School, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Angela and her team created the Youth Caregiver Action Network to help students in the Detroit area who are also caretakers for an ill family member.

It wasn’t uncommon for Angela to miss crucial study hours or class time as one of the main caregivers for her 14-year-old sister, who has autoimmune encephalitis, a condition that causes neurologic disorders. Angela helps her parents take care of her sister when she needs to go to the emergency room or has emotional outbursts.

“I’ve had to navigate the pressure between being a caregiver and a student at the same time, without any kind of tangible support,” she said. “[People have] kind of treated me as a way, or as a tool, to make my sister get better — not as a teen who’s going through a challenge as well. So that’s how this project started.”

When Angela discovered the fellowship a week before the application deadline, she didn’t know any peers who had a similar caregiving experience. But when she posted a request to student groups on social media, she found other students across the U.S. who were as passionate about the topic as she was. Four of them are now members of her Carnegie fellowship team.

All fellows met face to face in July to start their project. Each team receives a coach from the program and has to identify a mentor in their community. Angela chose the Detroit Health Department because it has the capacity to reach more young caregivers, she said. 

Angela’s project includes three branches: mental health support, educational equity and civic empowerment. Her team will use some of the Carnegie grant to buy and distribute mental health kits with small gifts and local resources to youth who are caregivers at home. Research that children who care or provide emotional support for a family member have an increased risk for mental health issues.

Because young caregivers spend their time supporting others instead of focusing on education, Angela’s team also plans to work with local schools to discuss accommodations like tutoring or testing assistance. For the project’s third branch, the team wants to help caregivers with responsibilities like voting or navigating insurance and finances.

“This is something that’s definitely become my passion recently, because I wanted to go into the medical field, because my sister’s sick and all,” she said. “But if these kinds of [issues] are not really addressed — if I can’t even be considered as someone to receive help and support — the medical field is really nothing to me.”

Titi Adams, 17

Senior at Cypress Ranch High School, Cypress, Texas

Titi had already started a nonprofit that provided aid to Nigerian families when she discovered the Carnegie fellowship. She decided to help her local community with an issue that’s become more prevalent in recent years: natural disaster recovery.

Titi was 13 when wreaked havoc across Texas in 2021, causing millions to lose power and roughly 200 deaths. Last year, a tore through her own neighborhood. She said her parents are still fighting to receive a check owed to them from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for repairs.

The disasters and her parents’ struggle inspired her to create a project to educate citizens about community recovery resources and the FEMA financial aid process. Titi said her team wants to focus their efforts on low-income and underserved communities that are than their affluent neighbors.

“Not getting the checks you’re supposed to get was the first [thing] we felt we could actually maybe do something about,” she said. “We’re hoping to help people advocate for themselves and realize that they do have options in regards to FEMA.”

Titi said her team hopes to reach at least 200 people during the next school year by producing pamphlets, flyers and digital campaigns in partnership with schools and local nonprofits. 

She said she thought her project idea might be too niche — until a devastating flood in central Texas killed , including 35 children, on July 4. 

“When we saw people’s response, it validated us that maybe this is actually a problem and we can make a difference,” she said.

Parv Mehta, 17

Senior at Eastlake High School, Sammamish, Washington

Parv had been passionate about computer science for years. But when ChatGPT was released in 2022, his interest shifted to tech policy and the ethical use of artificial intelligence. 

As software became more and more sophisticated, Parv said, he was increasingly aware of the potential for problems such as — videos, audio or images that seem real but have been manipulated by AI. Since 2019, 47 states have implemented laws addressing deepfakes, according to a national . 

Parv’s project aims to educate youth on AI, deepfakes and other digital media through hands-on workshops and teacher curriculum. He wants to focus on students who are Black, Indigenous and people of color because they often attend schools with less AI education than their white peers.

“We decided to specialize in BIPOC communities because we see the need there the most, even though everyone should be AI and deepfake-literate,” he said. 

The team plans to partner with schools and community nonprofits to offer in-person workshops taught by Parv and other members starting this fall. They eventually want to create a curriculum to help teachers bring AI education into the classroom. 

“We put in a metric about how many people we want to impact. We said 75 people in person and then over 200 people online. But to me, this fellowship is about making as much impact as possible,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that almost every kid knows about AI in Washington in five years. We’re going to work really hard to get there.”

Jackson Simmons-Furlati, 16

Sophomore at Dos Pueblos Senior High School, Goleta, California

For years, Jackson has raised money for his local food bank, but he recently became interested in inexpensive ways to provide families with fresh, healthy food. Last year, he used his own money to buy a hydroponic garden for his high school. It’s an 11-foot tower that grows produce vertically, without the need for soil.

Jackson said the logistics of installing a hydroponic tower next to his high school’s cafeteria was challenging, but the district eventually approved it with the support of his principal. 

Between January and the end of the school year in the spring, he was able to grow and harvest enough vegetables to create about 100 salads a week. Now, Jackson and his team will be using Carnegie fellowship funds to expand the project to other schools in the Santa Barbara Unified School District. About half of districts in the state have at least one school garden, according to the .

“I’ve been reaching out to other schools in my area, and I’ve been talking to an elementary school that has been pretty interested in installing half-towers — since the kids are tiny,” he said. “The Carnegie grant will be used to buy saplings for the towers.”

Jackson said the project isn’t just about providing fresh food, but also limiting plastic use. The salads he made during the school year were served without using any plastic materials, and his team plans to continue the trend at other buildings. 

“We’re just trying to grow and trying to expand,” he said. “Which is great, especially with the Carnegie grant.”

Despite the summer heat, Toyia Diab came out to the Summer on the Block at Pulaski Elementary-Middle School to learn what it had to offer the four grandchildren she had in tow.

The family made their way to about a dozen tables snaking around the lawn on the side of the school. Diab listened to staff from the Detroit school district detail all of its resources over the pulsing base of loud music.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Diab’s family was one of many the Detroit Public Schools Community District courted this summer as part of its efforts to retain families and boost enrollment. With the loss of more than 92,000 students in the last 20 years, district officials devote some of the summer break each year to getting word out about what the city’s schools have to offer.

This year, the district ramped up efforts. It sent 40 people to canvas communities and held 19 events to create excitement about the start of school — nearly double that of previous years. It also started new initiatives, such as putting up billboards around the city. In all, the school system budgeted around this year. School starts Aug. 25.

Though the district has “done a fairly good job” of recruiting new students in previous years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told school board members at a that the main challenge is keeping them.

As a result, this year the school system also has focused on reenrollment rates. Those numbers have become a metric the district uses to “hold schools accountable,” Vitti said, though he didn’t share how many students the district typically loses during the school year.

“We have emphasized 
 the need to improve customer service and parent engagement, so that parents feel more welcome,” he said. “And we fight harder to keep students at the schools that they’re at, rather than having more of an attitude of, ‘Well, if you don’t like it here, then you can find another school.’”

Sharlonda Buckman, assistant superintendent of family and community engagement, told Chalkbeat the district has seen a lot of “good signs” for this school year because of the number of people her office reached in the summer.

“It’s noticeable for me, and I’ve been at this for a long time,” she said. “We’ll see what that boils down to, in terms of enrollment.”

This year, Buckman said nearly 5,000 people went to the Summer on the Block events, parties held at schools that both serve as a vehicle to sell families on sending their kids to the district and connect them with free resources.

“As a parent, you have to bring your kids to school every day in order to get the education that they need,” Diab said at the Pulaski back-to-school event. “But then you’ll find some schools, they just don’t have enough resources to keep them interested to come to school, to stay in school.”

All of the district’s summer efforts produced 532 leads on parents interested in enrolling their kids by mid-August. Around 80 of those students completed enrollment, according to the district.

Though initial enrollment numbers are up, officials say, the full impact of the district’s efforts won’t be known until the end of the 2025-26 school year.

Myriad factors have affected enrollment in DPSCD

Boosting student numbers has been among the district’s top priorities for years.

The numbers of students attending schools are crucial for districts in Michigan, where school funding is tied to enrollment.

Now that and the federal government has signaled , districts are bracing to rely more on local money.

A number of factors affected the district’s enrollment over the years, including , lower birthrates, the state’s , and . The district also faces competition from Detroit , where around .

High student mobility rates, or the rate at which kids move to different homes, contribute to the district’s difficulty in keeping children enrolled. rates also have a .

Enrollment in the district was more than . Last year, it was 49,000.

When DPSCD was created and the school system began being phased out of emergency management in the 2017-18 school year, enrollment shot up to more than 50,800 from 45,700 during the 2016-17 school year.

The district has struggled to move the needle much since, especially after drops during pandemic-era school closures and .

At the beginning of this month, there were 50,890 students enrolled in the district, Vitti said at the board meeting.

“We have about 1,400 more students than we did at the end of the year enrolled in DPSCD as of today, and about 500 more as compared to the first day of school,” he said, adding that “ “enrollment is trending in a positive direction.”

Early enrollment numbers for the district are usually higher than official headcounts made in October. The number of students recorded on is used by the state to calculate funding for districts.

Making the case for DPSCD face-to-face

Three days before the Summer on the Block at Pulaski, more than 20 people squeezed into a sun-filled classroom at the Detroit School of Arts.

The group was contracted by the district to canvas homes in areas where attendance is low compared to the number of school-aged children living there.

This summer, the district sent canvassers to more than 78,000 homes to inform families about its schools and programs.

The group at the School of Arts was gathered to get their assignments for the day. They waited to pick up hand-out materials, including fliers listing Summer on the Block dates and pamphlets highlighting programs at application schools.

To get the energy up in the classroom before they headed out, the canvassers stood up to form a circle. Buckman, the assistant superintendent, asked them to share what they heard door-knocking.

“We’re getting a good response in terms of some of those students coming back to the district,” said one woman.

Others expressed residents’ hesitations to open their doors or to give their contact information for the district to follow up with them.

Laura Gomez, who has been canvassing for three years, said through a translator that this summer has been different in southwest Detroit, which is home to many immigrant and newcomer families.

People in the neighborhood say they have seen more community members in recent months, including .

“There are some people that are really happy we’re going out to the houses because that way they don’t have to leave their home because they don’t feel safe,” she said.

After the canvassers broke out into teams, they drove to the areas they were assigned to for the day.

Tanya Shelton and her son, David, arrived in the Crary St. Mary’s neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city.

“We’ll ask them what school district are they in, and if they are interested in DPSCD, we give some information on it,” she said as she made her way down a long block adjacent to the Southfield Freeway.

In her conversations with families, Shelton said the district’s free school lunches piqued their interest. Other canvassers said parents were interested in learning more about the academic interventionists available to students.

Most of the doors Shelton knocked on that day, though, went unanswered. She left the district’s literature at dozens of houses.

Families weigh programming, academics, and transportation in selecting schools

At Pulaski’s Summer on the Block Alexa Franco-Garcia saw more students signing up to attend the school than she has in past years.

“Right now, I have three enrollment packets in my hand, so that means they’ve completed enrollment,” she said during a break from talking with families.

Another three parents left their contact information and said they would return the paperwork the next day.

Considering it was about 30 minutes into the event, that was a strong number, said Franco-Garcia, who works in the Office of Family and Community Engagement.

In her time working in the district, Franco-Garcia has learned what kinds of questions families ask: They want to know about the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and class sizes. They wonder whether their children will be supported in special education and if they will get a bus ride to school.

Most of the sign-ups at the Pulaski event were for kindergartners who were new to the district, Franco-Garcia said.

Enrolling early learners is one of the districts’ .

There were 457 students enrolled in prekindergarten by the beginning of August, according to the district, up about 10 compared to the same time last year.

Diab, the grandmother, brought four kids ages 5 to 12 out to learn more about the school. They heard about the district’s community health hubs, parent academy, and mental health resources.

Teachers from the school gathered around a welcome table ready to answer questions as Principal Tyra R. Smith-Bell floated around talking with parents.

The fresh produce boxes, ice cream truck, free books, and kids’ activities also enticed more than 350 people to come – many more than in previous years, Buckman said.

Linn Flake was the first second-grader of the day to enroll at Pulaski, said Franco-Garcia. It would be his first experience at a neighborhood school, she added.

His mom, Roxanne Flake, chose DPSCD over the charter school Linn went to last year.

“I just wanted a different start,” she said.

The charter school didn’t provide transportation, said Flake, which was an inconvenience because she doesn’t currently have a car. But the Detroit school district offered bus service for Linn to Pulaski, the mother said.

Diab said she had more research to do before her family committed to Pulaski.

“We’re gonna come here and we’re gonna figure everything out – ask questions, all of that stuff, and then if it’s the right fit for them, then we’re gonna put them in,” she said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

It’s “the amount of information that’s coming to you all at once,” said Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit schools. On a , he laid out a litany of hardships, including figuring out “what’s true, what’s not. Emergency orders. Budget cuts.” 

Leaders felt similar uncertainty in the fall of 2020, when the pandemic forced them to scramble to educate, feed and transport students. But this time, as 47 million students return to school in the coming weeks, the source of the unease is the federal government. The Trump administration has already frozen and unfrozen education funds, and seeks to further reduce school spending. Vidito said he’s urging principals in his district to stay calm, but “a lot of the stuff, we can’t control.”

As Education Secretary Linda McMahon to schools across the country to spread her gospel of returning control to the states, leaders say they’re hoping for something simpler: a return to normalcy. 

“What is the next freeze, or what is the next issue that the administration may have with some of the funding that school districts get?” asked Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham, Alabama, schools.

At a last month, McMahon offered “no guarantees” that she could prevent the kinds of “communication gaps” that led to previous dustups. Her comments came the same day that the Office for Management and Budget completed its unexpected review of several annual grant programs for schools. Officials said their initial inspection turned up expenditures at odds with Trump’s agenda — offering up, without elaboration, the use of school improvement funds on “a seminar on ‘queer resistance in the arts.’ ” 

But after seven months with Trump in office, some district leaders have grown cynical.

David Law, superintendent of the Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota, doubts there ever was a thorough analysis and suggested that the few examples cited were meant as a warning.

“I think the pause was intended to let people know, ‘We don’t like these things, so if you’re doing them, you should be worried,’ ” he said. As they try to prepare for additional shocks to their budget, leaders nationwide, he said, are adjusting to the pendulum swing over diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Under the Biden administration, “we were trying to prove we were caring about kids enough,” he said. “Now we’re trying to prove that we’re not meeting the definition of indoctrination. It’s a bit of a wild ride.”

‘Safe to speak’

For now, Congress Trump’s proposed cuts to K-12 funding. But OMB has still floated of a that would claw back unspent education funds from the current budget before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. Congress’ watchdog agency says that if the administration doesn’t give Congress ample time to approve or reject the cuts, the move would . 

In a , McMahon said funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act will flow with or without the Department of Education. 

But that the administration might cut some special education grants already awarded for research, technology, and teacher and parent training alarm district-level staff.

“A reduction in this funding will create challenges for districts and could lead to the need to re-evaluate essential programs that help to support students eligible for special education services,” said Jessica Saum, a special education coordinator in the Cabot Public School District, outside Little Rock, Arkansas. 

President Donald Trump has said that ensuring schools teach children English is the federal government’s only education-related obligation. But Vidito in Detroit said he’s still bracing for the elimination of funding for English learners. 

Federal officials stating that districts must take “affirmative steps to ensure” that English learners “can meaningfully participate in their educational programs and services.” The move expands on a from Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that despite the president’s executive order declaring English the official language, the government should “minimize non-essential multilingual services” and focus on assimilation.

The unpredictability of this moment has prompted Merica Clinkenbeard, who directs English learner programs for the Springfield, Missouri, district, to remind teachers that the federal money is supplemental: Teachers are responsible for ensuring students become proficient in English with or without it.

Due to the threat of federal funding cuts, she lost three members of her leadership team.

“They felt like perhaps they would not have jobs in this field ever again,” she said. Now she has two positions she can’t fill. “I was telling my husband, ‘This is just like COVID, like everything I’ve known is going away.’ ” 

Districts serving large English learner and immigrant populations are more cautious than most as students return this fall, especially after Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials an 18-year-old Los Angeles student last week while he was walking his dog. Officials said he had overstayed his visa by two years.

The fear of ICE raids has prompted more parents to ask about remote learning, said Sharon Balmer Cartagena, an attorney with Public Counsel, a nonprofit public interest law firm. She’s been holding “family preparedness” workshops for southern California districts, encouraging them to update emergency contact information in case a parent is deported. 

Los Angeles Unified is one district trying to by stationing volunteers, staff and campus police around school zones. But she expects enforcement actions to ramp up with the start of the school year. Even so, she encourages parents to send their children to school in person.

“We saw what happened during COVID with younger kids learning remotely,” she said. Students in the early grades as they would have in a classroom and experienced both academic, social and behavioral setbacks, studies show. Now, many of those students are in middle and high school.

“To have that hit them again would be really detrimental,” Cartagena said. “Some of them are just starting to catch up.” 

‘Doing it right’

Not all education leaders are dreading the next announcement from Washington. Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley welcomed McMahon to Baton Rouge Aug. 11, where she celebrated the state’s rising performance in reading. On the last National Assessment of Educational Progress, the state scored above the national average after trailing the rest of the country for years. 

McMahon also hit Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida last week, three more states that embrace the Trump administration’s plans to reduce federal education oversight. Since her confirmation, she has limited most of her school visits to charter and private schools, to emphasize the administration’s focus on expanding choice. But this tour is giving her more exposure to traditional district schools. 

“Louisiana is doing it right — and they don’t need the federal bureaucracy to make it happen,” McMahon after her visit to Jefferson Terrace Academy in East Baton Rouge. 

But the state did need federal money, specifically the COVID relief funds, Brumley said during the . 

“We were able to use those pandemic dollars around the academic efforts that we knew were best for students,” he said. He agrees with McMahon’s position that fewer strings tied to education funding will lead to stronger results. “We’re just really excited about 
 not having these excessive restrictions and bureaucratic needs surrounding dollars.”

Educators want assurances that the funding their students count on is stable, said Saum, in the Cabot district. Some students with disabilities require significant hands-on help from staff members. 

“Parents are following along,” she said “They want to know ‘Is my child going to get what they need to be safe and cared for at school?’ ”

With the formal title of “inclusion coordinator,” Saum said she has to be clear about her role at a time when the administration is trying to ban DEI-related programs. 

“It can be so divisive when people don’t really understand we’re talking about children with disabilities,” she said. Others with similar positions, she said, have changed their titles to emphasize “meaningful access.”

If anything, Law, from the Minnetonka district, said the administration’s “critical lens” on schools have forced leaders to be “crystal clear” about their work. During a recent visit to a nursing home, as part of his efforts to connect with members of the community, he said a resident told him, “You should be teaching all these kids English.”

“ ‘I have great news. The only thing we’re teaching these kids is English,’ ” Law said he told him. “There will always be people that say you don’t need to kowtow to certain populations. I’m still going to say public education is all students getting free education.” 

Detroit schools are facing some of the deepest cuts to federal funding in the country as The White House withholds $6.2 billion of funds nationwide.

The appropriations were already approved by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

But the administration informed states that they would be withholding the funding for five programs that support educator development, student enrichment programs, migrant education, English learners and 21st-century learning centers.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

While data isn’t available for the program supporting migrant education, federal data organized by shows that Michigan stands to lose $81.6 million across the other four programs – accounting for more than $65 per student in the state.

The deepest cuts are in areas represented in Congress by Democrats, with those school districts facing a loss of $45 million compared to nearly $36.6 million in areas represented by a Republican.

That’s an average of $7.5 million per school district in Democratic areas compared to $5.2 million per district in Republican areas.

Michigan’s seven Republican members of Congress represent 713,666 students, while the six Democrats in Michigan’s congressional delegation represent 530,785 students.

On average, school districts represented by a Democrat would lose about $84 per student, while school districts represented by Republicans would lose about $51 per student.

That’s a reversal from the national trend, where the average school district represented by a Republican would lose 1.6 times as much funding per pupil than those represented by a Democrat.

That’s in part because while 91 of the 100 school districts nationwide facing the deepest cuts are in Republican congressional districts, Detroit is one of the ten districts with the most funding at risk.

They would lose the third most funding nationwide for student support and enrichment programs and the sixth most funding for education development.

In total, the district has more than $16 million on the line.

U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Detroit) represents the hardest hit congressional district, which stands to lose about $210 per student, followed by U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) at about $87 per pupil.

The school district has the highest poverty rate across the 46 states for which data was available at 46.9%.

Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti could not be reached for comment.

Zahava Stadler is the project director of the Education Funding Equity Initiative in the Education Policy Program at New America.

She told Michigan Advance that highly impoverished districts are likely to face significant cuts since poverty rates are a consideration for some federal grants.

“Higher poverty districts are going to be hit again and again and again as the federal government dithers over whether or not to release all of these individual funding streams to which school districts are legally entitled,” Stadler said.

The federal government withholding the already-allocated funding has made it even more difficult for schools to plan their budgets after the Republican-led Michigan House of Representatives by their deadline of July 1.

Even if school districts are able to maintain the programs through other funding sources, Stadler said they wouldn’t be able to then reimburse those funds later on if the federal funds came through.

“Money can’t just get moved around at will,” Stadler said. “Federal dollars have rules. And the administration is throwing districts into chaos as they are rapidly approaching a new school year.”

Beyond the programs themselves having an impact on students, Stadler said the fight over funding also symbolizes the wrong message for the students who benefit from them.

“The message that these kids are getting is that their country doesn’t want to invest in them, their schools aren’t able to invest in them,” Stadler said. “And that is a really difficult and tragic thing to hear as a young person who is just trying to grow and thrive in a community of which they’re a member.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

Maykol Bogoya-Duarte, the Detroit teen whose detention by federal immigration authorities last month caused an outcry and led to calls for his release, has been deported, his attorney said Friday morning.

Attorney Ruby Robinson said he learned late Thursday night from Maykol’s mother, in an 11:15 p.m. voicemail, that the teen was back in his home country of Colombia.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Robinson said he hadn’t yet spoken with Maykol, but hoped to do so later Friday. He said the teen is now with his grandmother in Colombia.

Chalkbeat reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to confirm the deportation, but did not get a response. His information is no longer available on .

while he and a group of other newcomer boys attempted to join a field trip at Lake Erie Metropark, about 25 miles away from Detroit. Rockwood police stopped the teen for allegedly tailgating another car. Maykol did not have a driver’s license, only a City of Detroit identification card, Robinson has previously said.

His detention prompted advocacy from his teachers, fellow students, community members, and lawmakers who pleaded for Maykol to be allowed to remain in the country to finish high school. He was 3.5 credits shy of a high school diploma at Western International High School, where he was enrolled.

“I’m devastated,” said Kristen Schoettle, who taught Maykol at Western.

“The cruelty of this country really shakes me,” Schoettle said. “This kid, my bright student, was passed along to prisons for a month, scared and facing awful conditions I’m sure, for the crime of what — fleeing his country as a minor in search of a better life? And the US government decided his time was better spent in prison than finishing out the school year.”

Schoettle said she hopes to hear from Maykol today.

“I hope he’s safe with his grandma. I hope he can recover from this traumatizing experience and still will dream of a better life. I’ll miss him in my classroom next year and our city and our country are worse off without people like him,” she said.

Schoettle shared examples of Maykol’s classroom work with Chalkbeat, including what he wrote when asked earlier this year to write about freedom.

“I think the freedom in this moment is a little confusing since we can’t leave safely since we don’t know what can happen and it seems strange to me since we have to be more careful than usual,” he wrote in Spanish.

Thousands of people signed a petition earlier last week .

for more than 2Âœ hours at the district’s school board meeting on June 10. Afterward, the board released a statement saying it wanted Maykol to be able to stay in the country to earn his diploma.

Maykol’s mother attended that school board meeting, though she didn’t speak. Robinson, senior managing attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said the organization isn’t representing Maykol’s mother.

“But I would suspect she will try to return to Colombia at her own expense based on what she learned with Maykol’s month-long, taxpayer-funded, and entirely unnecessary and harmful detention.”

During the May 20 traffic stop that led to his detention, police officers could not communicate with him in Spanish and called Customs and Border Protection agents to translate.

Maykol, who came to the U.S. when he was 16, had already been going through a legal process to return to Colombia after receiving a final order of deportation in 2024. He was working with immigration officials and the Colombian Consulate to obtain the documentation he needed to fly out of the country with his mother.

While he made those arrangements, Maykol planned to finish high school in Detroit.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Adding to the legal challenges over the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to rid schools of DEI, 19 Democrat-led states sued Friday over an April 3 “dear colleague” letter.  

The threat to withhold funding if states don’t sign what the complaint calls “a novel and unlawful certification” would be “catastrophic for plaintiff states’ students from kindergarten through high school,” the attorneys general wrote.

Collectively, the Democrat-led states stand to lose almost $14 billion, including Title I money for low-income schools and funds for students with disabilities. The complaint asks a federal district court in Massachusetts to declare the April 3 letter unlawful and prevent the department from taking any action based on its interpretation of anti-discrimination laws and the Supreme Court decision that ended racial preferences in college admissions.

States and school districts resisting a U.S. Department of Education ultimatum regarding diversity, equity and inclusion got a temporary reprieve Thursday. Two federal judges — one in and another in the — blocked the department’s ability to withhold federal funding from those that didn’t to its interpretation of non-discrimination laws or agree to end what officials called “impermissible” DEI programs.

A third judge in suspended for now a Feb. 14 “” letter warning districts against racial diversity efforts. The deadline to sign a form certifying compliance was Thursday.

States and districts are “no longer under the immediate threat” of losing funds if they “continue to offer long-standing lawful programs or don’t sign” the form, said Katrina Feldkamp, assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund. Representing the NAACP, the law firm is among several groups, including unions, school districts and advocacy groups, involved in three separate lawsuits over the department’s anti-DEI guidance. 

In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers — part of the Maryland case — called the court’s ruling “a huge win for students, families and educators.” 

The department’s follow-up on Feb. 28 appeared to soften officials’ stance on practices it considers illegal, saying cultural and historical observances were acceptable as long as all students were welcome to participate. But the certification requirement took a firm tone, cautioning states that they could face substantial financial penalties if they sign it and are then found to be in violation. 

“The court finds that threatening penalties under those legal provisions without sufficiently defining the conduct that might trigger liability violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on vagueness,” Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in her oral ruling granting a preliminary injunction. The department’s documents, she said, “placed a particular emphasis on certain DEI practices without providing an actual definition of what constitutes DEI or DEI practice.”

At the time of publication 12 states, including Arizona, Arkansas and Montana, and the District of Columbia, had signed the certification. Twenty-two, including California, Michigan and New Mexico, declined to sign, and 17 either hadn’t announced their decision or did not respond to calls or emails from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Madi Biedermann, spokeswoman for the Education Department, said she didn’t know if officials would share the full count of states complying. She didn’t respond to a request for comment on the court rulings. 

Signing the form indicates compliance with Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, as well as the department’s view of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against racial preferences in higher education admissions. 

State chiefs who didn’t sign argued that the Education Department didn’t clearly define DEI and ignored proper procedures for collecting such information. Overall, the documents have left leaders bewildered over whether they stand to lose millions in federal funds. In Denver Public Schools, for example, roughly $36 million in Title I funds for high-poverty schools and another $20 million for special education services are at stake. Like state chiefs in several other blue states, Colorado’s Susana CĂłrdova to sign the document. 

“I think all districts across the country are forced to grapple with this question of ‘What would you do without it?’ ” said Chuck Carpenter, chief financial officer.

Title I funds in his district, Colorado’s largest, cover salaries for school social workers, help to reduce class sizes and support interventions for students who are behind academically. 

“These are very much on-the-ground expenses,” he said. “This doesn’t get caught up in the bureaucracy. This is for real kids and real people.”

Several GOP state chiefs welcomed the department’s message. Arizona state Superintendent Tom Horne , “Thank you for fighting for our Constitution and laws!” along with his signature. Oklahoma chief Ryan Walters posted of himself at his desk signing the form. 

“No DEI in Oklahoma schools,” he said. “We will talk about merit and American exceptionalism, and we’ll have the best school system possible, thanks to President Trump.”

While some state and district leaders likely viewed the form as a “box to check,” others may see it as “provocation,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations.

“The department’s shifting guidance in recent months has created a lot of confusion in the field,” she said. “It’s not always clear whether this is a legal compliance issue or a political messaging moment.”

Even some critics of DEI agree. Steven Wilson, a senior fellow at the free market-oriented Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Boston, argues that many schools, including high-performing charter networks, went astray by embracing anti-racist teaching approaches. 

He pointed, for example, to author that “worship of the written word” is evidence of white supremacy and framing around social justice issues. 

“These teachings are enormously destructive,” said Wilson, who founded the Ascend charter school network in Brooklyn, New York. “I would be hard pressed to think of a more damaging message to impart to teachers of Black and brown children than that the worship of the written word is whiteness.” 

But Wilson views the department’s threat to federal funding as equally harmful. “The audacity” of tying the compliance form to funding for programs that serve students in poverty and those with disabilities, he said “has to be vigorously contested.” 

‘Historically underserved’

Title I, the biggest federal education program, totals over $18 billion. Part of the 1960s War on Poverty, it has “really been a cornerstone of federal funding in K-12 for the better part of a century,” said Jess Gartner, founder of Allovue, a school finance technology company that’s now part of PowerSchool. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, currently funded at $15 billion, came a decade later in 1975. 

Officials can’t withhold those funds with “a wave of the hand and a strike of the pen” or because “someone won’t sign a form,” Gartner said. “There is for reporting, investigating and determining that discrimination has actually occurred.” 

In 2023, under former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the department withheld federal funds from Maine for not meeting state testing requirements. But that was after two years of being out of compliance, and officials the state could reserve for administrative costs — not the money that goes to schools.

The Trump administration has demonstrated that it will abruptly cancel funding that has already been approved by Congress. That’s why finance officers like Carpenter in Denver are on edge about how the department will respond to states that didn’t sign the form. 

Title I funding supports about half of the Denver district’s 207 schools, where immigrant and non-English-speaking parents especially rely on liaisons like Boni Sanchez Florez. He helps them access after-school classes, mental health services and low-cost internet. But  Florez also encourages them to take leadership roles and speak up about issues that affect their children, like .

“It’s hard enough for them to walk in a building with a staff that is predominantly 80% white. How do you build that trust in a community that doesn’t trust the system?” asked Florez, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a child. “If I’m in my dad’s shoes 30 years ago, I would want people to reach out to me.”

Nearby in Jeffco Public Schools, Colorado’s second largest district, roughly 100 staff members are directly paid with Title I funds, said Tara Peña, chief of family partnerships and community engagement. They include three “family ambassadors” who work out of a mobile welcome center — a customized bus that hosts enrollment fairs, book giveaways and what Peña called “goodwill events.”

The welcome center staff signs families up for Medicaid or free lunch programs and teams up with other community groups to distribute school and hygiene supplies.

“A loss in federal funding would be very destructive and be very impactful to the supports and the services that we provide to our most vulnerable students,” Peña said. “The students who’ve been historically underserved would continue to be the ones that would be harmed.” 

‘Four years?’

The potential cuts to funding also come as districts across the country are finalizing their budgets for the upcoming school year, with federal funds in mind. Before McMahon announced the certification requirement on April 3, most had already issued contracts for staff for this fall. 

In California, which receives over $2 billion in Title I funds and almost $1.6 billion from IDEA, the deadline to issue any layoff notices was March 15. 

That means districts would still be obligated to pay employees whose salaries come from those sources “whether they get funding or don’t,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state agency responsible for financial oversight of districts. “Districts did not contemplate such a loss before the March 15 layoff window.”

Districts in Michigan, another state that declined to sign the form, are in the same predicament. For now, the Detroit Public Schools Community District — where roughly 25% of the budget comes from federal sources — has committed to not letting any employees go. But Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer, said that could just be a temporary solution if the department fully cuts Title I. 

“Maybe we can bridge two years with our fund balance. But four years? There’s no way,” he said. “It will mean school closures. It will mean reduced services for our kids and walking back the intervention programs.”

With a student poverty rate of  more than 80%, the nearly $125 million Detroit receives in Title I funding pays for counselors, social workers, and art and music teachers, as well as  high school administrators who are focused on keeping ninth graders on track for graduation. 

For LaQuitta Brown’s son Kermari, a 7 year old with autism, art has been especially important. He struggled to speak until last year, but he could communicate with his mother by drawing pictures, Brown said. Through special education, he receives speech and occupational therapy. His mother also depends on a mobile vision screening program for his checkups.

“He wouldn’t be where he would be without those services,” she said. “It takes a village, especially when you have a child needing special attention.”

Title I also supports high-dosage tutoring in Detroit, one of the reasons, Vidito said, why the district outperformed most other large, urban systems in a from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Last school year, the district also saw in reading than the state as a whole.

“We are seeing results,” he said. “We have committed to educating all kids, but if we start to defund education, then we’re stepping back from that commitment.”

Most right-leaning think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, welcome the department’s certification requirement and its interpretation of the decision. 

That opinion didn’t mention K-12 schools, but it has “broad implications for the use of racial preferences in public education services at the K-12 and postsecondary levels,” said Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “The majority opinion and supporting opinions deal with rooting out racism writ large from education.” 

But Wilson at the Pioneer Institute said the AFT lawsuit is “one of those relatively rare moments” of agreement he has with AFT President Randi Weingarten. She said the anti-DEI directives would hamper schools’ efforts to teach accurate history, including the harms of slavery and persecution of minority groups. 

“If that is what [the department] has in mind as a federal prohibition, that would be devastating.” he said. Trump, is “claiming, rather flamboyantly, to devolve education back to the states while announcing this unprecedented intrusion into what schools and districts may teach.”

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Mark Keierleber contributed to this story.

When the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered schools in 2020, students were suddenly thrust into a world of online classes at home. That wasn’t an easy switch, even for affluent students with their own computers and internet service at home. 

But in high-poverty cities like Cleveland and Detroit, it was a full blown crisis with thousands of students lacking computers and any internet access.

Nearly half of families in the two cities had no broadband internet service —  strong connections to home devices such as computers, not just on mobile phones — making them the worst-connected cities in the U.S. in one ranking. Other high-poverty cities, including Baltimore, Memphis and Newark, were close behind.

Today, a little more than five years since the pandemic shut schools down, the crisis isn’t as immediate — schools are open after all — but structural issues remain. Connectivity rates have improved nationally from about 71% of homes having broadband service in 2019 to more than 76% in 2023, still far from everyone.

”The pandemic highlighted for federal and state government that we have an issue,” said Charlotte Bewersdorff, vice president of community engagement of the a partnership between Michigan’s universities that has worked to improve internet access even before Covid hit. “A lot of our work prior to that was trying to convince people that there was an issue. The pandemic made it undeniable.”

Gains were greater in the cities that had the greatest need. Cleveland and Detroit each went from having nearly half of homes without broadband down to a third, according to U.S. Census data.

But now those gains are threatened.  

Most connectivity improvements were made in 2020 and 2021 — at the height of the pandemic —  but have since stalled. A key federal emergency effort to help families be online by paying part of their monthly bill has ended. Some long-term improvements using Covid relief money are planned but have been slow to start. 

The programs are now in limbo as Congress has changed its focus and President Donald Trump ordered a pause in January on many infrastructure investments, including internet efforts with funding set aside in pandemic relief bills but hadn’t started work yet. There’s also which would benefit Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the Starlink satellite company and close advisor of Trump.

 â€œThe initial agility and efforts to help everybody get connected lost steam as other programs and other problems emerged,” said Johannes Bauer, the chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission in 2023 and 2024. “There’s a risk that the gains that were made very early on are actually diminishing over time, and new programs haven’t yet filled that gap.”

Providing internet access for all has long been a goal of digital equity advocates, though it has never been easy to achieve. There’s an infrastructure challenge: Homes need a service to connect to, which isn’t always the case. Families need to be able to afford it. They need computers to use it. And they need to know how,

All of these were hurdles when the pandemic hit, particularly for low-income areas.

Schools and nonprofits scrambled to hand out laptops and mobile hotspots. Some parked buses with wifi service in neighborhoods. Learning pods sprouted at churches, community centers or clubs like the Y.M.C.A. or Boys and Girls Clubs, where plexiglass dividers separated properly-spaced desks for students to take classes on just-acquired laptops.Club staff came to work every day while school staff stayed home.

Suddenly, “digital equity” was a focus of legislators and the federal government, which soon offered billions in grants to help families pay internet bills and to add fiber optic lines and other internet infrastructure to disconnected areas.

block by block to help target aid. All 50 states created digital equity plans to compete for grants and help connect and educate underserved groups. Many states have also submitted plans and won early approval for plans to connect rural areas.

But there are worries. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), created by Congress during the pandemic, gave a peak of 23 million homes $30 a month to reduce their internet bills, but Congress let the funding expire in 2024. And billions set aside for both rural and urban 

infrastructure and for internet education is also uncertain while the Trump administration picks new leaders to oversee grants and Republicans in Congress seek to change rules guiding them.

Beyond just pausing infrastructure projects overall, Trump’s orders to half spending on “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” in all parts of government threatens efforts to connect and train families under the Digital Equity Act, another pandemic response.

Cleveland and Detroit highlight the mixed impact of the pandemic on connectivity. The two cities remain the worst-connected cities in the U.S., but they have also seen the greatest improvements in connectivity rates the last few years, according to census data

Those cities each slashed the percentage of families with no broadband service in half –  from around 46% in each city in 2019 to about 23% today, according to Connect Your Community and 2023 data from the census. 

“It has gotten completely better,” said Gloria Jones, director of the Boys and Girls Club near the King Kennedy public housing apartments in Cleveland. The club’s pandemic learning pod once drew  more than 30 students every day to do online lessons.

 â€œWhen we first started out, there were kids that didn’t have any access,” she said. “That’s why we had to set up. Or their internet was running slow. If you’ve got three kids in the house and y’all are trying to get on the same internet, it slows it down.”

Today, students mostly use the club WiFi only for an online tutoring program the club provides. She said families seem to have found low-cost service, even if not at ideal bandwidth, often from cell phone companies.

The landscape has changed so much in Cleveland that the Cleveland Municipal School District, which had to scramble to buy its 35,000 students laptops and digital hotspots for the 2020-21 school year, has cut its hotspot program way back. The district gave hotspots to 12,000 students — about a third of the district’s enrollment — in 2023, but cut that in half to 6,000 by last spring because students weren’t using them for months at a time.

“We turned them off,”  Curtis Timmons, the district’s Chief Information Officer, said as budget cuts were announced last spring. “If you don’t use a hotspot that tells us something – that’s a waste of our money.”

The need for hotspots will reduce further with the district now offering students free internet service from DigitalC, a unique non-profit the district has partnered with since 2020 that aims to provide low-cost broadband using wireless technology. It’s a plan that has caught the attention of connectivity experts, who could not point to another new, public—private partnership like it.

Using private donations and federal pandemic relief dollars from the city, DigitalC has nearly finished building a network across the city so it can offer 100 mbs service for $18 a month.

The school district, city and county housing authority all allowed the company to put transmission towers on school buildings to keep costs down. About 1,300 families with students in the district now use it for free internet.

Nichelle Montoney, guardian of two boys, 13 and 10, in the Cleveland school district said free service from DigitalC makes a big difference for her. She kept her internet service after ACP ended, but her $50 monthly bill from the cable company was hard to pay.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “That bill barely got paid
when you have to choose between paying the gas bill and the light bill. You pay just under the minimum requirement to put it towards the cable bill, so you can try to get just another 30 days and hope that it stays on. It was a struggle.”

Other residents are still slow to sign on. The service has about 3,600 subscribers, out of about 90,000 households in its service area. DigitalC still aims to eventually have 22,500 homes subscribed, nearly half of those without internet service now.

Detroit also had major efforts to connect people. A partnership with the city, United Way and the Rocket Mortgage company, which is based in Detroit, rallied as “Connect 313” — named after the city’s area code — to provide training and low cost laptops and hotspots to people. The city also used pandemic relief money to ” in libraries, community centers and non-profits around the city that remain open today for residents to access the internet.

It is also trying to add fiber optic cable to one neighborhood to improve connectivity there as a pilot project, but the .

And it boosted its connectivity numbers with a major drive with television and radio commercials in late 2023 to sign up more residents for ACP internet benefits. , but many more eligible families never took advantage.

“It was kind of like a last chance effort to show them (federal officials) this is a really big need, in the community,” said Jenninfer Onwenu, a senior advisor in Detroit’s Digital Equity and Inclusion office. “This is something that people were not aware of that they could be benefiting from. Imagine how many lives we could change by keeping this program in place. Unfortunately, that did not work out.”

Republicans opposed extending ACP as a “wasteful” part of a Democratic “spending spree”  because it was costing billions and some estimates showed that only about 20 percent of recipients added internet service because of ACP,while most just enjoyed a discount on service they already paid for.

Digital equity advocates worry, though, that new census data available this fall will show that families had to drop their service without ACP’s help. Some loss is likely, with major communications companies reporting subscriber losses last year they attribute to ACP’s end. Comcast, the nation’s largest internet provider, reported losing 87,000 subscribers in one quarter last year mainly because ACP expired.

John Horrigan of the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, a Chicago-area non-profit, and that ACP bill reductions kept 8.8 percent of households nationally online.

“The digital divide is not about being ‘on’ or ‘off’ the network,” Horrigan said. That framing makes it seem as if once a household is on, it has permanently hurdled the barrier that separates disconnection from connection…There is more uncertainty and churn in broadband at the low-income end of the market than some may appreciate.”

At-risk families like these are who DigitalC in Cleveland is hoping to connect, though Detroit and other cities don’t have a similar backstop.

“Their safety net is being cut,” said DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds. “In the absence of that funding, locally, we have an answer.”

Republicans in Congress are also opposing grants to states and communities under the pandemic-passed Digital Equity Act and the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD) for their focus on serving ethnic and racial minorities, both in who the projects will serve and who is hired to work on them. Such a race-based program is unconstitutional, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has charged.

U.S. House members have also raised concerns about the BEAD infrastructure program, which has states with plans ready to begin, but are now on hold. A House subcommittee blasted that program in a

”The Biden-Harris Administration saddled the BEAD program with regulations unrelated to broadband to appease left-wing interest groups,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican, the sub committee’s chairman. “These included technology preferences, burdensome labor rules, and climate change requirements, to name a few. 

He and others want to ditch BEAD’s old preference for fiber optic lines for a “technology-neutral” approach that would allow the allotted $42 billion to also cover satellite projects.

Democrat Doris Matui of California immediately objected to what she called “sabotage” of projects ready to begin.

“Republicans claim they’re just being technology neutral,” the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee said. “But can we trust this when the Trump administration has given Elon Musk nearly unfettered authority to further his business interests by taking over government contracts and dismantling agencies regulating his companies?”

Nearly 5,000 Detroit high school students have earned at least one $200 incentive for perfect attendance since early January.

High school students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District in which they have perfect attendance, from Jan. 6 through March 21.

There have been two cycles so far for which students have received the gift cards and, in addition to the 4,936 students who had perfect attendance in at least one of two-week periods, 2,028 have had perfect attendance in both cycles, according to data Superintendent Nikolai Vitti shared with Chalkbeat this week.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

The attendance incentive is aimed at improving attendance in the district, where two-thirds of nearly 49,999 students were considered chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year. The incentive is among a number of efforts the district has employed over the years to create an attendance-going culture among students. The district has invested heavily into and this school year announced that students with extremely high rates of chronic absenteeism will be held back a grade at the K-8 level and required to repeat classes at the high school level.

The number of students earning the perfect attendance incentive is a fraction of the nearly 15,000 high school students in the district, leading one school board member to question last week whether the incentive is working. But Vitti said he is encouraged that the program is and resulting in a small decrease in the chronic absenteeism rate for high school students. He said the district and board will have to evaluate the program’s success at the end of the school year.

Chronic absenteeism has been one of the district’s biggest challenges for years. The chronic absenteeism rate has declined, from a high of nearly 80% at the height of the pandemic, when quarantining rules meant many students missed school because of COVID exposure. But last school year’s much lower chronic absenteeism rate of 66% still means it is difficult to have consistency in the classroom and improve academic achievement.

Students in Michigan are chronically absent when they miss 10%, or 18 days in a 180-day school year. Statewide, 30% of students are considered chronically absent, . A recent education scorecard cited the state’s rate as being a factor in students’ slow academic recovery from the pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights of the students who’ve received the incentive so far::

• 3,473 students had perfect attendance during the first cycle.
• 3,492 students had perfect attendance during the second cycle.
• About 10% already had perfect attendance.
• About 4% were considered chronically absent at the time the incentive began.
• About 16% had missed 10% of the school year at the time the incentive began.
• About 25% had missed 5-10% of the school year.
• About 44% had missed 5% or fewer days in the school year.

At a Detroit school board meeting last week, Vitti said the statistic showing that just 10% of the students who earned the incentive already had perfect attendance is an indication that “this is not just rewarding those that have already been going to school.”

Board member Monique Bryant questioned what school leaders are doing to promote the incentive to students who haven’t earned it.

Bryant suggested that data Vitti shared at the meeting showing that chronic absenteeism is down by 5 percentage points for high school students since the incentive began is an illustration that most students aren’t rising to the goal of the incentive.

Vitti responded that it depends on how you look at the data.

“Right now, chronic absenteeism at the high school levels improved by five percentage points,” Vitti said. “That means that 700 high school students are not chronically absent where they were last year. I’d also say that at least on the 97th day, our chronic absenteeism at the high school levels is the lowest it’s been since the pandemic.”

The question for board members to decide at the end of the school year is whether the incentive “is the right investment with other challenges that we have districtwide,” Vitti said. “But I think the data is suggesting it’s working for many students 
 but not all.”

Board member Ida Simmons Short urged the district to survey students to learn more about what is preventing them from coming to school.

The causes of chronic absenteeism are numerous and include physical and mental health reasons, lack of transportation,and lack of affordable housing. Most of them tie back to poverty. Vitti specifically , because half of the students in the district don’t attend their neighborhood school and the district doesn’t provide school bus transportation for high school students, who must take city buses to get to school.

“Sometimes they’re unreliable, they’re late, they’re too far away from where the child lives,” Vitti said.

Vitti said traditional school bus transportation for high school students “was decimated” under emergency management and it could cost between $50 million and $100 million to bring that level of transportation back.

Another factor, Vitti said, is that for some students, school isn’t relevant. Middle and high school students, in particular, “struggle to understand, ‘why am I going to school every day? How is this connected to what I’m going to I need to know for life.’”

Mi’Kah West, a Cass Technical High School student who serves as a student representative on the board, said that when talking to other members of the District Executive Youth Council last week, many said students overall are excited about the incentive.

One thing that stuck out, she said, was council members saying they heard students in the hallways or on social media saying they were coming to school because they want the money.

“And, while we don’t want to just say we want to come to school for the money,” West said, “I think it’s important to see that students 
 may have stayed home because they don’t want to come to school, but they’re willing to come to school now.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

– Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting opinion in Milliken v. Bradley, July 25, 1974

This year, Americans marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended legal segregation of public schools. It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most famous rulings and certainly its best-known education-related case. In many ways, though, Milliken v. Bradley — decided 50 years ago, in July 1974 — has more to teach about the current state of American education and what it would take to truly realize Brown’s promise of integrated schools and equal educational opportunity for all.

If Brown was the green light for school integration in America, Milliken — which addressed the question of whether the federal courts could require regional integration plans across district lines — became something of a flashing red. In overruling the cross-district remedies that lower courts deemed essential for true integration in metropolitan Detroit, the Supreme Court significantly limited the ability of the federal courts to order predominantly white suburban districts to integrate with predominantly black urban ones.

As Marshall sadly predicted, schools today are than they were when he wrote his dissent, with most of that segregation occurring between school districts rather than within them. Indeed, a whopping of the intense school segregation in the Detroit area stems from demographic differences between neighboring or nearby districts — a direct legacy of Milliken.

But the decision did not prevent states from adjusting district lines or taking other steps to promote cross-district integration. That’s exactly what they should do now.

The organization I co-founded, Brown’s Promise, has developed laying out concrete strategies for state leaders, advocates, policymakers and practitioners. States could, for example, transform school funding formulas to allocate resources according to a school’s needs rather than local property values. Or they could create interdistrict transfer programs and public magnet schools, like those that have fostered diverse classrooms in Hartford, Connecticut. States could also require districts to create plans for promoting integrated, well-funded schools within districts and schools, and systematically track their progress toward meeting those goals.

Achieving this sort of state policy change should not require litigation, but history teaches that legal action is necessary for forcing integration in American schools. Several active lawsuits offer a promising roadmap. Students, families and organizations in Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have filed lawsuits arguing that their states have a duty under their state constitutions to address segregation in their public schools. In Minnesota, for example, the state Supreme Court’s most recent ruling in the ongoing Cruz-Guzman school desegregation case underscored the state’s responsibility to address educational inequalities caused by segregation without requiring proof that the state intentionally promoted it. In New Jersey, the Latino Action Network’s school desegregation lawsuit has , seeking remedies after a judge . And an appellate court recently for a suit challenging segregation in New York City public schools to proceed.

These legal challenges are complemented by growing momentum in research, advocacy and community organizing around the country. In New York, is turning to youth leaders to light the way toward integrated, equitable schools. Earlier this year, New America released an innovative, that allows educators, policymakers and advocates to explore how district lines separate students from resources, opportunity and each other. And leading researchers at Stanford and USC recently published eye-opening new about the state of segregation in American public schools.

That research paints a bleak picture of a public school system that has, for decades now, been trending back toward segregation. Indeed, as legal scholar Martha Minow has noted, “.” But that does not have to be the end of the story. A new generation of students, educators, advocates and judges now have the chance to author a new chapter.

You have to go there.

goes there.

Founded in New York City by Laurie Brotman, Bezos family professor of early childhood development, in NYU Grossman’s School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, ParentCorps offers professional development for educators, a social-emotional learning curriculum for pre-K students and a parenting program. Prioritizing racial equity, the team honors families’ culture and their lived experience and expertise, and supports teachers in establishing authentic relationships.

“You can’t just tell people to change,” explained Kai-ama Hamer, who has been with the organization since 2018, serving as director since last May. “You have to know their values, what they’re doing, why they do this work, what moves them? And then once you unearth that, then they feel open.”

It starts the moment a parent or educator comes in the door.

“We want them to understand that even if our values are different,” Hamer said. “Even if we don’t speak the same language, ‘I see you and I care for you.’ And that is the basis for everything else.”

Beyond the Five Boroughs

Randomized control trials of the ParentCorps model have demonstrated improvements in home and school environments, as well as the health and development of children and parents.

In light of the evidence, it’s no wonder that the model is expanding. Detroit was the first pilot beyond New York City. Since 2015, when then-CEO Ann Kalass met Brotman as fellows, ParentCorps and Starfish have teamed up to build relationships with the early childhood workforce, social workers, facilitators and teachers, and to embed ParentCorps programming for children and families in Starfish sites. “We want Starfish to own the model in ways that work in their setting,” Hamer said.

In its 19 early care and education centers, Starfish provides integrated, high-quality care and support services that build on the strengths and assets of families in and around Detroit. Lindsay LaBoda, a social worker and a clinical therapist with Starfish, points to widespread trauma among the families they serve. “Trauma-informed care,” she said, “means fully supporting our children by identifying the signs of stress and responding with respect, care, and kindness. We don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with this child?’ but ‘What’s strong about this child?’”

Kecia Rorie, operations director at Starfish, acknowledges that when people think of Detroit, they picture “blight, unemployment and an educational system that has failed a lot of children.” At the same time, she points to resiliency and a strong sense of community. “When parents walk through our doors,” she says, “you can tell right away, they’re very protective of their children, and we are honored that they allow us to come in their homes to take care of their most priceless, precious possessions, to just help guide them along the way.”

Ironically, for a city built on the automobile industry, Family Engagement Specialist Mary Woods-Miles notes that viable transportation is one of the biggest challenges for many Detroit families. Starfish provides $500 or more in Family Stability Funds for car repairs, insurance, down payments and other expenses, which helps parents get to and from work, and to drop off and pick up their children.

A New Twist on an Old Adage

ParentCorps reboots the adage, “build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” by building better training, using old-fashioned mousetraps. The trainers have asked me not to reveal the specifics of how the devices are used, but I can say that the activity also involves balloons. This is a distinctly low-tech approach.

Rorie recalls her first exposure to ParentCorps: “A colleague and I flew out to New York City just to observe. But by the time we got to lunchtime on day one, we looked at each other and said, ‘This is amazing.’ And by day two, we were like, ‘We have to take this back.’” At the time, Rorie said, “We were having trouble engaging with families. Our network of six Head Start grantees had just come together, but it was still new, and people weren’t used to it.”

One of the people she took it back to was Woods-Miles.

“The mousetrap game did it for me, too,” Woods-Miles said. “I knew that ParentCorps would be effective, but I didn’t anticipate it being as effective as it is.”

The experience made Woods-Miles reflect on her time as a single parent of a young child and all the multitasking involved. About 30 years ago, she tells me, the Head Start class misplaced her son. “I was going to community college, and it was finals time. When I went to get him, he wasn’t there. So I literally kicked in every locked door, broke some doors and went in the men’s bathroom until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And I went outside, and there was my slippery kid saying, ‘Ma, what took you so long?’ He had gotten out with another family.”

Three Little Words

The ParentCorps approach boils down to three words: safe, nurturing and predictable. Woods-Miles acknowledges that not all the parents at Starfish go for it right away. One mom told her it wasn’t going to work for her children, but Woods-Miles persuaded her to try it. The mom came back the next week and admitted that letting the kids know what was going to happen in the evening helped her to be more organized, and as a result she had a few hours to unwind.

LaBoda appreciates the fact that ParentCorps doesn’t tell parents how to parent. “You’re the expert on your child,” she said. “Your know your child better than anyone else.” The point of the programming for pre-K caregivers is to get them to realize they already have everything they need to be a parent.

Recently, a grandmother in LaBoda’s parenting group announced, “Y’all can’t tell me nothing. Ain’t nothing new under the sun and y’all can’t tell me a thing.” Just a few hours later, she reported, “I actually learned a lot. I have to admit that I was wrong.”

For Hamer, the parents, grandparents, Head Start professionals and other educators contribute immense value to our communities that often goes unrecognized. “Once you understand the value of early education,” she said. “You see the value of those people who stay, who choose to stay because they really care.”

The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt blocking many young people, particularly those who are low-income, from earning degrees and finding fulfilling careers.

But in the last few years, college promise programs from Kalamazoo to New Haven, Buffalo, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, have realized that paying tuition alone doesn’t always achieve the ultimate goal of making lives better. So they have added staff and built partnerships with business to start internship, mentorship and apprentice programs that give “promise scholars” a start on career paths.

Further highlighting the shift, college promise advocates nationally will hold their fourth Nov. 8 and 9 at the University of Tennessee. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and First Lady Jill Biden will speak at the event, whose major topics include “Empowering Career Exploration and Pathway Discovery” and “Building the Promise Pipeline of Workers.”

“We’re quick to say ‘Go to college, get your degree,’ but you don’t have that follow up piece of what do you do after that?” said Jade Scott, who works with the Detroit Promise through the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “So many students get lost in the shuffle, like ‘I’m done with my degree, what do I do now? And this is where we really come in.”

“Now, we’re talking about how we get them employed,” Scott added. “What are we doing to support you, as you make that journey from these college classes into an actual career that you genuinely enjoy, or that’s making you money, or that’s offering you a sustaining lifestyle?” 

Detroit Promise, with the help of the chamber, gave 450 students work experiences such as internships or job shadowing in the 2022-23 school year, Scott said.

The Kalamazoo Promise, perhaps the best-known promise program in the nation, considers the internship program it launched in 2022 so important it calls it “Higher Promise.” 

Cetera DiGiovanni, Higher Promise coordinator, said parents previously kept asking if Promise officials knew of open jobs while businesses repeatedly asked the program for help finding talent.

“We know that kids are graduating and no one has jobs,” DiGiovanni said. “We thought we would be the mediator to bring them together.”

David Rust, executive director of Say Yes Buffalo, said the evolution is natural. Say Yes Buffalo, which started as a scholarship program in 2011, placed 25 students in apprenticeships in the fall of 2022 and another 25 this year.

“It stands to reason that there will be refinements, expansion of features, because we know a lot more now about what scholars and students need,” he said.

College promise programs began in the 1990s with individual philanthropists adopting single schools and pledging to cover college tuition for any student that graduated from high school and enrolled in college. Anonymous donors in Kalamazoo started a citywide promise program in 2005, then other promise programs like Say Yes to Education expanded from single schools in the 1990s to the cities of Syracuse and Buffalo, New York, Greensboro County, North Carolina, and finally Cleveland in 2019.

States like Tennessee have also added statewide promise programs as the ranks have swelled to more than 400 programs nationally. The programs differ in what colleges they pay for, with some covering only the local community college, some only in-state public colleges and others including private universities that choose to be partners with them.

But once lauded for wiping out the worries of tuition debt, promise programs have found that students, particularly low-income students, also need chances to test drive careers they think they might like. They need mentors in their field. They need workplace experience before graduating and seeking a full-time job.

Sometimes students simply need a paycheck while they are in school to pay for rent, commuting to class and meals, which promise programs rarely cover. Or they skip college altogether because class time takes away earning time they need to help their families.

“Free college can be too expensive for students,” said Rust. “A lot of our scholars, over 50 percent, have combined family income below $40,000. So, we’ve seen this more so than ever throughout the pandemic, you (students) do what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do.”

There’s also benefit to the regional economy when students find careers that keep them in the city after college. 

In Columbus, Ohio, where a pilot promise program pays for Columbus school district graduates to attend Columbus State Community College, companies such as Nationwide Insurance and gas and electricity supplier IGS Energy are eager to take on promise students in college as paid interns.

John Wharton, 19, a second year finance student at Columbus State, started work at IGS this fall helping manage and audit customer accounts for $18 an hour. Because he has an interest in marketing too, his supervisors are also trying to find chances to work in that department.

“It gives you a sense of feeling for what the real world is,” said Wharton, who had never had a job before the internship. “This gives people a platform to gain insight, whether or not they actually want to do what they’re studying.”

Abdallahi Thiaw, 20, also a Columbus Promise student, also just started as an intern this fall with the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio for $20 an hour for 20 hours a week. Since he is earning an associates degree in interactive media, developing apps and programs that can be used on mobile devices, the board has him developing a chat program for its website that lets users find out what services the nonprofit provides.

“It’s a big opportunity for students like me, because a lot of job fields will tell you that once you graduate, you need experience,” said Thiaw. “But the main issue is nobody’s offering experience, so how are you going to get that experience? But with this program, it offers students like me experience and on top of that, you get paid great wages, which really helps us in focusing on school.”

David Campbell, director of communications for the board, said matching students with work that fits their interest, like is happening with Thiaw, is ideal.

“That idea is the genesis of this program, that they need to work, they need to have some money, but it needs to be earned and still learn, right?” Campbell said. “It has to combine with their degree, so they get someplace at the end of it.”

Not this year.

A U.S. Department of Education known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) means college advisors nationally will have to wait two months until December, or even after Christmas break, to start helping the 20 million students that typically apply.

It’s a delay that wipes out two months in which about half of applicants fill out the forms nationally. Deadlines have been extended, but the time until colleges announce financial aid packages and students must make decisions has been slashed. And it raises fears students needing extra attention — particularly low income students and families who are unaware how the financial aid process works — will be left behind.

Advisors like Zwyghuizen are preparing and bracing for a scramble in the new year to make sure they have multiple chances to nudge students to apply and walk families that need extra help through the process. Many students don’t believe they can afford college and need repeated prodding to apply and find out.

“There’s fear of the unknown going into this later and with less preparation than we did before,” said Zwyghuizen, who works for the Grand Rapids Promise, which helps pay tuition for students in a city where a third of children live in poverty. “There’s already so many barriers people have with FAFSA.”

Bill DeBaun, a director of the National College Attainment Network, said he has “real concerns” college access will drop, particularly for low-income students and those who would be first in their families to go to college.

“The outreach to these students, the helping them understand that college is for them is what takes time and energy on top of actually completing the FAFSA,” he said.

FAFSA determines eligibility for federal Pell grants for college expenses of up to $7,400 this school year. It is also the starting point for almost every need-based financial aid system in the country.

But with more than 100 questions asking for detailed financial information from families, it’s complicated and can scare some families off, particularly those who have not used them before.

“It’s the graveyard for so many college students,” said Tom Harnisch, vice president of government relations for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

The “cumbersome” process and “outdated technology” on the current form means “far too many are locked out of aid,” Richard Cordray, chief executive officer of the U.S. Office of Federal Student Aid

The new forms, ordered by the FAFSA Simplification Act that Congress passed in 2020, will cut the number of questions more than in half. And applying will be even easier online if parents let the application import their tax filings.

The new forms will be accompanied by new aid formula that . Though more students may be eligible for aid and expected family contributions could fall for many, the formula no longer accounts for siblings also going to college and there is debate over how the value of family land or small business assets are weighed.

The department has said for months the new forms will be available in December, but hasn’t clarified if that will be early or late December, when holidays will slow completion.

That delay is of immediate concern to a dozen national associations of colleges and counselors who wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona earlier this month urging him to set a release date as soon as he can, so they can plan their completion campaigns.

“Because the timeline for completing the FAFSA will be much shorter than it has been in recent years, every day counts when it comes to supporting students and families through the new process,” the letter said.

Harnisch, whose organization is one of the dozen, said he hopes advisors can start working with families before Christmas.

“We’ve told them that December 1 and December 31 are quite different for us,” Harnisch said.

In cities like Grand Rapids, Zwyghuizend said, counselors are planning to jam the one-on-one meetings with students they normally spread out over the fall into just January.

“It’s going to be a lot of work in the second semester to try and get people ready at the last-minute,” she said.

Others are focusing this month on a key initial step to completing the new forms — creating log-ons and IDs in the online system — that they can do now and avoid having to start from scratch in January.

In Cleveland, advisors have set four workshops just to create IDs between October and December. They are also planning intense family outreach in January.

“We believe that our ‘prework’ now will help keep parents and students engaged around FAFSA and financial aid,” said Alison Bibb-Carson, spokesperson for CollegeNow, the nonprofit that handles college advising for the city’s schools. “We hope that this work and our extended outreach will keep numbers the same or maybe increase the number of FAFSA completion.”

Cyekeia Lee, executive director of the Detroit College Access Network, is also banking on advance work and setting FAFSA IDs now will help students in that high-poverty city connect to aid they need.

“So as long as you take that first initial step to get them the most prepared that we can, we will work with that,” Lee said. “As long as families start to work on the FSA ID I think you’ll still get enough traction once it comes out.”

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Linda Jacobson contributed to this story.

“We’d get something really plain like one piece of bread with one piece of fish or chicken,” Woodard told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “They’d count out everything we’d get to make sure everyone had something to eat.”

The district began to change when officials introduced food trucks and live cooking demonstrations into its school meal strategy in 2019, said Woodard, 17.

“It’s a really amazing feat,” she said. “I feel safe eating the food because care is put into everything I eat now.”

Originally created pre-pandemic, the food trucks and live cooking demonstrations have contributed to the district’s hike in school meal participation for the 2022-23 school year among the nearly 50,000 students enrolled in the district’s 107 schools.

School breakfast participation increased from 22,142 to 24,612 students, and school lunch participation increased from 28,558 to 33,062 students — an 11% and 16% surge, according to the .

Food Trucks

“When we got the food trucks, I was immediately able to see and feel that shift on how students see school food service,” said Carl Williams, executive director of the district’s office of school nutrition. “It’s really elevated our program and students see us differently.”

Williams said there’s high demand for the food trucks — often causing competition among Detroit principals rushing to reserve them.

“The principals love it like crazy,” Williams said. “They’ll call me first thing in the beginning of the school year trying to get them booked.”

Williams said the district designed two food trucks, often referred to as Blue and Goldie to represent the district’s official colors, that routinely visits two of the 29 high schools each week.

The elementary and middle schools can also schedule food truck visits for special events, he said.

“The food trucks have created an abundance of options for students
and they look at us as a quality meal provider,” Williams said.

From burrito bowls to street tacos, Woodard said the food trucks are so popular she often sees her classmates go back in line for seconds.

“Of course they would,” Woodard said. “They’ll even try to be discreet about it.”

Live Cooking Demonstrations

Mike Hearn, also known as the Great Chef Mike, is one of four chefs contributing to the food trucks and live cooking demonstrations.

“It gives me so much excitement because it offers something different for our students and I’m just happy to be a part of it,” Hearn told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Hearn said he particularly enjoys running the stir fry station where he lays out all of his ingredients, from bean sprouts to bamboo shoots to various proteins, for students to see him cook.

“It really increases [school meal] participation and that’s what’s most important to make sure we don’t leave any hungry kids out there,” Hearn said.

Williams said one student told him the meals made him feel like he was “eating at a five star luxury restaurant and my response to him was ‘you deserve this type of service every day.’”

Next Steps

Kevin Frank, senior director of the district’s office of school nutrition, said the district’s school meal initiatives are unique to Michigan schools.

“We’re like a hidden gem,” Frank told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, adding that despite budget limits the district has been exploring more food options, such as Nigerian and Mexican dishes, to match the diversity of Detroit’s students.

“We obviously have a lot of restrictions, but our chefs are brilliant and if anyone can do it they can,” Frank said.

Even before COVID, 9 in 10 middle schoolers in the shrinking city were below proficient in math and reading, many school buildings were structurally unsound and gaping budget deficits had landed the school system under the fiscal control of the state for the better part of the last two decades.

When relief funds began flowing, the challenges were great — a year of school closures and high absence rates had set students even further behind — but so were the means. The district scored nearly , over $23,000, as any other large system nationwide, thanks to a funding formula weighted for students living in poverty. Detroit has a median household income of $34,762, according to , and a childhood poverty rate roughly three times higher than the national average.

It was a test of the full power of federal relief dollars: Could $1.3 billion help get one of the nation’s most embattled school systems back on track?

Fast-forward two years and experts question whether the influx has delivered the needed boost to students. With more than half the money already out the door, has gone toward bringing students back to classrooms, according to officials, despite two-thirds of the district’s 53,400 students last year missing school at a threshold researchers say puts them academically at risk. And the superintendent in March announced to come in June.

Meanwhile, the district is using $700 million of the relief cash on expenditures it normally pays for through its general fund, stockpiling money in its reserves for district-wide facilities upgrades over the next five or more years — a creative way to skirt the September 2024 deadline on the use-it-or-lose-it federal funds.

It would be “impossible” to complete the more than one thousand facility projects the district has planned in just a few years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ in an email. “Our students deserve to have roofs that do not leak or schools that do not close because outdated boilers break down.”

Taken together, the Detroit spending decisions paint a picture of both the promise and the pitfalls of schools’ handling of stimulus money. And they serve as a sobering reminder of what researchers have emphasized for over a year: relief cash alone likely will not be enough to offset the damage wrought by the pandemic.

Nearly a year behind 

The scale of recovery efforts in Detroit and elsewhere falls short of the magnitude of learning losses, worries Harvard University education professor Thomas Kane, who researches COVID’s impact on education.

Comparing 2019 test scores to those in 2022, he calculates that students in Detroit fell nearly a year behind where they were previously. But he estimates the district’s key interventions — summer school for roughly 9,000 students and high-impact tutoring for about the same number — are only enough to spur about a fifth of the needed gains to get youth back on track.

“This is common in districts around the country,” the education economist said. “They can list the interventions that they’re fielding 
 but they’re not doing the math on the effect sizes that they should be expecting from those things.”

He suggests a quick sanity check: If students are a year back in their learning, catching them up will cost, at minimum, a district’s typical yearly operating budget. In Detroit, that would mean devoting roughly two-thirds of all relief dollars to academic recovery — a level the district is far from approaching.

District spokesperson Chrystal Wilson pointed out that the district is continuing to scale up small-group and one-on-one literacy and math help for struggling students. COVID money helped expand the effort initially, but now it’s built into the district budget so the support doesn’t disappear when relief funds dry up, the superintendent said. 

As a result, a higher share of Detroit’s lowest-scoring students are on track to make a year’s worth of growth in reading and math this year than pre-pandemic, Wilson said.

Stacey Young is a Detroit mother of six, including three youngsters at Davison Elementary-Middle School. Last year, the school advertised tutoring and all three children attended, but the program enrolled more than a dozen students per teacher, she said, and her kids’ grades, which had suffered on the heels of virtual learning, did not improve. This year, her youngest son continues to struggle in math.

“On his report card, they said, ‘You need to seek some support,’” Young said. But the school had “nothing to offer” in terms of additional learning options, she said.

Superintendent Vitti recognizes the problem, but explained hiring staff for afterschool programming has posed a challenge.

“Our teachers are burnt out after the school day,” he said.

The students who remain the furthest behind in their learning also tend to be the ones who have had continued attendance challenges, he added, meaning the learning recovery efforts laid out by the district often miss the students who need them most.

“The issue here is not funding. The issues here are student access, quality human capital and the ability to scale human capital,” Vitti said.

Bernita Bradley, a parent advocate in Detroit with the National Parents Union, is frustrated that the district has also cut back on summer enrichment programs. After opening summer learning to all interested students in 2022, the school system will offer programming this summer.

“There’s so much that’s needed for our children to catch up,” Bradley said. “This is the time for families to be getting more support 
 as opposed to canceling something.”

Fixing neglected facilities

It’s a delicate balance between shorter- and longer-term stimulus investments, because Detroiters — Young and Bradley included — acknowledge campuses across the city are sorely in need of repairs. The scale of efforts like tutoring or summer school are constrained in part because upgrades to buildings represent the single-biggest line item in Detroit’s COVID relief spending plan.

Capital improvements have long been on hold in the district because for most of the last two decades a state-appointed emergency manager controlled its purse, making budget cuts to close a longstanding deficit, explained Sarah Reckhow, associate professor at Michigan State University.

“An easy way to cut was simply to not spend money maintaining buildings,” she said.

It created a backlog of roughly a in needed upgrades to fix issues like leaky roofs and moldy buildings, Vitti told NBC in 2019. Michigan is among the bottom five states nationwide for equitable school funding, according to a from The Education Trust-Midwest, meaning the challenged district would have had to increase taxes on Detroiters to make facilities upgrades.

When the $1.3 billion COVID windfall hit, the district carved off $700 million to finally address conditions that many deemed shameful.

It’s a tactic common across high-poverty districts, which are more likely to have unmet infrastructure needs. School systems serving mostly low-income students have been far more likely than affluent districts to spend emergency relief dollars on facilities or transportation, a February found — meaning less cash leftover for academic support.

But from a fiscal perspective, it’s a prudent choice, said Elizabeth Moje, professor of education at the University of Michigan. Detroit’s schools need “massive renovations,” she said, and because the expenses don’t recur, the investment won’t contribute to future budgetary issues when federal funds dry up.

Still, doing so requires creative accounting as the construction projects will extend years beyond the deadline for spending relief money, said Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Detroit is using COVID stimulus money to cover $700 million worth of expenses it typically pays for with its general fund, leaving the saved cash in its reserves with no spending deadline. The size of its general fund has swollen over 500% since stimulus funds began flowing and will be drawn down over the next five years, the district said.

“There’s a lot of that budget jiu-jitsu going on,” Jordan said.

Some 21 states, including Michigan, place no limit on the amount of money districts can keep in their reserves, allowing them to stockpile extra funds past the federal deadline so long as they first substitute COVID money for allowable expenses typically paid out of their general fund. 

Meanwhile, a recently announced round of layoffs in Detroit was an even more bitter pill knowing so much cash is waiting unspent, educators said.

Daniella Borum is a college transition advisor at the Detroit School of Arts who was told in early April that her position, which she’s held since 2019, would be terminated. Now she wonders who will help the high schoolers on her campus through the stressors not only of preparing for higher education, but of navigating daily life.

“It doesn’t have to be Ms. Borum here as a college advisor, but the kids need [someone],” she said. “They need support services, period.” 

Re-engaging students

A key component of COVID catch-up, in Detroit and nationwide, has been luring students back to classrooms. Student attendance took a major hit in the pandemic’s wake and chronic absenteeism, which researchers typically define as missing at least 10% of school days, reached unprecedented levels across the country’s largest districts — 69% last year in Detroit.

The district deployed staff to knock on the doors of families whose children were absent, seeing if there were ways they could help get those students to class.

“Families wanted their children coming back,” said Gwendolyn Jachim, a Detroit elementary school teacher who signed up to knock on doors in the summer of 2021. Still the conversations were difficult, and many parents remained unconvinced. She recalls virus-wary parents who, after the nearby Flint, Michigan, water crisis left , said they didn’t trust the government on public health matters.

For its youngest students, the district also ran summer boot camps to help children prepare for the transition into kindergarten. Detroit educator Kristy Kitchen co-led a cohort of a dozen youngsters in six weeks of programming, including weekly field trips. While the program’s past iterations had sometimes required teachers to purchase supplies themselves, educators last summer were flush with markers, science experiments and backpacks for students, she said.

“It was a very good opportunity for the kids,” Kitchen said. “They’ve had kindergarten boot camp prior to that year, but they didn’t have all those resources that we had.”

The two campaigns, door knocking and kindergarten boot camp, together amounted to roughly $1.8 million, according to figures provided by the district — less than 1% of its total stimulus allotment.

This year’s chronic absenteeism rates have dipped slightly to 60%, which the district attributes to its efforts. Still, 6 in 10 youth are missing class at a level that researchers say puts their education in peril. 

Using stimulus funds, the district also invested in several fan-favorite activities aimed at boosting morale and engagement. The city paid thousands to vendors like Chuck E. Cheese, Top Golf, Video Game Mobile, Dave & Buster’s and Zap Zone Extreme, according to spending records obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ through a Freedom of Information request. Some $47,000 went to field trips to Blake’s Orchard & Cider Mill, which Detroit Federation of Teachers President Lakia Wilson said is an annual tradition.

“These are city kids, so it’s good that they get to go out 
 picking their own apples, seeing pumpkins grow in a patch,” Wilson said. “You can’t live in Michigan and not go to the apple orchard.”

Contracts come under scrutiny

In a district with a past history of , Detroit’s emergency relief spending has not been without its share of expenses some saw as questionable.

For its tutoring contract worth over $3 million, the district chose a vendor led by Superintendent Vitti’s wife, Rachel Vitti, ex-director of the literacy nonprofit . Leaders disclosed the relationship when they discussed the contract in 2021 and said the provider was chosen because of its strong track record. Still, amid pushback, Rachel Vitti last summer from her role leading the nonprofit.

And the district’s $68 million COVID testing contract received scrutiny for a price tag twice as high as the nearby University of Michigan’s, which used the same provider and served a comparable number of students.

The contracts “cannot be compared apples to apples,” Rebecca Throop, a spokesperson for testing provider LynxDX Inc., said in an email. Detroit schools requested a higher number of tests and the university hired staff independently to assist collecting samples, she said.

LynxDX Inc. is now a to the Detroit Public Schools Community District, listed as providing support at the $20,000 to $99,999 level.

“As a company, we recognize the importance of giving back to the communities we serve and where our employees live,” Throop said.

But zooming out beyond individual contracts, Reckhow, at Michigan State, sees the Detroit school district’s position as inherently difficult. The $1.3 billion is a lot of money, she acknowledges, but doesn’t think the time-limited boost can erase all the problems of the last decades.

“There’s the assumption that you get a one-time infusion of money and you recover,” she said. “But when you’re talking about a district where the needs are as high (as Detroit’s) and where the pre-existing issues of inequality were already enormously pronounced, the timeframe of these relief dollars is just not really up to the task.”