Brendan P. Walsh

Tonight’s town hall meeting, a form of debate between incumbent Governor Rick Snyder (R) and challenger Mark Schauer (D), the gubernatorial candidates sparred over Gov. Snyder’s record on K-12 funding.

“Today, it is a fact that schools still have less per pupil dollars in the classroom than when he started four years ago,” Schauer said. “…Don’t take my word for it. Talk to any teacher. Talk to school board members, parents all across this state.”

These are complicated answers, but here’s a start with some facts. The first chart below, extracted from the Grosse Pointe Public School Systems’ annual financial audits, shows total state revenue flowing to the district. It spans the Gov. Jennifer Granholm era (2003-2010) and current Gov. Snyder’s era (2011-2014).

The greatest cuts in state aid to the GPPSS is undoubtedly from the 2007-8 school year through the 2009-10 school year, during which time the Granholm budgets cut state aid by $9.1 million. Meanwhile, in the Gov. Snyder era, state aid has increased in each of the last three years.

We need to go a layer deeper here though. In Michigan, state aid follows student enrollment and we can’t necessarily blame Gov. Granholm directly for lost student enrollment. The correlation between declining enrollment at state aid is clear in the period from 2007 through 2010 when the GPPSS lost 483 students. At roughly $8,000 in state aid per student, that’s about $3.8 million in lost state revenue.

If we deduct that from the $9.1 million state aid loss, that’s still a $5.3 million cut in state aid to the GPPSS in that three year period.

A different cut of the numbers normalizes for enrollment fluctuation. If we look at just the defined state aid per pupil, gathered from the Michigan Department of Education data, we can see the most significant reduction came in the 2009-10 school year, at Gov. Granholm’s executive order, that led to a $520 reduction in state aid for GPPSS. The worst part of that cut was that it came in October of 2009, four months after the district was required to pass a budget that had not anticipated such a cut.

The subtlety of Schauer’s state is his qualifier “in the classroom.” He seeks to discredit Gov. Snyder’s K-12 funding increases by claiming those increases went to replenish the state’s decimated Public School Employee Retirement System (MPSERS), the retiree pension and healthcare fund.

You can’t segregate MPSERS cost increases from the budget picture nor claim that that money does not go “into the classroom” when it indeed funds the retirement benefit of the teachers and other staff who are indeed “in the classroom.” What’s more, if the shoe fits for Gov. Snyder, it does so for former Gov. Granholm as well, as I wrote in this March, 2010 blog on this very topic.

Lots more time would be needed to contrast these two administrations, but if Mark Schauer were to ask me, I’d tell him the Granholm administration’s budgets have done far more damage to the GPPSS than Gov. Snyder’s and the numbers bear that out without dispute.