Tim Skubick

What follows is a recent media headline and before you think too long and hard about it, what is your first reaction to: Every K-12 School Kid Gets Record State Support.

You’re maybe thinking, wow this is good news for our students or they really need help in these challenging times or congrats to the governor and the bi-partisan vote by state lawmakers. And if that is the way you react, you just produced a bunch of smiles for all the lawmakers and governor who passed it.

Your reaction is totally justified given the fact that the $10,050 per pupil grant was historic and a record. But as Paul Harvey use to say, hold that good feeling while you digest the rest of the story…the one the headline did not cover. Not all the schools got an increase.

“For some districts, yeah, it is a wash or very close to it.”

That is not some misguided social media devotee popping off.

Nope it is the head of the Michigan Association of Schools Boards since 1997, Don Wotruba. He has survived many a budget battle over the years but this record spending thing, while true on the surface, is not what it appears to be once you dive into the rest of the state school budget.

You see lawmakers also played around with the money districts get for teacher retirement or in this case did not get, thus forcing the schools to scramble to fill in that important gap on their own.

So to be fair, you have to subtract that dollar amount from the $10,000 plus figure. Each school comes up with a lower number. It’s just a question of how much lower. And now all of a sudden that “record” spending level just went bye-bye.

Mr. Wotruba also points some more subtraction math is required to get the full picture because more money that was going to school kids is going somewhere else. That lowers the $10,000 figure even more.

“A big chuck, 100’s of millions of dollars that weren’t going to universities in the previous budget are also in this school budget.” In other words, K-12 money is going to the state’s 15 major universities perhaps under the legislative “reasoning” that the K-12 kids will eventually be smart enough to go to college so why not give their money to the state’s 15 universities to prepare a spot for them in 15 years.

But wait there’s more.

“For some districts there was almost a dollar for dollar exchange so some districts saw very little total increase in dollars to spend this year and inflation was larger than that so we actually had some districts that were in a cutting space even though they saw an increase in the per pupil” line item.

Mr. Wotruba remains “very happy with that increase but a lot of people (like you poor unsuspecting souls) don’t realize that on the back end, we lost a bunch of dollars.”

So while the governor and fellow politicians were soaking up the positive headlines about helping Dick and Jane read, they’ve also been boasting about being transparent with taxpayers on where their money is going. Sure they will argue all of this information is laid out in the entire budget so it’s not as if we were trying to hide it.

But what busy citizen who is not in the school biz has actually read the K-12 budget language? None.

As for news media which is suppose to bird dog all this for you, did they just run the headline the pols wanted but either forgot to include the rest of the story or if they did report it, did they buried it deeper in the story which nobody read anyway?

So how ’bout this for a revised opening paragraph to the story: State leaders are taking credit for record spending for every K-12 school kid but as one school leader asserts, in some districts the so-called record increase was actually a financial wash or very close to it while other districts had to actually cut their budgets because money they got from the state last year was taken away in this year’s new state budget.

That’s a little closer to the truth compared to the headline in paragraph one. Agreed?