PHOTO/FLINT COMMUNITY SCHOOLS
Editor’s note: On January 14, residents of Flint confronted the County School Board for failure to dispatch needed Special Education funds to the long suffering, poisoned children of Flint. Speaker after speaker called out the Board who hid behind a formula that they claimed would not allow more funds for children in distress per the Flint water crisis. (As the public left the meeting, four sheriff patrols lined up outside.) The following are excerpts from an article written by Pamela Pugh, former Chief Public Health Advisor for the City of Flint and current Vice President of the Michigan Board of Education. Submitted by Flint correspondents.
A recent financial audit report for Flint Community Schools District shows that its general fund expenses exceeded revenue by $6.6 million. While there was a dramatic drop in student enrollment between 2014-15 and 2018-19 there was a needed increase in hiring. Recently, in the media and the community, there have been talks of school-building closures, dissolution of the school district, or annexation of Flint Community Schools as a solution to the financial deficit.
These “solutions”, especially building closures, ignore the fact that school-building closures have historically led to greater student losses, and a consequential loss in revenue. Furthermore, it presents a false narrative that the dire conditions of Flint schools, like other districts that serve our children of color and low-income children, are solely due to misspending, overspending, or even corruption and ineptness on the part of local school leadership.
Placing focus here also causes an overshadowing of the fact that inequitable funding is greatly at play in Flint. For instance, Flint Community Schools receive a portion of special education cost-reimbursement funding through a countywide millage that all Genesee County taxpayers must pay. The Genesee Intermediate School District’s (GISD) Special Education Mandatory Plan, last modified in June 2013, outlines how the millage funds are disbursed to its local districts.
Grand Blanc, a neighboring, much more affluent and predominantly white district, has only half the number of special-needs students as Flint but gets twice the amount of special-education millage funding from GISD. More startling is that, with a Special Education Fund Balance of over $23,000,000, including a fund for future capital expenditures, GISD is sitting on a Special Education Fund balance that is much greater than other much larger intermediate school districts.
If millage funding were distributed more equitably based on special-education populations, then Flint would receive approximately 20% of the special-education millage funding distributed throughout Genesee County, versus 7.5% that it currently receives.
See entire article at OpEdNews.comOn January 14, residents of Flint confronted the County School Board for failure to dispatch needed Special Education funds to the long suffering, poisoned children of Flint. Speaker after speaker called out the Board who hid behind a formula that they claimed would not allow more funds for children in distress per the Flint water crisis. (As the public left the meeting, four sheriff patrols lined up outside.) The following are excerpts from an article written by Pamela Pugh, former Chief Public Health Advisor for the City of Flint and current Vice President of the Michigan Board of Education. Submitted by Flint correspondents.
