No Child Left Behind: Parents Blast School Funding Scheme in Michigan

Whose kids are they, anyway?

That's a pretty common query - issued in varying degrees of hostility - as tens of thousands of rural Michigan residents and taxpaying parents grapple with the costs and mandates of educating their children.

In the usually quiet hills and valleys of Michigan's small, rural and farming communities, there's open discussion during this election year of trying to force changes to the state's Constitution to return to local residents the authority they once had over funding their local schools.

Elected officials would do well to pay heed.

At the heart of the issue is the perfect storm of high energy and insurance costs, shrinking student enrollments, unfunded-but-mandated requirements associated with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and corresponding state strictures that pass the cost burden of NCLB down to the local level.

Small wonder that parents today complain that they bear all of the fiscal responsibility for maintaining an education system, the content and quality of which they now have virtually no control.

In Michigan, that's a quadruple whammy that exacerbates an already sore spot among state taxpayers who want to financially support the operational end of local education, but literally, can't. No matter how rich the community or how dedicated the parents are to local-based schools, pocketbooks are sealed shut due to a decade-old Michigan Constitutional amendment that caps local homestead property tax contributions to six mills - that's $6 per $1,000 of a property's valuation.

If parents want to pay additional taxes to broaden the local curriculum, pay their teachers more or add enrichment classes, the Michigan Constitution says they may not do so.

To add insult to injury, that 6-mill State Education Tax (SET) isn't captured in the local district - it's sent to the state for bundling with other districts' taxes, then redistributed equally to all Michigan public school districts on a per-pupil basis.