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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Bolger is under investigation of trying to buy an election, helped push Right-to-work and is now working to rig the electoral college. Perfect candidate for an M-Live guest opinion.
Word is now the projected deficit of Flint under Snyder's emergency managers will be in the area of 25 million, up from the current 19.2 million. Downtown will continue to flourish and the rest of Flint will decay. It is projected Flint will lose another 20,000 residents by 2020, the next census. That will trigger huge loses in revenue if we fall under 100,000 population. Many think the census data was rigged to keep us barely over that number in 2010.
Guest column: Speaker of the House Jase Bolger looks forward to 'delivering more results'
By Guest writer
on January 25, 2013 at 10:00 AM, updated January 25, 2013 at 10:27 AM
House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall
By Jase Bolger
Michigan is turning the corner toward a healthier economy, mainly due to the determination of the hard-working men and women we serve. More Michiganders now agree: our brightest days are ahead of us. Unemployment is down because job opportunities are up, and Michigan's population is growing again.
Our number one job remains more jobs and better careers for all Michigan residents. We must work together to continue creating a better place to provide jobs so that families can stay together in Michigan.
That means we must focus on applying common sense to regulations; those that do not serve our citizens or protect our natural resources should be eliminated.
We should also raise the value of life in society so there is a bright future for all children. That includes celebrating and improving adoption and pre-natal care. We also must ensure that every child in Michigan receives a quality education regardless of their ZIP code.
Moreover, we should expand early childhood education opportunities so kids have a better chance to succeed and taxpayers see long-term savings from that success. For those who choose to earn higher degrees, we must provide support for high-quality colleges and universities by demanding accountability and results. Making sure those who don’t want a college degree are well prepared for successful careers is equally important, because we value the men and women who work with their hands every day to literally make, build, and grow our great state.
To continue moving Michigan forward, we must answer the billion-dollar question of how to provide good roads to Michigan's drivers and job creators. We will first maximize existing resources, but together we must determine how and when we will pay for this vital service.
Fiscal accountability and stability in the state budget should remain in focus, as well, as we again work to complete the budget by June 1, months ahead of the deadline.
We also should seek to rebuild relationships and come together on the budget priorities of public safety, education, and transportation. We must get beyond past political battles to work with anyone who is willing to commit to delivering results for the hard-working men and women of Michigan, protecting the future of our kids, and ensuring the long-term security of our parents and grandparents.
Disagreeing on a single issue should not taint the discussion of the next. Helping Michiganders realize their hopes, dreams and a brighter future should be a goal we all share.
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Do you have a guest column to share? Email MLive Statewide Community Engagement Director Jen Eyer at jeyer@mlive.com. |
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Sat Jan 26, 2013 6:24 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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The development and foundation money will continue to go downtown and the improvements elsewhere will rest on the backs of the residents. Less than 60 officers are being paid for with general fund dollars and who knows what is being done with the millage money being placed in a special account.
The city needs to show us where the officers are being deployed and how the crime rates downtown compare to the rest of Flint.
Tim Herman and the Chamber of Commerce began teling us in 2001 they wanted to attract more affluent and educated residents to downtown Flint. Is this why they need 500 new houses? |
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Sat Jan 26, 2013 6:30 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Letter: Citizens need to know where business funding was spent
By Community Voice | Flint Journal Letters
on January 24, 2013 at 11:00 PM, updated January 24, 2013 at 11:01 PM
View full sizeThis photo released by the office of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder shows the governor as he signs the state's $47.4 billion budget for the 2011-12 fiscal year as legislators look on in Lansing, Mich., on Tuesday, June 21, 2011. Looking on from left are state Sens. Darwin Booher, Tonya Schuitmaker, Bruce Caswell, John Pappageorge, Senate Appropriations Chairman Roger Kahn and Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville.AP Photo|Michigan Governor's Office
For the 2012 budget, Governor Snyder and Michigan Republicans gutted 1 billion dollars from Michigan's public education funding so that a tax break could be given to small businesses as they were/are to create new jobs.
Michigan citizens need a report on how this is developing - especially so that we can see the results of the Governor's plan as opposed to the effects of the auto industry's recovery.
We need to know the specific names and locations of Michigan small businesses that have expanded, how many new, full time employees they have added, and most importantly, the hourly rate of these new employees.
Likewise we need the same information about new-to-Michigan businesses. With the help of the Chamber of Commerce I feel confident Governor Snyder can produce and publish an easily verifiable report by June.
Michiganders deserve an answer to, "Where's the billion?"
CHERYL CYRAN/Fenton
Check out more Flint Journal Opinion pieces and letters at www.mlive.com/opinion/flint. |
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Sat Jan 26, 2013 6:52 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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There are similarities to the Flint Schools.
Detroit school issues deeper than education
Opinion
by Jay Scott Smith | August 15, 2011 at 1:10 PM
When you see the reports about the perils of the American public school system, the one place that is mentioned most often is Detroit. Thus why when MSNBC chose the Motor City to host Making The Grade, it was essentially a no-brainer.
There are many common misconceptions about Detroit. Whether it involves our crime rate, our personality, or our slew of abandoned buildings and houses that dot the city’s landscape.
One of them, however, is not our educational system. Things are not good. In fact, in recent years the numbers have been absolutely startling.
In May, a study by the National Institute for Literacy revealed that 47 percent of the city’s 714,000 residents are considered “functionally illiterate”. Karen Tyler-Ruiz, head of the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, told news radio station WWJ that means that thousands of people cannot as much as read a prescription or fill out a job application.
Just 3 percent of Detroit’s fourth graders and 4 percent of eighth graders meet national math standards. The often-disputed high school graduation rate was as low as 25 percent in 2007, by far the worst in the country.
Depending on who you ask, it has since risen to as little as 32 percent, according to the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, or (according to the Detroit Public Schools) as high as 62 percent.
Whatever the case, those numbers are far too low. In Detroit, the most common reflex over the last 10 years has been to point fingers.
Administrators blame teachers and parents. Teachers blame administrators and parents. Parents blame teachers and administrators. All three will also blame suburban schools and the media. The kids are often ignored altogether.
There is even a faction that insists that nothing was ever wrong with DPS and this was all created by the state of Michigan taking over the school system in 1999.
As a product of a Detroit Public High School and the son of a retired 38-year teacher in DPS, I can assure you that the problems in Detroit’s school have existed for far longer than 12 years. My alma mater, Renaissance High School, is seen as one of the crown jewels of DPS, along with Cass Technical High School.
Renaissance is widely regarded as not just the best high school in Detroit, but one of the best in the country. My graduating class sent all but four people to a four-year college or university. The others chose the military.
We routinely posted the highest test scores, best grade point averages, and highest graduation rate in the city. But this did not mean we had it any easier than anyone else.
“I remember how the text books would always be outdated,” said LaKaisha Hollingsworth, a 1997 Renaissance graduate who also attended Dossin Elementary. “What made up for it was having a teacher that knew how to instruct without a textbook. A teacher that could bring the real world into the classroom based on current events and real life experiences.”
During my freshman year at Renaissance, we made the local news when it was discovered that the school’s bathrooms had no soap or toilet paper. Students were actually packing toilet paper and bars of soap in their book bags. In our first few years of having a football team, we practiced on a 60-yard field with one goal post.
Things were not much better at the city’s largest high school: Cass Tech. Cass has produced a who’s who of famous alums, from Robin Williams, to Lily Tomlin, to Jack White, to former Detroit Mayors Dennis Archer and Kwame Kilpatrick.
The school’s original building, which was vacated in 2005 in favor of a multi-million dollar new building some 30 feet away, was recently town down after sitting abandoned for six years.
“I remember reading Beloved by Toni Morrison in my 11th grade AP English class for extra credit and my teacher having no idea of how to approach the text,” said Anita Dalton, a 1999 Cass Tech graduate. “We’re so focused on emulating the understanding of European classics that we lose understanding of literature generated by those that look like us and their struggle.”
Outside of the “big three” high schools — the third being Martin Luther King High School — students looking to excel in the other schools often found the road to be a tough go of it.
“If we didn’t share books in some advanced classes such as Calculus or Trigonometry, we had outdated history books,” said Theo Nicolaidis, a 1994 graduate of Northwestern High School. “I remember my history book had no mention of the Berlin Wall falling in 1989.
“We were using Apple II-C computers, which were 11 years old at that time, but brand new Compaq’s sitting in the Maintenance Closets, still in boxes. I worked for DPS for a short while in 1999, and saw the same scenario, asked the principal and her answer: ‘We don’t want the students to ruin the new machines and we don’t want them stolen.’”
Detroit schools have suffered from largely the same issues as many urban centers across the country. The difference between our issues and others is that there is such a huge disconnect between everyone involved that very little movement has been made.
“We have two major issues here in Detroit,” said current Emergency Financial Manager Roy Roberts. “The academic pace is missing. By every measure we have not done the job.”
Roberts, who has been on the job just three months, was previously group vice president of North American vehicle sales, service and marketing at General Motors.
“We have a $327 Million deficit. That’s not going to go away. That’s our job to work to make that go away. We’ve gotta get rid of that deficit.
“The key is how do you prioritize to where you can get the best return for it. Rather than having 60 percent spent in the classroom, we want 90 percent of it.”
Millions of dollars meant to service DPS were either stolen or misused over the last 10 years. Audits by former Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb showed that money meant for the schools was spent on everything from parties, to motorcycles, to cell phones, to personal shopping sprees
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Due in large part to that deficit, many traditional neighborhood schools such as Redford, Chadsey, Mackenzie (whose famous alums include former NFL All-Pro Jerome Bettis), and Murray-Wright High Schools have closed. Others, such as Northern High School, have been converted into specialty schools in lieu of shutting them down.
Charter schools have also sprouted up all over the city, which has led to contentious battles between DPS and the corporations that run charters.
There have also been questionable, to say the least, appointments to the Detroit School Board. The most glaring being former school board president Otis Mathis, who was discovered to have been a functioning illiterate.
Last year, the Detroit News published copies of e-mails he had sent out to the press during the contentious battles with Bobb over control of the city’s school system, such as this one:
“Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?” (Detroit News, March 4, 2010)
It was revealed that Mathis had graduated from Southwestern High School with a 1.8 grade point average,. After a stint in the military, it took Mathis 15 years to obtain his Bachelor’s Degree, and that was only after Wayne State University dropped a required English proficiency exam.
Ironically, he was able to become a substitute teacher in DPS during this time. Mathis resigned from the board on June 20, 2010 after he was accused of inappropriately touching himself during meetings with former superintendent Teresa Gueyser.
With what has gone on here, parents, teachers, and administrators all share responsibility for this situation. But where are the solutions?
“What the (DPS) administration needs to do is bring this to the frontlines, and the frontlines are the students and teachers in each school,” said Theresa Landrum, a parent of a DPS student and 1972 Southwestern High School graduate.
“We shouldn’t just have two or three good schools, every school should be a good school. And everyone, from the administrators, to the teachers, to the counselors, to the parents, to the students should make sure that the school that their child is in should be a good school.”
Landrum noted that the collapse of DPS did not happen out of nowhere. She noted that as far back as the late 1960s, there were problems in the Detroit school system.
“After the (1967) riots, there was white flight from the city,” Landrum said. “Well, a lot of good teachers also left. There was a deficit, so there was a mad dash to fill these deficits.
“We have to admit that there are some bad teachers that do put the effort in. They’re just there to get a paycheck. But then you have to teachers who see a child has a problem, and they nurture that child. I was one of those students.”
When it comes to in-school programs, the subject of preparing students for college and post-secondary education is also seen as a must. Renaissance was the only college preparatory school in DPS.
“There needs to be more educational programs that assist students on making a transition to college,” Hollingsworth said. “Counselors and teachers need to be tasked with letting students/parents know that college is affordable to everyone.
“In addition, more colleges need to step up to the plate and make themselves visible in DPS. For Wayne State University to be a top research university in Detroit, as a child I had never heard of them. Colleges need to be visible in the early years, so as a child progresses, college is always on their mind as the next logical step.”
For the city of Detroit to finally “come back”, it needs to be on the backs of an educated group of citizens. As Roy Roberts said during Making the Grade, when a business looks at moving to a new city, one of the primary things they look at is the city’s school system.
If a city has poor schools, there is a strong chance that business will look elsewhere. For Detroit, my hometown, to get people to take the city seriously when it says “good things are happening” and that we’re “coming back”, we need to improve our future and our future is in our children.
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Sat Jan 26, 2013 3:25 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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January 26, 2013 at 1:00 am
Pontiac schools pulled into toilet paper scrap
Rep alleges GOP cuts sap supplies; district says it's managing
By Shawn D. Lewis
The Detroit News
Pontiac — A state representative charged Friday that education funding cuts have left the Pontiac School District without basic supplies, including toilet paper.
Rep. Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills, said drastic reductions in school aid pushed through the Legislature by Republicans are to blame for the supply shortage. Pontiac schools are in Greimel's district.
"When the Pontiac schools faced a $2.4 million shortfall in funding from the state, it responded by laying off dozens of teachers and cutting spending on necessities such as textbooks and toilet paper," he said.
A spokesman for Republican House Speaker Jase Bolger fired back.
"It is unfortunate that Greimel would try to use Pontiac students as some sort of political chip," Bolger spokesman Ari Adler said. "He is inaccurate about the funding. We need to get past this bickering and arguing and discuss who is willing to work with the House Republicans on finding solutions that put students ahead of adults who want to have turf squabbles and we'll be able to get a lot more accomplished."
Pontiac Superintendent Brian Dougherty said the district is not short on toilet tissue.
"There's no doubt about it, times are tough, because I do have people and organizations donating things like pencils and paper, and we do have a budget deficit," Dougherty said. "But rest assured, we have toilet paper."
He conceded obtaining the necessary supplies in the district has not been easy, especially with what he described as a $28 million deficit.
"We owe money and we were having difficulty getting toilet paper, especially when we owe money, but we're not at a standstill," Dougherty said.
"The vendors are still working with us."
But Aimee McKeever, president of the Pontiac Education Association, said the prospect of a toilet paper shortage came up in a conversation she had with Dougherty before the holidays.
"I'm not privy to the stock or vendor information, but that was the indication I got from the superintendent, and he mentioned it more than once," she said. "He said our financial situation was extreme and very dire and that we were having trouble with vendors filling orders, including for toilet paper."
Dougherty said he did have a conversation with McKeever about vendors, but that the problem has been rectified.
slewis@deroitnews.com
(313) 222-2296 |
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Sat Jan 26, 2013 3:30 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Flint Schools $757 cut per student!
Gov. Snyder’s education cuts worse than reported for many school districts
Posted on 04/12/11 at 11:55am
Dozens of districts face cuts greater than $1,000 per pupil
Nearly 200 Michigan school districts face cuts greater than $500 per student under Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed budget, according to the non-partisan House Fiscal Agency.
The $470 per-pupil cut commonly referenced by politicians and the news media is just the tip of the iceberg, according to the House Fiscal Agency. That oft-reported figure relates to the foundation allowance, but Snyder’s budget cuts go beyond that to slash millions of dollars in critical education programs, including dropout prevention programs, special education funds, isolated and rural school grants, declining enrollment funds and various payments to equalize inequities caused by the implementation of Proposal A.
Combined with a $1 billion tax increase on senior citizens’ pensions, the cuts to education would help pay for a massive tax break for large corporations, according to Snyder’s budget proposal.
“Slashing our children’s education to pay for tax cuts for big banks, oil companies and other large corporate special interests is a clear sign of misplaced priorities,” said Iris K. Salters, president of the Michigan Education Association. “That may be Governor Snyder’s definition of ‘shared sacrifice,’ but it’s not ours. Instead of mortgaging our kids’ futures to help big corporations, we need real, balanced solutions to fund Michigan’s priorities.”
According to the House Fiscal Agency’s report, 171 public school districts serving 356,582 students face cuts greater than $500 per pupil. They are as follows:(list edited)
• Beecher Community School District: $524
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• Benton Harbor Area Schools: $505
• Bridgeport-Spaulding Community School District: $842
• Buena Vista School District: $545
• Detroit City School District: $569
• East Detroit Public Schools: $520
• Flint City School District: $757
• Hazel Park City School District: $547
• Highland Park City Schools: $995• Hillman Community Schools: $504
• Kearsley Community Schools: $509
• Lansing Public School District: $668
• Mt. Morris Consolidated Schools: $516
• Pontiac City School District: $625
• Saginaw City School District: $512
• Westwood Heights Schools: $531
Contact: Doug Pratt, Director of Public Affairs, 517-337-5566
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Sat Jan 26, 2013 3:37 pm |
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