Interview with Steve Cousins on the Fundamental Inequities of Public School Funding
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals who are passionate about the future of Michigan Education. Now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we're joined in the Foxbright Podcast studio by Steve Cousins. Steve is the superintendent of the Reeths-Puffer Public School District. Steve is, in fact, the first in a three part series that we're going to be covering the fundamental inequities in public school funding. Welcome, Steve, it's a pleasure to have you on our show.
Steve Cousins: It's a pleasure to be here.
Rob Huisingh: Steve, I was hoping you take just a few minutes to talk to us about your history, who are you and tell us a little about Reeths-Puffer.
Steve Cousins: Well, as you said, I'm the superintendent of Reeths-Puffer School. This is my 5th year superintendent. I have been with the district in some capacity for 15 years. This is my 15th year. Reeths-Puffer is a great community. There're about 4000 students, community of about 20000 residents, on the shores of Lake Michigan, we've got some great state parks, wonderful beaches, but the really wonderful thing about Reeths-Puffer is that it is a very diverse community. We have people from all walks of life and that makes for a very-very rich educational environment and we've got a great staff that stretches real far to try to reach every kid that walks the door.
Rob Huisingh: As I said earlier, this is the first of three part series in which we're going to be talking to three different people about this topic of the fundamental inequities in public school education. Can you help frame the issue for us in terms of what are the fundamental inequities that you see that actually affect your district?
Steve Cousins: Inequities that exist in funding for education are based primarily on the basic concept for how we are funded and that is the legislature and the governor decide that x amount of dollars per student be allocated to a district and then based on however many students you have, that's how much money you get. The problem with that, from the get-go, is that not everybody gets the same amount of money.
Even within the Muskegon County, there are different funding levels for different districts based on where they were when Proposal A was passed and we changed the way that we started funding schools. To put it in sort of in its biggest contrast, if you take the highest funded school district in the state over in Oakland County and look at their foundation grant allowance, how much they fund per student and then took Reeths-Puffer, which -- we're at the bottom of the funding per student in the state of Michigan, you would have a difference of about 23 million dollars in our budget. Reeths-Puffer has a 35 and a half million dollar budget, if we were funded the same way as the top funded district in the state, we would have 23 million dollars more to spend on education. Just divide that by 4000 kids and you get the amount of money that per student that we're talking about.
Rob Huisingh: It's a tremendous difference and this traces back to the original time when Proposal A was put through. The amount of funding that a school district receives is not the same. Why was that?
Steve Cousins: Michigan has always been a very community-orientated education state. The basic attitude has been 'let local districts decide what they're going to do with their money' and if you go back far enough before Proposal A, it was basically, 'let local communities decide how much they are going to provide funding for their students' because before Proposal A, primarily all the money that went into -- good 80% of the money that went into our budgets and for some districts almost a 100% came from their local property taxes. So, when they created Proposal A, there has been a genuine attempt to try to close that gap but the fundamental inequity that existed continues today. The fact remains that the top funded school in the state was public taxpayers dollars is funded at almost twice the rate that Reeths-Puffer is. So, it goes back to the basic philosophy that local communities will make the decision as to how their districts are going to be funded and what they're going to spend their money at.
Rob Huisingh: Alright. So, there's the initial issue of the amount of the foundation but then there are other areas, take for example, special education and could you talk to us about that?
Steve Cousins: Yeah, I think bussing and special aid are probably two of the areas that you see where the inequity gets stretched even further. On the special aid side, you can just look at it in terms of county funding. Besides the money that comes from the federal government to help pay for special services for students and that's a very small portion of the amount of money that we use. There's money that comes from what's called the special aid millage tax in each county. The ISD does that tax and then they give the money to the local districts to run the programs based on a formula that is submitted to the state.
Muskegon which is per capita a poor county than Ottawa or Kent, Muskegon taxes less to pay for those services, therefore, the school districts from Ottawa and Kent County get more money to cover their special aid costs than the districts in Muskegon. To put that into a local flavor, Reeths-Puffer spends about $550 out of every foundation grant that we get. So, say, this year we got 4000 foundation grants, about $550 of every one of those foundation grants comes out to pay for special aid services that we have to provide and we should provide because that's the right thing to do. No question about that. But that we have to provide that aren't paid for. That's somewhere around 2.1-2.2, I think the last time I checked it was 2.32 million dollars that we have to cover, and in Ottawa and Kent Counties, they'll have to cover considerably less than that because they taxed more for special aid services.
Rob Huisingh: So now, the goal of Proposal A was to take school funding and to remove that from the property tax base and to put it into a state taxed arena and so what's happening is that initially not even all schools are receiving the same amount of money per student but then beyond that, I'm hearing you say that the communities are supporting through specific taxes different levels of special education costs and that by law, we're required to cover those costs first. So schools like Reeths-Puffer are not only receiving less money up on the front end but they're also forced to fund more of the special education costs from their foundation.
Steve Cousins: Yes and that would be true for all of the districts in Muskegon County if we're comparing them to Kent and Ottawa Counties. One part of what you said wouldn't necessarily be accurate and that's when they pass Proposal A, they never took away, never intended to take away the option for local communities to pass a mileage. As a matter of fact, it was specifically written into the law so that the intent was very clear that they wanted to allow that because they had to change the language in the law to actually to do it and what they did is they took that from being a local, purely local decision to it had to be a county decision. So the ability to increase mileage to pay for some operations has always been intentionally left in Proposal A but it was moved from the local district level to the county level. But outside of that essentially yeah, what we're talking about here is that you start from the get-go, there isn't the same taxation level to fund special aid services in each county. It's a fundamental inequity that shouldn't be there because our kids' services in their level of education shouldn't be dependent on the relative wealth of the people who live in the community. If we expect all kids to perform at a high level and if we expect all schools to teach at a high level then we ought to be providing the same amount of service and resource to each one of those school buildings that's going to do that job and that's not being done.
The other inequity that exists in special aid funding is that the special aid populations aren't the same in every district and I think that that would at least make intuitive sense to people who live in a county and understand the demographics of different townships and different cities in those counties. I'll use Reeths-Puffer as an example. The special aid rate in Reeths-Puffer is around 16.5%. That means about 16.5% of all the kids who attend Reeths-Puffer have an identified disability. That could be a very mild disability to a very, very comprehensive disability. So, it's not all lumped together but then there is a big continuum when we talk disability but about 16.5% of our kids have been identified through special aid services as need of those services because of a disability.
There are districts in Muskegon County where this special aid rate is only 8-8.5%. The burden of the finance to fund the programs that go into servicing those children is much less for those districts than it is for Reeths-Puffer. Conversely, their districts in Muskegon who have a higher percentage rate than Reeths-Puffer and so that the burden financially for them to provide those services is higher than it is for Reeths-Puffer. We're a little bit above the county average and we're a couple percentage points above the state average. So there's a less dollars to go to general education interventions or programs for kids because we'll have to use that money to pay for special aid services. Again, it's the right thing to do but there isn't equity in funding when it comes to providing those resources.
Rob Huisingh: Understand, now, bussing.
Steve Cousins: Okay, bussing. When we talk about bussing and again I think this one makes intuitive sense to people if the special aid ones seems a little more difficult. I'm going to use Muskegon as an example again and the data I'm going to use is a couple years old so it wouldn't reflect the last couple of years but two years ago we did a survey to find out what the special aid costs were across the county. District near us, North Muskegon, I believe that their cost was somewhere around $86 per kid, so for every foundation grant they got, they had to spend $86 per kid to cover bussing. In Mona Shores, little bigger district, little bigger geographic area, it was around $220-230 per student to pay for bussing for their kids. In Reeths-Puffer, that number was over $400 and in Montague, it approached $500 per student.
I think there're logical reasons for that. North Muskegon is a very small compact district. They don't have to do a lot of bussing to get their kids to school. Montague on the other hand, Reeths-Puffer, we're primarily rural districts. Most of Reeths-Puffer's population is spread out over a 78 square mile area. I think Montague is more like a 137-mile square area. Obviously, it costs more money to bus those kids to get them to school than it does in the smaller areas. Even though bussing is not mandated, it's not something that we have the option of discontinuing. Our kids relied on that, many of our families rely on that to get to school and quite frankly, if you try to have all the kids driven to school and we were going to start school at 7:45, it would be a mess because of the number of kids who come to any one building.
Just let me put that in the perspective of that means in terms of a budget. Let's take North Muskegon. They start off with a $124 per student, more than Reeths-Puffer because of that inequity we talked about in the beginning. Add to it the $314 roughly. $314 difference in the bussing cost, you have $438 per kid or 1.7 million dollars difference in funding that Reeths-Puffer would get if they were funded on a similar or had to provide services on a similar scale. That's 29 teachers which means I could put a teacher, extra teacher in every grade level and every elementary and add two reading specialists to every elementary in our district. That's what that translates to in terms of instruction for our school.
Rob Huisingh: My head is spinning here. The original foundation grant -- you mentioned that -- how much does Reeths-Puffer receive per student?
Steve Cousins: This year, we've received the basic grant of $7204 and then we'll get another $7-8 per student for declining enrollment but our basic foundation is $7204.
Rob Huisingh: The highest funded school district in Michigan receives about how much?
Steve Cousins: Over 13000.
Rob Huisingh: Over $13000 per student?
Steve Cousins: Yeah you have to go on to the internet and look it up.
Rob Huisingh: But and then, in addition to this where there's this differential between how much is funded by the community versus how much the school has to pay for, so in addition let's just say that that difference for the special education is how much in case of your district?
Steve Cousins: Well, I can tell you about in terms of mileage rate. In Muskegon, we levy 2.3 mils to pay for special education, in Ottawa County it's close to 4.5 mils and in Kent County, I believe, it's close to 3.5-3.6 mils. In terms of local districts just inside Muskegon, I can't tell you what the difference is. Like I said, just sort of logically, you could figure, if one district has an 8-8.5% special aid rate and another one has a 16 or almost double the special aid rate, there's going to be quite a but more money out of the foundation grants or the general aid money that's going to have to go to pay for it than it would be in other district.
Rob Huisingh: So assuming that we're anywhere close to $200-300 per foundation grant and then if add on bussing which could be another $500, you can be down to $6000 a student right out of the get-go and that compared with some districts in Michigan which are receiving 13000 and the rationale behind this is where.
Steve Cousins: Well, the higher funded districts, the rationale I suppose was politically expedient. The higher funded districts in the state that received that money from local property tax, back before Proposal A in an order for Proposal A to be politically acceptable to people, they had to find a way to hold those districts harmless. In other words, they didn't want those districts to have to go backwards for others to catch up and so they allowed that gap to continue and the gaps less than it was when we started Proposal A but it's not nearly where they had envisioned it would be I think when they passed Proposal A.
Rob Huisingh: I keep coming back to the thing that I find it absolutely amazing that one school district could be receiving $13000 per student from the government and another district is receiving seven and that we somehow think that this is equality.
Steve Cousins: Well, there are other categoricals that go into funding too. I think that should be put on the table. There is an at risk categorical, there's title one money that comes from the federal government and there are some districts that don't get as much of that money that Reeths-Puffer would get but those pots of money are very, very small compared to the differences in the funding that go on in other areas.
Rob Huisingh: Steve, I want to thank you for coming over and being on our show and spending sometime to help frame some fairly complex issues in rather understandable ways. Thank you. I know from talking to students, and teachers, and parents and people within your community that you're doing a great job and I want to thank you for what you're doing in education and thanks for being on our show.
Steve Cousins: Oh, thank you very, it's been my pleasure and my honor to be here.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to contact Steve, he can be reached by telephone at (231) 744 4736. You can visit the Reeths-Puffer School District online at www.reeths-puffer.org.
Rob Huisingh: Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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