Last Friday morning, the House passed the state’s school budget for the upcoming year. I want to thank my colleagues for their hard work this year, which came with some real wins for our schools. That being said, I decided to vote no. I’ve become more and more concerned about the state’s irresponsible use of the School Aid Fund (SAF), and I can’t continue to support our current funding plan.  

Our schools are in trouble, and they have been for years. Districts face aging facilities that they have no extra funds to repair. Some are passing millages or receiving grants, which may require consolidating. Teacher shortages have become the norm due to stagnant pay compared with other industries. Administrative costs continue to rise due to increasingly unpredictable and burdensome regulatory requirements mandated by the state.  

Above all, the developmental challenges that our younger generation is living through has reached a state many of us never dreamed of.  In the last 30 years, the rise of phones with internet access and social media has led to a huge spike in behavioral and academic issues in children and teenagers.  Everything on the mental health spectrum—anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, ADHD, self-harm—has become steadily more prevalent, particularly post-COVID.  

While our teachers have seen increasing challenges on the front lines, our state school aid fund has been under siege. School funding as it currently exists is largely protected by Proposal A of 1994, which cut property taxes and imposed some limits around local millages, while cementing a 6-mill state education tax in law and raising the state sales tax to 6% to ensure a sufficient, dedicated source of revenue for local school districts. This was presented to Michigan voters as a reliable way to help curtail rising property taxes while protecting our investment in our students.  

But starting in 2010, the Legislature began using money from the SAF to backfill higher education funding due to general fund deficits. The amounts started relatively low from a state budget perspective, around $200 million, but have been steadily growing since. More than $11 billion has been appropriated to higher education out of the School Aid Fund since then, including a record $1.7 billion this year, over a 25% increase from last year. In fact, the entire community college budget in Michigan now comes from the SAF.  

The way this spending has progressed is not what the voters intended. Prop A was pitched to voters as a sales tax with two purposes: cut back local millages, and contribute to education for Michigan’s students. Both of these are becoming less and less accurate every year. Our colleges and universities bring in—and profit from—tuition from an increasing number of out-of-state students, and our school aid funding model doesn’t have any specific metric to require the money to follow the student. Universities actually benefit more from attracting out of state students, since they pay a higher tuition rate.  This has no negative impact on the university and actually disincentivizes them from selecting Michigan students, despite the amount of money that goes to universities from the SAF.  

If we want to fix these issues, we need a bottom-up approach. We need to prioritize investing in Michigan students from their first day of kindergarten through their entire education. Parts of the state budget we passed were a good start but not enough. We need to make teaching a career people want to go into again.  We need to increase funding so that districts can pay teachers a living wage, consolidate administrative responsibilities for small rural districts, and make sure our educational model is actually producing positive results for our students.  

Finally, if we are going to continue to fund higher education from the School Aid Fund, I would like to see these dollars earmarked for only Michigan students. This could be accomplished through an in-state enrollment formula where the money follows the student to the college or university they attend or through an expanded Michigan Achievement Scholarship. Our tax dollars should be an investment in our children and grandchildren’s education and future. That’s what the people voted for in 1994, and that’s what they should get: Michigan dollars for Michigan students.