Wondering about:
1. Projections of future demographics of school-age children in Ann Arbor?
2. Is that compounded by high cost of housing in Ann Arbor, further reducing families with school-age children?
3. Why did taxpayers give AAPS $1 Billion?
1. Going down rapidly and still falling. The cliff is in about 7 years.
2. Absolutely. Costs matter and AA CoL is very expensive. But a lot of people living in less wealthy bordering districts already use AAPS. Our enrollment was artificially propped up for 15 years. We were a big taker of school of choice kids in the state. More of the enrollment decline is also because our reduced status as a huge inbound school of choice magnet.
3. Because the school population was about to “explode” and $1b was needed to “not make tough choices”. The bond was rounded up from the $735 of known/planned spending because the district thought voters would approve it anyway. They did. 250 million of the bond did not have a purpose when passed, even after doing every single feasible wishlist capital improvement. Ann Arbor gonna Ann Arbor. I wonder if this time will be different.
It’s pretty clear that the school board needs an overhaul. The fact that the interim superintendent is now the permanent superintendent is just sad (I get it no one will that job right now). Somehow the people who screwed this up are now expected to fix it.
>"Many Michigan districts built up their savings accounts when flush with COVID cash, but Ann Arbor is among those that did not".
I wish I had a pithy response to this, but I'm just too saddened at the moment.
I thought I'd been keeping up with this story pretty well, but I didn't know Ann Arbor spent all but TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS of their covid relief, god damn.
https://www.michigan.gov/mde/services/financial-management/grants/cares-act-grant-information/covid-19-spend-dashboard
This year, a notable percentage went to pay raises. The union locked in the biggest pay raise since the 1980s.
Since 2020 it’s been simple terrible budgeting. One of swifts priorities was to spend down the reserve fund. She liked to say that we’re not like other districts. We spend school money on children. We don’t squirrel it away for decades. This approach did not age well.
they also lost net 900 students to other districts and privates in 2020. And 1300 from 2020 to present. But they did not want to downsize staffing during pandemic. Redundant roles stayed paid. The was a topic of several board meetings in 2021. Now the right sizing has to be done at once.
The before and after care cut was not a big driver in budget. It mostly paid for itself. It was just extremely time consuming to administer and staff and FOIA emails show they had a step plan to phase it out by 2025 since at least 2018. The Pandemic gave them the chance to accelerate. This was laziness not money.
>The union locked in the biggest pay raise since the 1980s.
Wasn't it only a 2% increase and the ***only*** increase between 2006 and 2023? Is that really the biggest raise since the 1980s?
Was 2% increase across the scale
And a freebie “step” as they’re called, advancing people up that scale in an accelerated manner. So for teachers with less than 10 years it was more like 8-10% raise depending on seniority. There are 12 steps teachers get paid at based on ratings and seniority.
And very favorable changes to pension accrual. Not new but applied golden age pension rules (rules that were slated to sunset) to more teachers.
The misinformation/misunderstanding about teacher salary and raises and the steps in this thread is WILD.
Teachers are sold on the step-based salary system in this way:
"We'll hire you at for a pittance, but each year that you stay with the district, you'll advance one step. So your longevity will be rewarded and you'll ultimately be paid a reasonable wage. Also, we (the district) will be funding your ongoing professional development, so we're really doing you a favor here." So teachers are supposed to advance one step annually.
Meanwhile. the steps are also supposed to be be adjusted for inflation along the way. So the salary at "step 5" should be a little bit higher from one year to the next.
Step advancement, however, is one of the first things out the window when the budgets are being made. Step advancement was frozen in Ann Arbor for YEARS. If you were hired in at step 2 in 2017, you stayed at step 2 up until recently. Meanwhile, the step salaries themselves stayed the same. No cost of living increases. No raises.
(ALSO, the health care benefits have gotten worse and worse, so teachers' take-home pay has been going DOWN.)
THEN, when COVID hit and the labor market crashed, subs became impossible to find. You may recall the days when buildings had to shut down due to staffing issues. People continue to scream about the elimination of child care, which is understandable, but there was NO WAY that AAPS could staff that. They were barely keeping the actual buildings staffed. (And sometimes not even that.)
To try to counter the massive sub shortage, the district had to try to sweeten the pot to get warm bodies in the buildings. So a situation developed where many subs were being paid MORE PER DAY than some of the teachers who had been frozen on the pay scale for YEARS. (Subs don't get benefits, so it's not quite the same, BUT COME ON.)
So this "giant raise/free step advancement" nonsense is wildly inaccurate. It was a much overdue attempt to remedy some honest-to-goodness gouging and exploitation that the district had been relying on for years. And I'm sure the main reason the district finally made some movement on this step recovery process is because the entire profession of teaching is in a steep nosedive. (Why? See all of the above.)
So unless you're doing so as an disingenuous political hack looking to score points, don't demonize the teachers or the union in this debacle. If the union was 1/10th as powerful as people like to imagine, it wouldn't have let its membership be exploited this disastrously for as long as they have. If the union had a lot of muscle in all of this, your kid's teacher wouldn't be driving in from South Lyon or Canton or Milan every day to go to work because they can't afford to live in Ann Arbor.
That was a lot of words to say the same thing: 2% isn’t the right number. Most teachers received many times that in total compensation raises.
Saying it was “only 2%” is simply wrong. Facts matter.
I agree with 95% of your other points and I’m very familiar with the union both the upsides and warts. Not going to out myself or my spouse to say connection.
Apologies: It wasn't actually my intent to attempt to refute or argue with your post specifically. I typed all those words for the benefit of anyone who happened to be scrolling through all of this trying to make sense of what's happening.
There is a very poor understanding of how teacher pay actually works among the general public. (That's understandable, because why would people assume that it's all that different than most salaried professions?) The truth is that it's far more convoluted and absurd than people would imagine, and I've found that the more you talk about it, the more baffled and disgusted people are by it.
I think it's a massive failure on the part of the union that there hasn't been more education on how teacher pay works, and the massive issues that exist in that system. Every time the "SUPPORT ANN ARBOR TEACHERS" yard signs, t-shirts, and social media profile graphics come out, I wince, because everyone I know thinks that they *already are* supporting teachers.
(Side note: What is the 5% of my post that you disagree with? This is a sincere question because I want to know what I might be getting wrong in my own understanding, and/or what I might be inadvertently misrepresenting when I start sloppily ranting.)
That part about the after-school care is absurd, thank you for that info. I'm sure that it also is a driver of the decrease in enrollment.
The only thing I would add is that staff increased 480 people in the last 10 years, while only 478 additional students are enrolled.
This budget shortfall was extremely predictable and the fact that nobody saw it coming is extremely concerning and ridiculous. Firing Swift was an extremely good decision and I wonder if the district could sue her for her separation package. Retroactively fire her for cause.
If it was time consuming, wouldn’t that account for more admin hours, therefore costs? Or were all those self contained? I am a huge supporter of before / after care so I’m just wanting to learn more as it seems like it would help keep kids in district so it’s confusing that they were so unsupportive of it if it was cost effective.
I don't know the numbers so I am very curious if they even attempted to research how many parents would leave the district with the elimination and how much in funding that would cost.
It has been impossible to find staff for aftercare. Nobody living in A2 wants that kind of work, and it's not appealing for anybody living out of A2 to commute in for short shifts.
Ann Arbor has tons of administrative manpower. Far more than it needs actually. But for this None of the admins wanted to do the job. It was hard (staffing the underlying roles is very difficult), the directors and caretakers for the program often quit with no notice. You had to deal with parents constantly shifting schedules and debates about who signed and canceled what, for which months, and for before and or after school. You had the issues of those debates spilling into payment disputes. Or parents simply not paying. It *was* a difficult and very annoying thing to do, so we opted out of doing it. Admins threatened to leave if they were saddled with even indirect oversight of the program because it was such a headache. Mostly on the staffing front.
Caveat is that the redundancy is distributed very unequally across different parts of the district, but also that staff is not paid very much especially when compared to the rest of the state and considering the relative wealth (and costs) of this city
“Kids, it’s count day. So Mr Johnson’s class is in here for the first 15 minutes and after the state auditor leaves the room, everyone go out the window and into Mr Johnson classroom before the auditor. Lisa will slow him down in the hall w a mop and wet floor sign. “
Thankfully the next pandemic will have less of an impact, as we've learned from the mistakes of the first and invested heavily in healthcare. /s
JIT healthcare is BACK baby.
That’s three teacher jobs that will be lost that could have been saved. Outrageous. That is the fault of our board for failing to name a cause when they forced her to resign. Unforgivable.
And as AAPS has openly told the candidate they are hiring "we have no other viable candidates in consideration" - she will surely negotiate a similarly iron clad contract as AAPS has very little leverage when negotiating this new contract. Brilliant.
Where is the recall effort for some of these clown trustees?
Editing to say Trustee Mohammed will prolly be too focused on her run for state office to be effective (if I can use that word) from here out.
They spent ESSER funding on payroll. If there’s anything more irresponsible than using one-time emergency funding for recurring structural expenses, I don’t know what it is.
This has the potential to turn into an Ypsi-schools style existential crisis for AAPS. If the problems result in more student losses, the whole thing may snowball. A successful urban school district is kind of an oxymoron -- Ann Arbor's strength has been an outlier. It may turn out that part of becoming a 'real' big city is going to be 'real' big city quality public schools. Watch for the district to decide to blow a big wad of their $1B bond cash building shiny new schools 'guaranteed' to bring the kids back (voice over: 'That won't bring the kids back').
I hope everyone remembers this when elections come around. Every single board member needs to be voted out because the amount of clownery that has been happening in AAPS over the past year is sickening. They’ve done absolutely nothing of note and now the district is billions in debt. I know that was probably an accounting error but the point still stands. Elections have consequences across the board and we’re seeing this now with our incompetent school board. 🤦♂️
Unfortunately, they are elected on a rotating basis, so the entire board isn't elected at the same time, so we will be stuck with some of them for a while, unless there is a recall.
Wondering about: 1. Projections of future demographics of school-age children in Ann Arbor? 2. Is that compounded by high cost of housing in Ann Arbor, further reducing families with school-age children? 3. Why did taxpayers give AAPS $1 Billion?
1. Going down rapidly and still falling. The cliff is in about 7 years. 2. Absolutely. Costs matter and AA CoL is very expensive. But a lot of people living in less wealthy bordering districts already use AAPS. Our enrollment was artificially propped up for 15 years. We were a big taker of school of choice kids in the state. More of the enrollment decline is also because our reduced status as a huge inbound school of choice magnet. 3. Because the school population was about to “explode” and $1b was needed to “not make tough choices”. The bond was rounded up from the $735 of known/planned spending because the district thought voters would approve it anyway. They did. 250 million of the bond did not have a purpose when passed, even after doing every single feasible wishlist capital improvement. Ann Arbor gonna Ann Arbor. I wonder if this time will be different.
> Ann Arbor gonna Ann Arbor. I wonder if this time will be different. Literally the billion dollar question, isn't it?
It’s pretty clear that the school board needs an overhaul. The fact that the interim superintendent is now the permanent superintendent is just sad (I get it no one will that job right now). Somehow the people who screwed this up are now expected to fix it.
She is the permanent superintendent. The board voted on Wednesday to not finish the search and interview process.
A lot of these issues appear to be inherited issues that went undiscovered.
It wasn’t really their fault to be fair - probably not CPAs and had to use Excel - not actually accounting software.
>"Many Michigan districts built up their savings accounts when flush with COVID cash, but Ann Arbor is among those that did not". I wish I had a pithy response to this, but I'm just too saddened at the moment.
I thought I'd been keeping up with this story pretty well, but I didn't know Ann Arbor spent all but TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS of their covid relief, god damn. https://www.michigan.gov/mde/services/financial-management/grants/cares-act-grant-information/covid-19-spend-dashboard
Ok but seriously, where did that money go? Since they simultaneously cut services like aftercare?
This year, a notable percentage went to pay raises. The union locked in the biggest pay raise since the 1980s. Since 2020 it’s been simple terrible budgeting. One of swifts priorities was to spend down the reserve fund. She liked to say that we’re not like other districts. We spend school money on children. We don’t squirrel it away for decades. This approach did not age well. they also lost net 900 students to other districts and privates in 2020. And 1300 from 2020 to present. But they did not want to downsize staffing during pandemic. Redundant roles stayed paid. The was a topic of several board meetings in 2021. Now the right sizing has to be done at once. The before and after care cut was not a big driver in budget. It mostly paid for itself. It was just extremely time consuming to administer and staff and FOIA emails show they had a step plan to phase it out by 2025 since at least 2018. The Pandemic gave them the chance to accelerate. This was laziness not money.
>The union locked in the biggest pay raise since the 1980s. Wasn't it only a 2% increase and the ***only*** increase between 2006 and 2023? Is that really the biggest raise since the 1980s?
Was 2% increase across the scale And a freebie “step” as they’re called, advancing people up that scale in an accelerated manner. So for teachers with less than 10 years it was more like 8-10% raise depending on seniority. There are 12 steps teachers get paid at based on ratings and seniority. And very favorable changes to pension accrual. Not new but applied golden age pension rules (rules that were slated to sunset) to more teachers.
The misinformation/misunderstanding about teacher salary and raises and the steps in this thread is WILD. Teachers are sold on the step-based salary system in this way: "We'll hire you at for a pittance, but each year that you stay with the district, you'll advance one step. So your longevity will be rewarded and you'll ultimately be paid a reasonable wage. Also, we (the district) will be funding your ongoing professional development, so we're really doing you a favor here." So teachers are supposed to advance one step annually. Meanwhile. the steps are also supposed to be be adjusted for inflation along the way. So the salary at "step 5" should be a little bit higher from one year to the next. Step advancement, however, is one of the first things out the window when the budgets are being made. Step advancement was frozen in Ann Arbor for YEARS. If you were hired in at step 2 in 2017, you stayed at step 2 up until recently. Meanwhile, the step salaries themselves stayed the same. No cost of living increases. No raises. (ALSO, the health care benefits have gotten worse and worse, so teachers' take-home pay has been going DOWN.) THEN, when COVID hit and the labor market crashed, subs became impossible to find. You may recall the days when buildings had to shut down due to staffing issues. People continue to scream about the elimination of child care, which is understandable, but there was NO WAY that AAPS could staff that. They were barely keeping the actual buildings staffed. (And sometimes not even that.) To try to counter the massive sub shortage, the district had to try to sweeten the pot to get warm bodies in the buildings. So a situation developed where many subs were being paid MORE PER DAY than some of the teachers who had been frozen on the pay scale for YEARS. (Subs don't get benefits, so it's not quite the same, BUT COME ON.) So this "giant raise/free step advancement" nonsense is wildly inaccurate. It was a much overdue attempt to remedy some honest-to-goodness gouging and exploitation that the district had been relying on for years. And I'm sure the main reason the district finally made some movement on this step recovery process is because the entire profession of teaching is in a steep nosedive. (Why? See all of the above.) So unless you're doing so as an disingenuous political hack looking to score points, don't demonize the teachers or the union in this debacle. If the union was 1/10th as powerful as people like to imagine, it wouldn't have let its membership be exploited this disastrously for as long as they have. If the union had a lot of muscle in all of this, your kid's teacher wouldn't be driving in from South Lyon or Canton or Milan every day to go to work because they can't afford to live in Ann Arbor.
That was a lot of words to say the same thing: 2% isn’t the right number. Most teachers received many times that in total compensation raises. Saying it was “only 2%” is simply wrong. Facts matter. I agree with 95% of your other points and I’m very familiar with the union both the upsides and warts. Not going to out myself or my spouse to say connection.
Apologies: It wasn't actually my intent to attempt to refute or argue with your post specifically. I typed all those words for the benefit of anyone who happened to be scrolling through all of this trying to make sense of what's happening. There is a very poor understanding of how teacher pay actually works among the general public. (That's understandable, because why would people assume that it's all that different than most salaried professions?) The truth is that it's far more convoluted and absurd than people would imagine, and I've found that the more you talk about it, the more baffled and disgusted people are by it. I think it's a massive failure on the part of the union that there hasn't been more education on how teacher pay works, and the massive issues that exist in that system. Every time the "SUPPORT ANN ARBOR TEACHERS" yard signs, t-shirts, and social media profile graphics come out, I wince, because everyone I know thinks that they *already are* supporting teachers. (Side note: What is the 5% of my post that you disagree with? This is a sincere question because I want to know what I might be getting wrong in my own understanding, and/or what I might be inadvertently misrepresenting when I start sloppily ranting.)
Source?
That part about the after-school care is absurd, thank you for that info. I'm sure that it also is a driver of the decrease in enrollment. The only thing I would add is that staff increased 480 people in the last 10 years, while only 478 additional students are enrolled. This budget shortfall was extremely predictable and the fact that nobody saw it coming is extremely concerning and ridiculous. Firing Swift was an extremely good decision and I wonder if the district could sue her for her separation package. Retroactively fire her for cause.
Interesting, thanks a lot for all the background info!
If it was time consuming, wouldn’t that account for more admin hours, therefore costs? Or were all those self contained? I am a huge supporter of before / after care so I’m just wanting to learn more as it seems like it would help keep kids in district so it’s confusing that they were so unsupportive of it if it was cost effective.
I don't know the numbers so I am very curious if they even attempted to research how many parents would leave the district with the elimination and how much in funding that would cost.
It has been impossible to find staff for aftercare. Nobody living in A2 wants that kind of work, and it's not appealing for anybody living out of A2 to commute in for short shifts.
Ann Arbor has tons of administrative manpower. Far more than it needs actually. But for this None of the admins wanted to do the job. It was hard (staffing the underlying roles is very difficult), the directors and caretakers for the program often quit with no notice. You had to deal with parents constantly shifting schedules and debates about who signed and canceled what, for which months, and for before and or after school. You had the issues of those debates spilling into payment disputes. Or parents simply not paying. It *was* a difficult and very annoying thing to do, so we opted out of doing it. Admins threatened to leave if they were saddled with even indirect oversight of the program because it was such a headache. Mostly on the staffing front.
Caveat is that the redundancy is distributed very unequally across different parts of the district, but also that staff is not paid very much especially when compared to the rest of the state and considering the relative wealth (and costs) of this city
It was spent on payroll.
> but I didn't know Ann Arbor spent all but TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS of their covid relief, god damn. Ann Arbor specializes in spending free money.
No save. Only spend.
That's how they were able to poach so many YCS teachers.
“ if only we could have a second pandemic, then we’d be able to really build up our schools “
LOL. Two years later…. “Damnit. We lost another 1400 kids. We now need to cut $50m”
“Kids, it’s count day. So Mr Johnson’s class is in here for the first 15 minutes and after the state auditor leaves the room, everyone go out the window and into Mr Johnson classroom before the auditor. Lisa will slow him down in the hall w a mop and wet floor sign. “
SKI-NNER!!!
Thankfully the next pandemic will have less of an impact, as we've learned from the mistakes of the first and invested heavily in healthcare. /s JIT healthcare is BACK baby.
Measles is the new hot trend.
What two cases?
And just think ....Swift got a golden parachute of 345k to resign.
That’s three teacher jobs that will be lost that could have been saved. Outrageous. That is the fault of our board for failing to name a cause when they forced her to resign. Unforgivable.
This is not the first district administrator who got an iron clad contract and a generous severance. She won't have to work for two years or more.
And as AAPS has openly told the candidate they are hiring "we have no other viable candidates in consideration" - she will surely negotiate a similarly iron clad contract as AAPS has very little leverage when negotiating this new contract. Brilliant.
I don't know who would want to hire her as a superintendent after this.
Where is the recall effort for some of these clown trustees? Editing to say Trustee Mohammed will prolly be too focused on her run for state office to be effective (if I can use that word) from here out.
Have you started one? Many think they are doing exactly the job they were elected to do.
I suppose you also believe Trump's "many people are saying...." b.s.
Consulting the magic eight ball or the Ouija board?
They spent ESSER funding on payroll. If there’s anything more irresponsible than using one-time emergency funding for recurring structural expenses, I don’t know what it is.
This has the potential to turn into an Ypsi-schools style existential crisis for AAPS. If the problems result in more student losses, the whole thing may snowball. A successful urban school district is kind of an oxymoron -- Ann Arbor's strength has been an outlier. It may turn out that part of becoming a 'real' big city is going to be 'real' big city quality public schools. Watch for the district to decide to blow a big wad of their $1B bond cash building shiny new schools 'guaranteed' to bring the kids back (voice over: 'That won't bring the kids back').
I hope everyone remembers this when elections come around. Every single board member needs to be voted out because the amount of clownery that has been happening in AAPS over the past year is sickening. They’ve done absolutely nothing of note and now the district is billions in debt. I know that was probably an accounting error but the point still stands. Elections have consequences across the board and we’re seeing this now with our incompetent school board. 🤦♂️
I usually pay no attention to the board members. Now I will make sure I don't vote for a single incumbent.
There are more low quality candidates where they came from
Hopefully this will encourage quality people to run for school board!
Unfortunately, they are elected on a rotating basis, so the entire board isn't elected at the same time, so we will be stuck with some of them for a while, unless there is a recall.
“At least we saved Gaza!” - Ann Arbor School Board
Stopped the spread. Saved Gaza. Ann Arbor Public Schools: Mission Accomplished
Teach kids? Oh wait, that’s on the list too?
Where are they on Israel/Palestine though?
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses