I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Anger over more than $500 million in cuts to school funding in the latest budget seems to be spreading in the state. Tuesday morning more than 1,500 students, teachers and parents rallied at the state capitol, demanding that the legislature restore those cuts. The Detroit News reports:
More than 1,500 parents, students and educators from Plymouth-Canton, Livonia, Taylor and other districts rallied this morning on the Capitol steps before going inside to bring their message to elected officials.
Their message: Recent cuts to school aid were wrong and should be restored.”We came here to raise our voices because they tried to cut money for Dearborn schools,” said Kassem Alakhras, who has six children in the 18,097-student district, which lost about $12 million under reductions approved by lawmakers and additional cuts by Gov. Jennifer Granholm. “We came here to tell them just to fix it and put our money back.”
Those cuts are forcing massive cuts at the local level as school districts struggle to make ends meet. Dearborn Public Schools laid off a staggering 300 teachers on Monday and said that an additional 200 non-instructional staff members will be laid off in December and probably another 100 teachers will get the pink slip in January.
Dearborn was one of 39 school districts to take a double whammy, losing $165 per pupil in cuts made by the legislature and another $127 per pupil in a line-item veto by Gov. Granholm that affected the state’s highest-spending school districts.
The legislature has until Nov. 21 to reverse those cuts by passing a bill to raise additional revenue. So far, the Republican-controlled Senate has shown little interest in doing so.
Correction: It appears that I misread the information on layoffs in Dearborn and accidentally doubled the number. A spokesperson for the Dearborn school district contacted me to correct the number of layoffs. This is his statement:
The budget reduction plan that was approved by the Board of Education on Monday, November 9 allows the administration to begin the process of laying- off an approximate total of 287 people. Just over 110 of those lay-offs will include instructional positions, 14 administrative positions and the remaining are non-instructional. Teachers and administrators would not be laid-off until the beginning of the second semester (Feb. 1, 2010) while non-instructional staff would be laid-off beginning December 1, 2009. The district is prepared to restore as many positions as possible if the state is able to restore all or partial funding to the district. Dearborn is facing a $10.3 million cut in state funds.
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