MADISON HEIGHTS — Usually residents of cash-strapped communities welcome more money, but Madison Heights residents don’t when it means bringing Detroit public school students into their district.

That was the majority opinion given, with outbursts and applause, at a school board meeting Wednesday at Madison High School in this Oakland County suburb. At the gathering, issues of race were unavoidable despite the insistence of many in attendance that skin color had nothing to do with their opposition to a plan to attract new students from Detroit. New Superintendent John Telford held the meeting to hear public reaction to his proposal to lift the district’s cap on the number of school-of-choice children enrolled to get more money from the state to close the district’s $600,000 deficit. Detroit public schools, meanwhile, face declining enrollment, the prospect of more than 50 schools closing, thousands of layoffs and a $306 million budget deficit, The Detroit News recently reported.

Telford wants to raise the cap on the number of students in the school-of-choice program, where children from an under-performing school district can attend schools in better districts. Currently, that number is set at 485; Telford, a former Detroit schoolteacher, wants to increase the schools-of-choice cap by about 1,000 students, which would nearly double the district’s current enrollment of 1,480.

The state gives school districts $7,500 per pupil enrolled. Telford said he could recruit most of the 1,000 sought-after children from Detroit. The district already has school-of-choice students from Wayne County, including Detroit, followed by Oakland and Macomb counties.

Telford tried to anticipate concerns over allowing more Detroit students into the district at the beginning of the meeting, namely on safety, academic performance and athletics.

He said the school board has been confronted with fears that African-American students are better athletes and would take most spots on varsity teams, which he dispelled as “myths.”

He also addressed other concerns. “It is a totally inaccurate presumption that our students from outside the boundaries of our school district, our students from Detroit … create most of our behavior problems,” he said, adding that statistics show this and concerns of lower academic performance to be false.

One woman said the district already mismanages money, evidenced by not having enough books for each student, so more enrollment would not make better schools. She insisted that the opposition to Telford and raising the cap was not about race.

“We’re very diverse. It has nothing to do with the color of a person’s skin. Now, what we do know is that it all comes down to money,” she said.

However, racial strife was unavoidably present at the meeting, despite the insistence of some that it wasn’t a factor in their resistance. Applause in favor of keeping the cap where it stands came exclusively from the majority white crowd, while applause in favor of Telford came mostly from black attendees. One man said Detroit parents had thrown trash on his lawn during an after-school event. This assumption that the litterers were from Detroit was beaten back by two black audience members who charged that the statement was prejudiced.

LaToria Clark, a Detroit mother, said her city’s schools are not well and that Madison Heights has nothing to fear from her children.

“I’m not trying to take anything from you. My children are not trying to take anything from you. But all children in Detroit Public Schools are not bad,” she said.