Skyline High students Gavin Morris (left) and Colin Franzen work together on a wall for this year’s student-built home on Pratt Rd. in Scio Twp. | Steve Friess
On a damp and chilly October morning, Milo Jurevicius, Eric Gomez-Ruiz, and Ridge LaPage jump up and down atop a dumpster overflowing with construction scraps. “We’re leveling the dumpster so we don’t have to pay extra money for them to take it away,” LaPage explains. “But yeah, it’s also fun, too.”
This is what longtime home construction teacher Mark Valchine means when he says Ann Arbor Public Schools’ Student Building Industry Program gives his thirty students “a taste of every aspect of home construction and a vision of their futures.”
Once the trio of Pioneer High students are done up there, they migrate back to the noisy construction site for the house they’re building on Pratt Rd. in Scio Twp. LaPage returns to hammering studs for the frame of a wall that one day will be someone’s bathroom, Jurevicius takes over a saw set up in a future living room, and Gomez-Ruiz holds a ladder steady for one of the other thirteen students on the job site.
“I always struggled in school with not only academics but also just sitting still,” explains LaPage, a seventeen-year-old senior who plans to go directly to work as a heavy machine operator after high school. “I found that it doesn’t really make sense for me to sit in a classroom for another four years to then get a desk job, so I started looking into the trades to get an idea of what else I could do.”
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There may be no more convincing poster children for public school Career and Technical Education (CTE) than LaPage and his classmates—which is why I’m here. On November 4, voters decide whether to raise property taxes by 1 mill for the next decade. The money raised—$25 million the first year—would support CTE programs like this one. Administrators can talk ad nauseam about the power of giving young people a variety of opportunities for instruction in specific career fields, but it’s student testimonials that have been front and center in the campaign to push through the millage.
Yet the debate over the ballot question isn’t so much about support for or opposition to CTE as it is whether a new tax ought to pay for it. Nobody involved with the Washtenaw Republican Club or Citizens Against Regressive Taxes (CART), the two most vocal organizations against the measure, disputes that such programs are popular and can set a sizable number of young people on life-altering paths.
“Everyone benefits from career tech education,” says CART organizer Kathy Griswold, a former city councilmember and AAPS board member. “When I was in high school back in the late 60s, I was the only female allowed to take drafting in tenth grade. It had a positive influence on me. It teaches a disciplined thought process, so career tech—and especially the tech part—is needed by all students.”
What Griswold and other opponents question, then, is whether a tax increase is necessary, appropriate, or good economics—and whether it’s fair to decide it in a low-turnout off-year election with, in many jurisdictions in Washtenaw County including Ann Arbor, nothing else on the ballot.
Ryan Rowe, who oversees CTE for the Washtenaw Intermediate School District, breaks it down in public talks as an increase of about $200 a year for the owner of a $400,000 home. Or, as WISD superintendent Naomi Norman told radio host Lucy Ann Lance in September, “a very small amount on a daily basis” of 54 cents.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” says Rowe. “We’ve threaded the needle on the timing on this. Our demand is going to continue. Students want those experiences. We will not have the funds to update the equipment we paid for. Some of those pilot programs will go away. It has to be now.”
Mark Valchine, director of the AAPS Student Building Industry Program, says he wants to offer more construction programs to meet the growing demand for CTE. | Steve Friess
Career and technical education—once commonly known as vocational training—had a heyday in the 1970s, which is when AAPS’s homebuilding program launched. But by the early 1990s, as K–12 academic requirements changed and the focus turned to college prep, such courses as automotive repair and woodshop fell out of favor.
“When the state beefed up requirements, there was so much that the students had to get before they could graduate that they essentially eliminated a lot of those exploratory classes in high school,” Valchine says. In recent years, though, the state has allowed more exceptions. “Now, sometimes, you can be exempt from a foreign language or from visual performing arts if you do certain CTE classes. Sometimes it counts as a math credit if the CTE class is heavily math-oriented.”
The skills taught in CTE programs are also burgeoning. They still include the so-called “trades”—construction, welding, farm science, various aspects of automotive technology—but the seventy-five programs available in Washtenaw County now include cybersecurity, drone and aviation technology, culinary arts, and health sciences. Students have opportunities to earn a wide array of industry-recognized certifications that can lead to work right out of high school or a jump on two- and four-year degrees in a range of fields.
“I receive phone calls on a weekly basis saying I need nurses, I need X-ray techs, I need welders, I need teachers, I need bus drivers,” Rowe says. “Covid accentuated an already existing problem. All of a sudden, people were retiring as fifty to fifty-five-year-olds. That created a vacuum of talent. We, frankly, cannot afford to have one student approach the stage of graduation, high school graduation, and say, ‘I’m really good at math, I’m really good at my hands, but I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ We can’t afford that.”
Perhaps because these jobs are in such high demand, CTE programs are also increasingly popular. Overall enrollment in the nine school districts under the WISD umbrella has fallen for public schools in Washtenaw County and statewide since the closures brought on by the Covid pandemic; AAPS alone remains down more than 6 percent. Meanwhile, enrollment in CTE programs in the county is up 69 percent, WISD says. More than 3,100 students participated in 2024–25, up from fewer than 1,900 in 2021–22. Hundreds of students are on waiting lists to get into the programs, too, and there’s a demand for a wider array of topics. Valchine, for instance, wants to offer more construction programs beyond the home-building one that requires a three-hour-a-day commitment.
Much of that uptick, too, is thanks to a flood of state funding to buy equipment, hire teachers, and cover busing for new CTE offerings, including aerospace and aviation and entrepreneurship. Those grants end next June, threatening to defund several of the programs.
Rowe and Norman note that Washtenaw County is one of just twelve in Michigan without a dedicated millage for CTE programs. Branch County, which borders Indiana, has the state’s highest rate at 4.2 mills. Lenawee County, sandwiched between Washtenaw and the Ohio border, has a 2.9 mill rate. A 1994 law put a 1-mill limit on new millage proposals for CTE programs.
WISD says it would use the millage money to offer CTE programs beyond high school, too. The idea is to introduce children as young as prekindergarten to a range of possible careers in age-appropriate ways, Rowe says. The From Curiosity to Career program currently in three county middle schools, including Scarlett in Ann Arbor, is the template; students learn about welding, electric vehicle technology, and manufacturing.
“It is a type of education that is powerful for young people and provides them tremendous direction and sense of self,” Norman says. “This is an opportunity, not a requirement. Across the board, we need applied and experiential learning experiences.”
CART organizer Kathy Griswold and Washtenaw Republican Club executive director Adam de Angeli oppose the millage because of the tax burden it would place on homeowners. | J. Adrian Wylie
Opponents of the millage seize on one argument—that county school districts would get to redirect the $10.35 million they currently spend on CTE programs. That’s another way of admitting this is a cash grab, says Adam de Angeli, executive director of the Washtenaw Republican Club.
“They’ve structured this to make it as a way to come back to taxpayers asking for more money,” he says. “They just ask voters for more money by putting particular issues—one year it’s computers, another year it’s CTE—on the ballot and getting people to vote yes. … It’s a fundamentally dishonest way of doing business. Voters shouldn’t be forced to fund districts in this way.”
Griswold says that putting another millage on top of some of the county’s highest property tax rates will further increase the stratospheric cost of owning a home in Ann Arbor. “This will disproportionately fall on working-class and middle-class individuals,” Griswold says.
The additional taxes did cause some to pause before supporting the millage. In May, as the AAPS board weighed whether to back WISD’s efforts to put it on the ballot, trustee Don Wilkerson voiced the concern: “I think CTE is very important, but I do share some concerns about the number of millages that we’re putting on our families here.”
Griswold and de Angeli say their opposition campaign is at a disadvantage because WISD is able to use taxpayer money to print and widely distribute lawn signs and other promotions of the benefits of CTE—all they have to do is avoid actually telling people to vote yes. Rowe says they’re walking a careful line and only providing “factual information. … There’s no bias in any of that.”
It’s unclear, though, if WISD’s efforts are breaking through with a public burned out and demoralized by politics. The organization held three open houses to offer information that seemed largely attended by school administrators and others already sold on the millage.
Coincidentally, though, one attendee at the Oct. 9 open house was James Gage, a sixteen-year-old Saline High sophomore who was there to fulfill a class assignment of attending a public meeting. Still, he found the topic resonant as he contemplates his next two years of school. Gage has taken several computer-aided design (CAD) courses as electives and has been encouraged by a teacher to look into the one-hour-a-day CAD program offered through the South & West Washtenaw Consortium, an alliance of five school districts that offer CTE programs together.
“I don’t know a ton about those kinds of property taxes and stuff, but I do know what they’re trying to do,” Gage says. “But I do know becoming a competitive college applicant is getting to be increasingly harder, and the fact that people are able to prepare and get certifications and have experience going into college applications, I think that’s a really big deal, probably bigger than most people would think.”
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This article has been edited since it was published in the November 2025 Ann Arbor Observer. The name of the street where students are building a house has been corrected in a photo caption.