A week after school let out in June, the Ann Arbor Board of Education voted to release a devastating report on the mistakes leading to a multimillion-dollar hole in the district’s budget: “The former Superintendent confirmed to us that discussions were held with the Board [in spring 2023] that there would need to be reductions in the cost structure of approximately $12 million in the next fiscal year,” consultants Plante Moran wrote. By the time the report came out, it was more than $20 million.

The former superintendent was Jeanice Swift, a ten-year veteran the board forced out a year ago for never-specified reasons. According to the report, Swift said the trustees were “briefed specifically about this issue in closed sessions prior to each presentation of the employee [pay] agreements which occurred on March 15, 2023 and April 26, 2023.”

“I don’t remember hearing that [$12 million] number,” says board secretary Jeff Gaynor. But “we knew we were below where we wanted to be,” and in retrospect, he acknowledges, the budget they approved last year “didn’t add up.” But “we trusted Dr. Swift would do what was needed to be done. We knew we had to do something. She stated that clearly.”

“I’m very upset about the situation,” says Torchio Feaster, appointed to the board in October and elected its president in January. “I’m upset that the board didn’t take action and did not notice the dire situation that we were in.”

Feaster joined the board last October, shortly before Swift left. “She told me at that time that realignments needed to be made and that they were working on making those realignments,” he says. But “to my knowledge, no plan was ever presented to the board. The board never required Dr. Swift to present them a plan. … The board clearly had no knowledge of the depth of our financial issues.”

In Michigan, public school funding is based on enrollment. From a low of 16,449 in the 2013–14 school year, the head count climbed to 17,961 in 2018–19, thanks to new programs and “schools of choice” openings that drew students from other districts and even other countries.

But then the pandemic drove enrollment down more than 1,000 students, to 16,927 last year—barely more than what it had been a decade earlier. Yet in the same period, the schools had added 480 positions, the great majority of them teachers.

Fred Klein standing in an office in front of a sign that says Support Ann Arbor Teachers.

Teachers union president Fred Klein calls the critical report “a summary of what we’ve been saying to the district for the last five years.” | Photo by J. Adrian Wylie

Ann Arbor Education Association president Fred Klein calls the Plante Moran report “a summary of what we’ve been saying to the district for the last five years. We’ve been saying we’re alarmed by the hiring while we watch the student enrollment decrease.”

Early this year, the state warned the board that the district’s financial reserves were so low that it was at risk of being taken over by an appointed manager. Trustees cut short their search for a new superintendent and asked interim superintendent Jazz Parks to take the job permanently.

An incentive program helped persuade eighty-six teachers to retire, and fifty-five more were laid off in June. “We’ve identified the problem, and now we’re correcting,” Feaster says. The budget is balanced at current staff levels and will be going forward.

But the board president fears the budget won’t “be our biggest problem. It’s going to be our reputation and restoring trust in the district and the board. … If we’re able to change that narrative and show the community that we’re back on the right track—we’re focused on education, focused on our students, focused on our staff, and [that] this is one of the best public school districts in the country—then we’ll be able to grow the district [and] bring people back.”

Related: Over the Cliff

Ten and Done

Swift Decision

At first Swift thought the pandemic losses would be temporary. When in-person classes resumed district-wide in the fall of 2021, enrollment was down less than 1 percent from its peak. The superintendent told the Observer at the time that she expected it to stabilize once “Young Fives” and kindergartners whose parents had kept them home during the shutdowns started school.

Instead, the numbers continued to drop. Feaster thinks the main reason was that when school resumed, only a few buildings offered before- and after-school care. “Unfortunately at that time our district was not able to provide those services,” he says. “We definitely lost a lot of people as a result.” 

Union president Klein agrees. “I think a major reason enrollment didn’t recover after the pandemic was because the district was not offering before/after school care. I am hopeful that now that the district is offering child care, we will see enrollment increases.”

AAPS director of communications Andrew Cluley blames the child care gap on difficulties finding staff. Availability has since increased, and last year about 260 kids were enrolled. Four more sites are opening this fall, bringing the total to thirteen; in August, Cluley says, roughly 340 students were signed up.

Jazz Parks standing in a hallway

Superintendent Jazz Parks believes extended care is crucial to increasing enrollment, because it’s “an important resource for our working families. We hope that that will make a difference.” | Photo by J. Adrian Wylie

Superintendent Parks believes extended care is crucial to increasing enrollment, because it’s “an important resource for our working families. We hope that that will make a difference.”

The district had also dialed back its schools of choice program. “When we returned from the pandemic, we were very intentional about social distancing [and] not adding in too many students,” Parks says. This took a toll: schools-of-choice enrollment, which peaked in 2018 at 511 students, slumped to a post-pandemic low of 308 last year.

The district resumed marketing this year by sending out 50,000 postcards to families in Washtenaw, Wayne, and Livingston counties. But if Steve Friess got one, it was buried among multiple pitches from the Ypsilanti and Lincoln school districts, charter schools, and even a school in Sylvania, Ohio. Some followed up with email and Facebook ads, all inviting the Superior Township resident to enroll his son, Nevada.

Friess, who edits the Observer’s email newsletter, considers Ann Arbor’s comparative invisibility “marketing malpractice.” He thinks the district’s enrollment is suffering as a result, and says he only knew the AAPS offered schools of choice because his husband was student teaching at Mitchell Elementary when the pandemic hit. “That’s specifically why we wanted to be at Mitchell, because we knew the teachers there,” he says. “We ended up on a wait list for two months for Young Fives.”

Nevada was eventually accepted off the wait list and started school at Mitchell in August. While they’re relieved, Friess emails, he doesn’t understand why the district didn’t try to interest them in other schools that did have room—or add more Young Fives and kindergarten spaces. Once a student starts at a school, he writes, it “virtually guarantees them 13 years of state revenue from those kids and, probably, their siblings.”

Instead, “they just sent anxious parents into the wilderness for the summer to figure out what to do. We were still trying to figure that out when we got the notice in late July; we were probably going to send our son to a school in Ypsilanti if Mitchell didn’t come through.”

Cluley emails that “typically when a School of Choice request comes in if they have multiple schools selected then if their first choice is full they would be offered entry through one of their other choices.” But “we don’t admit students if it is requiring new classes to be created, we use it to fill in seats” in existing classes.

“We absolutely, obviously, use Schools of Choice as a way to garner enrollment,” says Parks, “but we don’t use it as a way to add additional classes and things of that nature. We use Schools of Choice to fill in … where enrollment is low.”

Attracting families like the Friesses isn’t a priority. “We intend to offer ourselves as a resource for students who want to come to this district,” Feaster says. “But I don’t know that we’re going to continue to be sending out postcards and pushing to take students from other districts.” Instead, the board president emails, “our social media platforms will continue to show the excellent achievements of our students both academically and athletically. And I think that’s how we’ll continue to market ourselves.”

Even without reaching out to other communities, Feaster writes, “I believe there are enough students within our district borders to substantially increase our enrollment. We need to show them the benefits and opportunities we provide in this district and we need to provide an image of professional, competent leadership. This will allow our district to grow and maintain moving forward.”

Gaynor, too, thinks students will return to the public schools. “I’m truly hoping and expecting we’ll regain trust and will regain students,” he says. “Even when we were losing students, parents in the community had a great deal of respect and trust in our teachers. And I think that’ll carry us through. And if we’re open and transparent and own our issues and deal constructively, I think we’ll regain students.”

Trustee Susan Ward Schmidt isn’t so sure. “There was so much vitriol and so much hate [around the budget crisis] that I’m worried about the impact on our enrollment.” She calls the Plante Moran report “fair” and “correct” and says she’s “not surprised that things turned out the way they did, when you look at the context as a whole last year and a half and how the energy on that board was to do other things than to worry about finances.”

The biggest other thing was removing Swift. “I remember saying, ‘You guys, we know we have huge budget alignment things that need to be done, and you’re gonna get rid of the person in short order that basically is responsible for that,’” Schmidt says. But she believes the current budget will work because “supplemental budgets will track income and expenses throughout the year—and because the board will “be all over this budget—as we should be.”

Schmidt and Gaynor were on opposite sides of the superintendent controversy—she supported Swift, while he cast a decisive vote to trigger her removal. So it’s not surprising that they also disagree about whether the board was distracted.

In an email, Gaynor points out that “the budget presented to us in June 2023, for the 2023–24 year, occurred before there was any talk or action about Swift’s tenure as Superintendent.” He agrees, however, that the trustees “can always be more watchful, more vigilant.”

By mid-August, all but ten of the laid-off teachers had been called back, as other teachers retired or left voluntarily. But the staff remains smaller, with cuts including co-teachers in middle and high school bands and world language classes in most elementary schools. Klein, the union president, describes teachers’ current relationship with the board as “unsustainable. … There’s a lot of distrust, a lot of disappointment.”

Adding to the stress, a number of teachers with special ed certification were transferred to special ed classes over the summer, prompting protests from parents who wanted them back in their regular classrooms. Cluley blames a national shortage of special ed teachers, but emails that it’s his understanding that “the majority of the special ed transfers have already been offered positions in non–special ed roles.”

Will things calm down by next spring, when the 2025–26 budget is written? “Hopefully,” Gaynor laughs. “I won’t be on the board next spring!” He announced in 2020 that this would be his last term.

Four of the seven board seats are up for election in November. Krystle DuPree also chose not to run again, but Feaster and Ernesto Querijero face five challengers: Megan Kanous, Eric Sturgis, Don Wilkerson, Leslie Wilkins, and Glynda Wilks.

A group called Better Boards Better Schools, organized by former school board presidents who fought Swift’s removal, is backing Feaster, Kanous, Wilkerson, and Wilks. So far, there are no other slates. We’ll cover the contest in the October Observer.


The View from the Top

“It’s accurate and fair,” says AAPS superintendent Jazz Parks of the Plante Moran report. Parks joined the AAPS as Tappan’s assistant principal in 2007 and had been assistant superintendent of school leadership since 2020. But she says she “was not privy” to past budget discussions, because “those were conversations that were held in closed session.”

Made interim superintendent after Swift left in October and permanent in June, Parks says her “focus is on moving the district forward.” While “the measures taken this year will have certainly put us on a better path to financial stability,” she warns that “fixing the budget will be a process over the next several years of being really intentional about how we utilize our funds. It will be impacted by certain factors like enrollment and state funding.”

State funding is up to the legislature, but enrollment is up to parents. “We are certainly confident that students will return to the district,” she says. “We are an excellent school district. We will continue to be an excellent school district.

“It’s been a difficult year, and we are committed to doing all the things we said at the onset: remaining communicative, remaining transparent. And we hope that as we continue that over the course of the year, any of the trust that’s been fractured, or the concerns that parents have had, will be allayed through that transparency and communication and engagement.”

When the schools set their budget next year, Parks believes “we will be on a path toward sustaining some of the changes that we have made to ensure that we are on solid financial footing.”

—J.L.


Update: We received the endorsements from the Ann Arbor Education Association too late to include them in the print issue. The teachers union is supporting Torchio Feaster, Megan Kanous, Ernesto Querijero, and Leslie Wilkin. 

Calls & Letters, October 2024

What’s Next for AAPS?

“I read your article ‘What’s Next for AAPS?’ in The Observer,” schools trustee Ernesto Querijero emailed in response to our September feature. “It is unfair and irresponsible to end the article with the endorsements from Better Boards Better Schools, a group whose membership and organizational structure is unpublished, and not include the endorsements made by the AAEA, AAPS’s largest employee group and whose President is featured under the headline. I expected you to realize that.”

We didn’t note the AAEA’s endorsements because we didn’t receive them in time for our September deadline. They are included in this month’s feature on the election.

Trustee Susan Ward Schmidt also emailed to correct an error: “Torchio [Feaster] does not have any opposition. He is running for the remainder of the two year term that he was appointed to and he has no opposition in that race.”