Detroit Schools Closing: Michigan Officials Order Robert Bobb To Shut Half The City's Schools

DETROIT (AP) -- State education officials have ordered the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools to immediately implement a plan that balances the district's books by closing half its schools.

The Detroit News says the financial restructuring plan will increase high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidate operations.

State superintendent of public instruction Mike Flanagan says in a Feb. 8 letter that the state plans to install another financial manager who must continue to implement Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb's plan after he leaves June 30. Flanagan's said approval of Bobb's plan means the district can't declare bankruptcy.

Bobb filed his deficit elimination plan with the state in January, saying it would wipe out the district's $327 million deficit by 2014.

Bobb was hired in March 2009 by then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Comments

[ETexOpinion]

11:50 AM on 03/30/2011

Money saved today on closing schools will be spent tomorrow on new prisons. Sixty and more students in a classroom is no longer a learning environment... it is caged chaos... much like our prisons. The dropout rate will grow... educators will leave and corporations will have more money. The USA is starting to look more and more like the wealthiest third world nation on the planet.

[Jenny Baker]

08:52 PM on 03/23/2011

If parents aren't rioting in the streets, then they have no one to blame but themselves for how this turns out.

[beasteben]

03:52 PM on 02/25/2011

This is a disaster. If the American People don't start give education more love, the country is going to collapse.

[carolo]

12:19 PM on 02/24/2011

Another case of a man getting a job buried in red ink and everyone expects him to preform miracles in two years.

[pierre F Lherisson]

11:34 AM on 02/24/2011

The educational level of the Africans, Asians, Caribbean, Europeans, and Latin Americans has been increasing while there is a sharp decline in the level of education in America.
Yesteryear anyone could be gainfully employed even without an education. Nowadays in the high technology world, it is difficult for an uneducated person to find a job at a living wage.
Outsourcing occurs when big businesses are unable to find local people that are educated enough to perform adequately in their high tech companies. Those companies hired people overseas.
The myopic decision to close half of the Public Schools in Detroit to balance the book while helping the rich get richer will back fired in many unexpected ways the following decades including but not limiting to the exponential widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots; the state will have to deal with a few millions uneducated, under educated, under employed, unemployed and unemployable as a result of this decision. This also will leads to crime, delinquencies, more expenditures for social services, jails and prisons; such situation will create social strife and unrest that no one could control and predict their consequences. This will reverberates the current uprising in the Arab world that will stern from similar conditions.
Closing the schools means closing hopes and opportunities for the youths of today and tomorrow. Such inequity should not have been an option.

[Subsoil73]

10:30 AM on 02/24/2011

Most everything you need to know to make it in life is covered by the 10th grade. They should take the students that haven't shown the gumption or academic ability to go to college by the 10th grade and send them to tech classes for the final two years. The other student can continue college prep courses for 11th and 12th grade and the classrooms would be much less crowded.

The tech students would be learning to weld, run heavy equipment, lay brick, repair computers, serve as nurses aides, do landscaping, etc and actually have a marketable skill by the time they were 19.

Student that can't suceed at either should probably just be send to jail. That's where they'll end up anyway and at least this way, they wouldn't be harming their fellow man to get their ticket to prison.

[Yaa]

10:52 AM on 02/24/2011

Which route did you follow? I suppose it was...

[Subsoil73]

01:07 PM on 02/24/2011

I went to college and for a time taught technical classes at a high school. I had the privilege of seeing former students come back with technical school degrees telling me of their successes and finding that many of them were paid more than I was.

[Someguy85]

11:43 AM on 02/24/2011

I'll just say this. I had a TERRIBLE K-12 experience and did terrible in school. THANKFULLY since we're not like many of the other countries, I'm able to go to college and I have a 3.8 GPA. Just saying.

Students don't succeed for 3 reasons.
1) Parents don't raise their children anymore, they raise themselves.
2) We don't pay our teachers enough, treat them like crap, and our qualifications are terrible.
3) We don't fire enough bad teachers.

[Subsoil73]

01:09 PM on 02/24/2011

Under the system I describe, student's would still have the ability to attend college later in life. But if the kid is wasting time in high school and not apply them self, why make them suffer through two more years of the same. Give them skills and they'll have jobs.

[mollyrodriguez]

09:49 AM on 02/24/2011

60 high school kids in a single classroom? And you know there will probably be classrooms with closer to 65 or 70 students. Let's see how many Detroit high school teachers stay at their jobs...

[aaaarrrggg]

10:49 AM on 02/24/2011

They will have a bunch thay can 'recall' after they layoff the teachers from the schoold thay are closing.

I don't see how this saves money. They will need 4 or 5 security personnel in classes that size, and those guys make more than teachers do!

[kottkep]

09:29 AM on 02/24/2011

60 kids stuck in clasrooms designed to hold a maximum of 36 students. That's chaos. This doesn't even take into account the reduction in state aid to communities and schools that the governor wants to put into the next budget.

It's simply not workable. It will horribly unsafe. Teachers will quit. ( they're can barely afford to be teachers and are stressed as it is ) Large numbers of students won't show up ( which will reduce the money the schools get from the state )

I think the state and city need to come to grips with reality. Bankruptcy isn't always a fiscal decision. At some point it becomes a state of being. The Detroit school system is bankrupt with massive debt it simply can't pay for. Detroit cannot raise taxes enough on its decimated tax base to pay for it. It cannot cut services any further without doing critical damage to the city. ( The police response time is abyssmal as it is ) There is simply no way for Detroit to dig itself out the hole its in.

If the state or federal government doesn't provide Detroit the aid it needs to rid itself of its debt eventually they'll run out of banks foolish enough to lend them money. At which point the city might as well disincorporate itself and vote itself out of existence and the state of Michigan will be left with a lawless wasteland.

[abuja19]

03:40 PM on 02/24/2011

That is some pretty depressing stuff.

[A R Kearney]

07:22 PM on 02/25/2011

Classrooms in Detroit must be a lot larger than the ones I have seen in Indiana, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. I don't know how you could fit that many student in one room. I calls this the Mafiosi School of Management: short term solutions that harm long term benefits. This is a prime example.

[Yaa]

09:24 AM on 02/24/2011

Having up to sixty students in a classroom is a recipe for disaster.

I cannot believe that the average teacher can effectively teach that many kindergarten through twelfth grade students!

[klgrider]

09:15 AM on 02/24/2011

This is what funding two unnecessary and futile wars along with "welfare for the wealthy" tax cuts looks like. This is what conservative family values looks like. This is what The American Dream looks like in the twenty-first century.

[Sherley]

08:54 AM on 02/24/2011

I am sure closing schools will make people want to move into Detroit attract buisness and increase property values. Good job nit wits. I would bet a college class of freshmen students would make better decisions.

[liveandlearn]

04:03 AM on 02/24/2011

here in ann arbor, we have been watching the detroit follies for years. the law is beginning to catch up with some of the corruption, but now the man who put his reputation on the line for cleaning up detroit's public schools is being used by the private school industry.

[OneTop]

01:44 AM on 02/24/2011

" ..... increase high school class sizes to 60 students "

Unbelievable .... I doubt most classrooms could physically hold that many desks, let alone students.

What a horrible solution, while at the same time the new TP governor is giving massive tax cuts to all businesses.

Crisis .... what crisis ?

[TPaine1776]

01:42 PM on 02/25/2011

How did Michigan and Detroit end up in this mess? Take some time to think about and research before you rip into a newly elect governor.

[OneTop]

08:38 PM on 02/25/2011

LOL

I know, Detroit and the DPS got into this mess by NOT cutting corporate taxes.

[tploomis]

12:03 AM on 02/24/2011

I wonder if closing half the schools would significantly impact quality of education. Classroom learning in Detroit under current circumstances is abysmal. http://www.freep.com/article/20091208/NEWS01/91208020/Detroit-students-scores-record-low-national-test