Governor Gretchen Whitmer was elected in Michigan last fall as a progressive Democrat. She promised to reverse the destructive anti-public school policies of her predecessor Republican Rick Snyder.
But Governor Whitmer announced plans to close Benton Harbor High School, over the objections of school board members and students. They say that Governor Whitmer made her decision without listening to their voices. Whatever happened to democracy?
Governor Whitmer, I call upon you to meet with the elected Benton Harbor school board and student representatives.
School board member Patricia Rush wrote this letter:
Hi all –
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board (BHAS)
May 27, 2019
Contact: Steve.Mitchell@bhas.org or Joseph.Taylor@bhas.org
Benton Harbor Area Schools Board and the Community Demand Reconsideration of Governor Whitmer’s Plan to Close Benton Harbor High School
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. – On Tuesday June 4, 2019 at 6pm – the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board will hold the first of several Open Public Meetings at the High School Public Commons to discuss the future of Benton Harbor High School and the entire K-12 school district. Students, families, teachers, and community members are strongly encouraged to participate.
We are urgently requesting that Governor Gretchen Whitmer appear in person at our June 4 Public Meeting – and fulfill 3 of her campaign promises: to support public schools, especially in high-poverty communities, to fight urban poverty, and to hold government accountable. Please see Whitmer’s campaign website: https://www.gretchenwhitmer.com/issues/.
Attached is the Board’s Open Letter to Michigan Governor Whitmer. We respectfully request that all news media PRINT OUR ENTIRE LETTER TO WHITMER – and display on your website.
As has been widely covered in the media over the past few days, Governor Whitmer’s Office, Michigan Treasury, and parts of the Michigan Department of Education have proposed a unilateral plan to close Benton Harbor High School in 2020 with re-distribution of BHAS high school students to a proposed charter school under Lake Michigan College and nine other local school districts.
Parts of the story not reported in the media:
– Governors Office and Michigan Treasury did NOT consult the elected Trustees of the BentonHarbor Board members prior to their unilateral decision. The two BHAS Board members who were briefed in the State Capital Lansing on Friday 5/24/19 were told by the Governors Office staff that this decision to exclude the elected Benton Harbor Board was intentional.
– Likewise, on 5/23/19, the elected state-wide Trustees of the Michigan Department of Education were informed that the Governor’s Office had also excluded them from giving input into the fate of Benton Harbor High School.
– On 5/24/19, the Governors Office informed the two Benton Harbor Board members attending the Lansing meeting that the Governors Office had not held an open public meeting for community input – and did not plan to do so. Instead, the Governors Office met with undisclosed community members that the Governor felt were “representative.”
– The BHAS Board were told that the Governors Draft Plan is a “Yes – or – No Decision with no opportunity for negotiation.” BHAS Board was told it must decide by close of business Friday June 7 to accept the Plan or risk that the State may elect to dissolve the entire Benton Harbor Areas Schools district at any time.
This one-sided decision-making by Michigan State officials is unacceptable. We, the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board are going to hold our State government accountable.
In April 2019, the BHAS Board unanimously voted to support the Fresh Start Resolution petitioning the State of Michigan to reexamine public school accountability and finance systems, calling for a system of improvement strategies developed collaboratively by all stakeholders – to ensure all students and teachers have a voice and receive the opportunities and support they deserve.
The State bears direct responsibility for a significant portion of the BHAS debt. The legacy of this debt should be transparently reviewed and addressed – but the High School cannot be held hostage for the State to agree to debt forgiveness.
The fate of the Benton Harbor High School and the entire School District requires careful planning by all involved parties – especially the opportunity of full community input plus input from both the state and local School Board Trustees who were duly elected by the community to represent them.
//
The BHAS Board OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR WHITMER Follows immediately
We respectfully request that all news media PRINT OUR ENTIRE LETTER TO WHITMER and display on your website.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board (BHAS)
May 27, 2019
Contact: Steve.Mitchell@bhas.org or Joseph.Taylor@bhas.org
OPEN LETTER TO MICHIGAN GOVERNOR GRETCHEN WHITMER FROM THE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD OF BENTON HARBOR AREA SCHOOLS, BENTON HARBOR, MICHIGAN.
Dear Governor Whitmer –
We respectfully and urgently request that you visit Benton Harbor in person to meet in an Open Public Meeting with the community and the elected School Board trustees regarding the future of Benton Harbor High School and the K-12 District as a whole.
The School Board is hosting an Open Public Meeting at the Benton Harbor High School Student Commons on Tuesday June 4 at 6pm. We would love to host you and let you hear the full story.
Hopefully you are aware that representatives from your office, Treasury and the Department of Education are claiming that, on your behalf, a unilateral decision has been made to close Benton Harbor High School in 2020. The Board was told by your representatives that a decision was made by your office to intentionally exclude the elected School Board trustees and exclude open community input from the decision-making process. Honestly, we are completely shocked and dismayed by this action. Our Board has been working in good faith with both Treasury and Education to address issues at BHAS including an outline for a new Strategic Plan, submitted to Treasury, but upon which your departments have taken no action.
We also want to openly confront the many “elephants in the room” that neither your staff nor the news media have addressed:
• The land upon which the Benton Harbor High School sits with its athletic fields and adjacent School Board properties are the LAST MAJOR UNDEVELOPED WATERFRONT PROPERTIES in Berrien County, Michigan. Is this just a coincidence, given that your office just told our Board representatives on 5/24/19 that your plan to close Benton Harbor High School has major (but unnamed) supporters in the nearby business community?
• The Draft Plan from your office is explicitly a transfer of wealth from an overwhelmingly poor and black community (Benton Harbor) to nearby white, more affluent communities. Under your Plan, that transfer of wealth will occur through the loss by Benton Harbor of its school facilities and use of school land, transfer of state funding from Benton Harbor to the adjacent nine school districts where you plan Benton Harbor students to be redistributed, and loss of jobs for local teachers and staff of all levels.
• The contention by representatives of your office that hiring a single staff person to act as a “Cultural Dean” to smooth over “discomfort” that the displaced 700 black students might feel when transported out of their community to predominantly white schools is an appalling insult to our youth and the community. Such insensitivity to the painful history of racial segregation, unsuccessful past desegregation efforts, and continued State-sponsored dis-investment in Benton Harbor calls for a swift and strong response.
We call upon you to meet with us – to hear the students voices and the expertise of our teachers.
We call upon you to fulfill your 2018 campaign promises to support public schools, especially in high-poverty communities, to fight urban poverty, and to hold government accountable.
BHAS needs balanced, constructive leadership from you, your office and all State agencies.
We need complete transparency. We need State and local leaders to stop sensationalizing limited
facts about Benton Harbor in the media and on the Michigan.gov website created by your office to
promote your Plan to close Benton Harbor High School. Our community needs to feel that our
youth are respected, valued and worth meaningful investment so that they may achieve their
tremendous potential. The students, their families, our teachers, and our community deserve that.
Sincerely, Steve Mitchell, Trustee and Board President
Joseph Taylor, Trustee and Board Vice-President
Patricia Rush, Trustee and Board Secretary
Denise Whatley-Seats, Trustee and Board Treasurer
Matthew Bradley, Trustee
Lue Buchana, Trustee
Michelle Crowder, Trustee
//
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A governor who would close a high school and shift students to charter schools is NOT progressive.
State level union leaders should make that clear to her.
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sadly, however, in the upper echelons of the “progressive” party, doing that — closing public schools to open charters — is considered to be exactly in line with the progressive agenda
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What “progressive” party?
Are you talking about the neo-liberals, the other half of the neo-conservatives glob infecting the GOP, or another corrupt group: Corporate Democrats?
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“Never was Progressive”
Progressive is
As progressive does
Regressive biz
Means never was
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I think that we can no longer trust what anyone running for office says. To often they say what we want to hear so we will vote for them and then when they are in office, they take out a meat cleaver and start chopping off our heads for voting for them.
Koch/ALEC????
Walton????
Gates????
et al.
Money buys power
That power corrupts the way the wealthy think.
Lord Acton said absolute power corrupts absolutely. I agree.
I think if we brought back the Eisenhower tax rate on the very wealthy without any loopholes or exceptions of any kind, that would put a huge dent in the ability to buy absolute power. Tax the super wealthy based on their net worth and not their annual earnings.
For instance, Jeff Bezos is worth more than $100 billion even after his divorce settlement, but on the other hand, he had a salary of $81,840 in 2017—still modest by CEO standards.
Tax Bezos on his annual salary would do nothing to dramatically reduce his ability to be corrupted by his wealth and the power it buys him.
But Tax him on his net worth would.
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At a minimum, force Bezos’ company Amazon to pay Federal income tax like small companies do.
Amazon currently not only pays no Federal income tax but also gets billions in tax breaks from the states where it operated.
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Benton Harbor is one of the bleakest towns I’ve ever seen. I haven’t been there in probably 30-35 years, and based on what I’m reading about it today, it’s gotten substantially worse. Depressing stuff.
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Benton Harbor looks like an apartheid city, so I suspect the schools are apartheid schools. The city is almost 90% African American while St Joseph, across the river, is almost 90% white.
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I was glad to see you confirm this feeling I suspected. There is talk of “reparations” in politics. Me thinks keeping benton harbor high school open at all costs would be a symbolic first step in this vein. It is the 400 years of history that largely is in play here. Lets acknowledge that – finally and then take steps to correct the injustice.
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Those poor people. It’ll be chaos. Michigan charter schools are a mess:
https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/05/22/andre-agassi-fund-southwest-detroit-charter-school/3765115002/
5 charter schools opened and then closed. No one planned any of them. They just kept plunking them down in neighborhoods that were already saturated with new and existing schools. Just a fragmented mess- they have a lot of schools, but they’re all under-enrolled and underfunded. They have nothing to show for it- they don’t even own the facilities they paid for.
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Public servants like Governor Whitmer make it increasingly difficult to take the Democratic Party seriously–let alone vote for its candidates.
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Personally, I have had a hard time taking Democrats seriously for quite some time.
Ironically, the last time I lived in a state with real Democrats was when I lived in Utah (with people like Wayne Owens and Ted Wilson)
Since, I have lived in states in the NE with what can only be described as faux Democrats.
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Utah also had Scott Matheson while I was there.
And in case you don’t know, the real Democrats I named have been out of office for a long time.
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Not incidentally, Ted Wilson, a climber, is a recipient of a Dept of Interior valor award for rescuing other climbers from the North face of the Grand Teton.
I can’t imagine any of my own state’s Democrats having the courage to doing anything remotely close.
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Utah has had some good Democratic leaders in its past. I hope that the newest representative, Ben McAdams (D_UT) will follow suit.
But even some Democratic state legislators in Utah are a disappointment Last year, someone everyone believed was a “die hard Democrat,” Jim Dabakis, proposed a law that would have eliminated the elected state school board and replaced it with one appointed by the governor.
Republicans LOVED it. We teachers were horrified. Fortunately, it ran out of time to pass. But still, it was like spitting in the face of teachers.
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AOC actually reminds me of Wayne Owens and Ted Wilson, so I am cautiously optimistic.
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Yes, she is a bright spot in a sea of squalid mediocrities.
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I don’t know. AOC is a spirfire. Wayne Owens and Ted Wilson were both pretty mellow. And some of AOCs ideas wouldn’t have flown in Utah, so I sort of think both of them would have opposed them.
Utah was a really Democratic state until the 1960s and even beyond, because the original Republican party was against polygamy, and therefore quite anti-Mormon. It wasn’t really until the abortion debates that Utah switched to Republicans. And Matheson was the governor clear into the 1980s.
Both Wayne Owens and Scott Matheson died quite young. Both were downwinders of the Nevada nuclear tests.
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Before LBJ and Reagan, the Democratic Party was the party of the KKK and racism, and when the Democrats stopped supporting hate, Reagan scooped all the haters by telling them whatever they wanted to hear and they moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party where they have stayed ever since.
The South used to vote solid Democrat until Reagan and then they shifted to solid Republican.
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“Public servants like Governor Whitmer make it increasingly difficult to take the Democratic Party seriously–let alone vote for its candidates.”
LOL!
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” – Churchill said this but some say he stole the idea from someone else — regardless, it’s true.
So, here goes:
It is increasingly difficult to take the Democratic Party seriously–let alone vote for its candidates … except when the only other viable choice is a Republican and then the Democrat is often the only choice even if you don’t like him or her.
Any vote that doesn’t go to a Democratic Party candidate benefits a Republican.
Vote for a libertarian and it benefits a Republican.
Vote for a Green Party candidate and it benefits a Republican.
Write in Batman and it benefits a Republican.
Why vote if you are going to throw your vote away?
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Thanks, Lloyd. Of course I agree with you, and will continue to hold my nose and vote for people like Governor Whitmer of Michigan, or even Governor Cuomo, in my state.
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It is a sorry state when we have to choose between a glass with no bottom (the GOP) that can’t hold water and one that has a small hole in it and is slowly going empty (Democrats).
If only someone like AOC could stick a finger in that hole and stop the leak.
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Exactly right, Lloyd. I think of voting now in elections in the United States, one is offered the choice between moral blindness and moral squalor. The two parties trade off these vices, and we end up with…well, the dystopia in which we currently live.
I’m happy to have voted for AOC in the primary; I moved to Massachusetts before the general, but I may move back to The Bronx this fall. Then I can vote for her again.
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Liking your thread ….
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I was listening today to a discussion on term limits. I have been ambivalent in the past, seeing some pros and some cons. Today I think tipped my thinking in favor of term limits, not that it would solve all problems. However, if people couldn’t plan their entire career around public office and finding a place to entrench themselves long enough to build their power base, there would be less risk of losing all sense of a moral code. Everything would not be driven by political calculations. People might actually vote their conscience rather than what their donors demand. I watched a commercial that will be coming out that features Lindsay Graham pre-sycophant and then as a Trump apologist. It is disgusting. I hope it disgusts enough people that he loses his seat.
I wonder who has bought the governor.
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Perhaps in this case we might think the governor is voting her conscience. Benton Harbor is nearly 90% African American, has an median household income of $17,300, and has been declining in population since the 1970s leaving an estimated population of a bit under 10,000. It’s twin city, across the river, St. Joseph, is nearly 90% white, has a median household income of $49,900, and also has a population of under 10,000. Anyone who argues against segregation must see that these two adjoining cities must have a single school district.
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Joining districts should not be by state sponsored fiat. Developers want that land.
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Speduktr,
How often have school districts integrated on their own? If you want integration, it typically must be forced on the local community from the outside.
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Do you really believe that the governor cut the local community out of all discussions because she wanted to integrate the schools. Yeah, right.
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Developers want the waterfront land that the Benton High School is on.
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Another grab at the expense of economically oppressed ….
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