Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is poised to close the high school of Benton Harbor instead of giving it the resources and support it needs. Perhaps it is time to review the state’s funding formula, created by a generation of Republican legislator, Gov. Engler, Gov. Snyder, and Betsy DeVos.
In this article, journalist Anna Clark describes what the public schools of St. Joseph, the twin city of Benton Harbor, meant to her.
It begins:
Over on Court Street in St. Joseph, Michigan, one mile from the little bridge to Benton Harbor, my hardworking family struggled to make do. We poured milk over broken Saltines and called it cereal. I tried, in a thousand obnoxious ways, to persuade my parents to buy food they couldn’t afford, not least in a choreographed song-anddance routine with my siblings titled “The There’s-No-Food Blues.”
We had one big advantage: terrific public schools.
For all the separateness between St. Joseph and Benton Harbor – one whiter and richer, the other poorer and mostly African American, with the St. Joseph River curving between them, doomed to be a perpetual metaphor – these are small communities. For many of us, our roots span both sides. I grew up in St. Joseph, but Benton Harbor is where my mother was raised, where relatives live, where our family church is, where I worked part-time jobs in high school and college, and where I run a 5K on Thanksgiving mornings. It, too, is home.
Yet the differences between our so-called “Twin Cities” grow ever more serious. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has proposed closing Benton Harbor High School for at least a few years, to get the distressed school district out of the death spiral of debt, following a consent agreement that gave the state oversight of the schools for years; it was lifted last November in favor of a financial plan that has, apparently, been scrapped. Benton Harbor’s enrollment may be lower than it used to be, but the prospect of shuttering the community’s single public high school – one that many still take pride in – is a blow.
St. Joe schools gave me the chance to thrive. Besides classes with experienced teachers, I edited a newsmagazine, performed in plays, went out for speech competitions, and failed to make many, many athletic teams. The first time I traveled out of the country was on a class trip for fourth-year Spanish students. I worked constant extra hours to pay the bill, but I got to spend two wide-eyed weeks in Spain.
I didn’t have a conversation with someone my own age from Benton Harbor until I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, leading creative writing workshops at a juvenile detention center. He was in the workshop. We traded joyful memories of the beach at Jean Klock Park and brown bag lunches at Henry’s Hamburgers, while the gulf between us loomed. We had grown up as veritable neighbors, both in working- class families, and here I was, a college student, and there he was, incarcerated.
I began to see how segregation is not only bizarre but sinister. If you grow up on the St. Joe side of the river, even in a family that is poor, you have opportunities your peers in Benton Harbor don’t have.
I’ve often heard people in St. Joe blame Ben- ton Harbor parents for the school system’s woes: “They could have fixed it. They just don’t care,” they say, pointing to empty seats at PTA meetings and sporting events. I understand the value of loving parents, but I had a great public education because my schools were supported by the taxes of people far richer than my family. Until the passage of Proposal A in 1994 (most of my student years), property taxes were the main source of school funding. Unequal schools were a matter of policy.
Even now, in the era of per-pupil funding, schools with a disproportionate number of poor students must meet disproportionate needs, but with few resources.
Michigan ranks 50th for funding growth in public education, with total revenue declining 30% since 2002. Not coincidentally, it also ranks low for math and reading proficiency. But in St. Joseph, millages help. In May, my hometown renewed a millage for support services, technology, transportation and maintenance. The levy only applies to second homes and commercial properties, but it’ll generate $5.8 million.
Poverty is concentrated in Benton Harbor. Second-home millages aren’t an option. It’s a challenge to keep teachers, when salaries are among the lowest in the state. Average annual pay was $34,761 for the 2016-2017 school year, and fell during a statewide teacher shortage. In St. Joseph and nearby Stevensville, average salaries increased to more than $63,000.
I’m proud that I come from a community that prizes public education. But it is outrageously painful that some look across the river and suggest that Benton Harbor’s children don’t have the same advantages because their parents love them less.
It also misses the obvious: Inequality perpetuates itself. It can’t be forgotten that in living memory, segregation was law. Through redlining and racially restrictive deeds, enforced by every level of government and private enterprise, we designed a system where homes owned by African Americans were worth less. Then we tied school funding to property values.
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