Heartless is as heartless does

If you were a lawmaker and were given the chance to reduce the number of uninsured Michiganders by nearly half and save the state nearly a billion dollars over the next ten years, what would you do? If you were a Michigan Senate Republican, you would reject it. That’s what Michigan Senate Republicans did yesterday when they passed Department of Community Health budget without a provision to expand Medicaid as allowed by the Affordable Care Act.

They even killed a Democratic amendment to put Medicaid expansion back into the bill. It went down on a 13-25 vote.

It’s cruel. It’s asinine. It’s blatant anti-Obama politics. And it’s hurting some of our most vulnerable citizens, just to score points against Barack Obama.

It’s days like these that I think there ought to be an IQ test to be a lawmaker. The 25 senators that voted against the expansion of Medicaid in Michigan clearly would have failed.

[CC Image credit: SaMi | Wikimedia Commons]

That’s gonna leave a mark

[State Board of Education President John Austin -- photo by Anne C. Savage for Eclectablog]

Republicans are going Code Red to defend their desire to exempt charter schools from any sort of additional scrutiny, including being held to the same educational standards as public schools are. Toward that effort, state Senator Phil Pavlov went on the attack against the State Board of Education for even suggesting it. Pavlov is the chair of the Senate Education Committee. He then went on to blame the State Board of Education for the dire financial situation schools like those in Buena Vista and Pontiac find themselves in:

The State Board of Education needs to stop their partisan obsession with charter schools and focus on the problems they are responsible for. Where has their oversight been in Pontiac and Buena Vista schools? The board should be working to find preventive solutions to the mismanagement and fraud in these districts where local boards have misspent millions of taxpayer dollars and cost thousands of children the education they deserve.”

State Board of Education President John Austin, someone whose name has been talked about as a terrific choice for Lt. Governor of Michigan given his experience in education, is not taking this lying down. He put out the following statement, slamming Sen. Pavlov for his blatant politicization of our education system in Michigan. It’s a thing of beauty.

Senator Phil Pavlov felt moved by State Board of Education recommendations to improve charter school transparency and oversight to lash out at the State Board over the Buena Vista and Pontiac Schools financial crisis. http://www.misenategop.com/readarticle_printable.asp?id=5905&District=25

The State Board is doing its job to provide oversight over all schools, charter and traditional. There is a well-developed process, under our State Superintendent, to review the finances of all schools, and intervene when a district’s finances are in trouble. At last count 49 districts are under close scrutiny and required to resolve deficits. When schools willfully misrepresent their finances, the plug gets pulled as we saw with Buena Vista.

But the Senator needs to acknowledge that a major contributor to the financial death spiral of so many school districts is Michigan’s new school and charter school expansion policy. When the legislature eliminated the cap on new university charters and expanded dramatically the number of new untested on-line school offerings in Michigan, Senator Pavlov and his colleagues purposefully rejected the State Board’s recommendations to ensure that any new schools deliver high-quality education. As a result, as reported by respected non-partisan education reform groups like Education Trust Midwest: Michigan is seeing a fast growth in charters and new schools that deliver poor education. As Ed Trust Director Amber Arrellano said: “Some of the worst operators in the state are the ones that are growing the fastest.” (See http://www.edtrust.org/midwest/press-room/press-release/charter-school-growth-in-michigan-brings-cautionary-tale-on-quality).

These new schools that don’t deliver the educational goods take students and resources from other public schools—contributing to their financial distress—and also hurt the reputation and ability to attract students of high-quality charters. Charter school advocates like myself and Michigan Future’s Lou Glazer believe the charter movement is hurt, not helped when the Legislature enables poor quality, poorly regulated charter schools. (See http://www.michiganfuture.org/09/2011/unlimited-charters-not-smart/)

The State Board of Education is doing its job to call for quality and transparency in all schools. The Legislature needs to do the same.

Senator Pavlov’s love of further privatizing of Michigan’s public schools, an effort to direct the 80% of state funding that pays for our schools into the bank accounts of for-profit corporations is obvious. However, it’s offensive that he would take a catastrophe like is happening in areas like Buena Vista and Pontiac, where our kids’ futures are being sacrificed on the altar of business tax cuts, and turn it into an attack on those who would attempt to hold charter schools accountable. We need the State Board of Education to stand up for our kids in all schools and that’s just what they are doing.

Senator Pavlov’s grandstanding is just one more piece of evidence that Michigan Republicans will fight tooth and nail until they have destroyed our public school system and turned our students into good little, poorly-educated workers and profit centers for the businesses and corporations that bankroll the Republicans in this state.

You don’t know what it’s like until it’s your life.

Clara Sanders-Stevens works hard every day, directing the Project 21 after-school program for the Oak Park School District. But, because she’s an independent contractor, she’s responsible for her own health insurance. And she just can’t afford it.

I don’t need help with food or rent, but I need health insurance — especially in the event I have to go to the emergency room or I’m hospitalized. But when you start talking about $400 or $500 a month for insurance, it’s just not going to happen for a lot of people like me.

This is why Sanders-Stevens is a staunch advocate for Medicaid expansion in Michigan. She sees the realities of families living without health insurance every day. Kids coming to school sick because their parents can’t afford the cost of a doctor’s appointment or staying home from work and not getting paid. The same is true for a lot of other self-employed people she knows, or people who don’t get insurance through their work.

Those of us out here working, we’re trying to make good things happen. If people get sick they can’t go to work. And if we’re not healthy, there are no business owners to create new opportunities.

It’s especially frustrating to see this happening to Sanders-Stevens and others like her, who are dedicated to public service. As she explains, for many of them the choice may come down to having to return to the corporate world just to get health insurance instead of doing the kind of ground work that can make a real difference to communities.

Sanders-Stevens considers herself relatively lucky because she can usually afford to pay for routine check-ups. Having had health insurance in the past, she knows what a difference preventive care can make.

My health wouldn’t be what it is today if I hadn’t had all those regular physicals back when I had insurance. When you don’t have health insurance, it’s easy to let things go too far and wind up with something that could have been prevented.

Working with so many families who don’t have health insurance, Sanders-Stevens has seen what happens when people are hospitalized. She says they don’t always get the same care that people with insurance do or they’re released from the hospital sooner than they should be.

Then there’s the cost, she says.

You wind up with $20,000 in medical bills and they come after you for that immediately. They don’t let you work it out, or they want you to make payments of $700 or $800 a month. If people could afford that, they’d have health insurance.

Sanders-Stevens worries about what would happen if she were ever hospitalized. When they take the kids in her program skating, she doesn’t participate for fear of falling and getting hurt. In fact, she says she prays if she’s ever injured that she’s in her car at the time because her car insurance is the only medical coverage she has.

She plans to contact her representatives and urge them to support Medicaid expansion in Michigan. And what does Sanders-Stevens plan to say?

They don’t see how important it is until it happens to them or someone in their family. Our legislators have insurance. I’d never wish harm on anyone, but it just doesn’t hit home until it affects you directly. I see it every day and I can tell you that having health insurance would give so many of us peace of mind we don’t have now, knowing we can be cared for and stay healthy.

Contact your legislators today and tell them to say YES to Medicaid expansion.

It’s just another end-run around Obamacare that’s almost certain to fail — and could drag Medicaid expansion down with it.

Don’t let the Michigan House GOP fool you. They don’t really want Medicaid expansion in Michigan. They just want you to think they do.

As reported in the Detroit News, legislation introduced by the House GOP on Thursday would require Michigan to get a waiver from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to allow a 48-month lifetime limit on taxpayer-funded medical insurance for non-disabled adults. That cap on benefits is the centerpiece of their “counter-offer” to Governor Rick Snyder’s proposal to expand Medicaid, although they also expect low-income families to pay five percent of their annual income in premiums.

That’s astounding, given that many people eligible for Medicaid struggle just to buy food. Not to mention that, as I’ve written here before, Medicaid expansion is funded 100 percent by the federal government through 2016, a figure that drops incrementally to 90 percent by 2020, where it stays. That means a majority of Medicaid expansion is paid in full. The rest is covered by taxes citizens already pay to the federal government. No one is being asked to pay more. In fact, the state of Michigan stands to bring in about $2.1 billion through economic activity created by Medicaid expansion.

So not only do the House Republicans not understand math, they also don’t appear to understand Medicaid expansion. And, apparently, don’t have an ounce of compassion.

Here’s what House Speaker Jase Bolger (R-Marshall) had to say, as quoted in the Detroit News:

It goes entirely to our belief that government assistance is not an entitlement, nor is it a lifestyle, if you’re an able-bodied adult.”

House Republicans claim their proposal would exempt children, the disabled and the elderly. But they’re using the vaguest possible terms. What qualifies someone as an “able-bodied adult”? Does a man with asthma receive only four years of Medicaid because he can walk? Does a woman have to bear all the children she plans to raise in four years or miss out on essential prenatal care services? Do people with cancer have to stop getting treatments when their four years are up? Health conditions like epilepsy, heart disease, arthritis and countless others don’t just disappear in four years.

The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, explicitly states that insurers can’t cap benefits, so it’s unlikely CMS will agree to the Michigan House GOP’s proposal. I suspect Michigan Republicans know that full well, but are simply stalling and spinning, to look as if they’re trying to work with the Governor, Democrats, healthcare providers and citizens who support Medicaid expansion.

Speaker Bolger claims these caps are modeled after other “welfare” programs such as food stamps or housing assistance. But how can you put a limit on someone’s health? The answer is you can’t.

Michigan Democrats have called the proposal “shameful.” Here’s what Rep. Jim Townsend (D-Royal Oak), had to say, in the Detroit News piece:

Kicking [people] off the program after four years is immoral. Health care costs are going to rise as soon as these people who have been getting care lose their insurance and have to head back to the ER.

According to a report in Crain’s Detroit Business, House Republicans claim that when four years are up, people on Medicaid will all have jobs and be able to afford private health insurance. But considering the Michigan legislature’s woeful track record on job creation in recent years, that’s a ridiculous excuse. Unless the House GOP can promise those people jobs with benefits or ample salaries, why on earth would they refuse federal funding that provides Michiganders with health insurance?

House Democratic Leader Tim Greimel (D-Auburn Hills) addressed the point emphatically in a press release:

This plan is a slap in the face to anyone in desperate need of health care who had hoped our state would do the reasonable thing and accept federal funds to expand Medicaid. We should have done the responsible thing and accepted federal funds to pay for Medicaid expansion, bringing health care to 400,000 Michigan residents who currently have none. Instead, Republicans want some of our most struggling families to pay 5 percent of their annual income to get limited access to health care for a short time only — while insisting the state never contribute a single penny to the program Republicans proposed. It’s heartless, irresponsible and an insult to the people of Michigan.

Governor Snyder and supporters of Medicaid expansion have said they are willing to work with the legislature to find a compromise that meets federal law. I applaud their continued efforts to make Medicaid expansion happen. I’m just not convinced Michigan Republicans share their commitment.

Speaker Bolger claims this proposal is a first step in Medicaid reform. That’s all well and good, but that’s not the issue currently on the table. Accepting Medicaid expansion needs to happen now or hundreds of thousands of Michiganders will remain uninsured, creating a financial drain on our hospitals and costing those who do buy insurance more money in the long run.

If House Republicans want to propose Medicaid reform, fine. But tying it to Medicaid expansion will achieve nothing but slowing down, if not preventing, Medicaid expansion in Michigan — at the expense of everyone and everything but the GOP’s continued efforts to thwart Obamacare every chance they get.

[Poisoncare sign photo by Chris Savage | Eclectablog]

Actions speak louder than words

Photo by Anne C. Savage, special to Eclectablog

As Michigan Republicans continue their corporatist agenda of eviscerating the middle class, destroying unions, harming public employees and taking women’s rights back to the middle of the last century, Michigan Democrats are proposing important pieces of legislation that solve actual problems.

The first comes from Representatives Jim Townsend, Vicki Barnett, and Andy Schor. They are introducing a package of legislation designed to reduce gun violence in our state and to increase public safety. From a statement released today:

Democratic state representatives will introduce a package of legislation aimed at curbing gun violence and increasing public safety. The package calls for universal background checks for gun purchases, protections to keep guns away from individuals convicted of domestic assault, increased support for mental health systems in Michigan, promotion of safe zones and the expansion of gun-free zones to include public libraries.

“We are fortunate not to have recently experienced tragedies like Massachusetts, Arizona and Colorado,” said Rep. Townsend, “but the reality is that over 150 gun deaths have occurred in Michigan since the tragedy at Newtown. It shouldn’t take a mass shooting in Michigan for us to take action on commonsense gun safety legislation. Requiring a background check for all purchases and transfers of firearms is a start in making our communities safer. The people of our state know we need a change. A recent poll showed that over 80% of Michiganders support this common sense measure.”

The gun legislation would also ban the carrying of guns in schools and libraries because, as Rep. Schor puts it, “A gun free zone should be just that: gun free. Carrying guns in schools and libraries is not conducive to learning and causes people to be uncomfortable or threatened. Current law bans concealed carry of guns in these areas but a person can go into a school, library or other sensitive area with a gun on their hip or pointed down. We need to close that loophole.”

Rep. Barnett has also sponsored two bills that would “strengthen mental health services in Michigan and increase offenses and restrictions on those convicted of committing acts of domestic violence.” Barnett said in a statement, “A woman in an abusive relationship is five times more likely to be killed by her abuser if the abuser owns a firearm. Now more than ever we must give a voice to so many of the voiceless victims. The appalling figures related to domestic violence demonstrate that we must place importance on these laws in reducing access to those households affected by intimate partner violence.”

A separate package of bills will be introduced by State Representatives Gretchen Driskell, Jeff Irwin, Adam Zemke and state Senator Rebekah Warren. On Monday, May 13, they will hold a press conference in Ann Arbor to unveil legislation that will help increase women’s access to health care. Their goal is to reverse the restrictions Republicans have put on women’s health care, to educate women about health care options, to support rape survivors and address health care inequities women face.

Meanwhile, Republicans are working diligently to do things like reduce the value of a Michigan high school diploma and tie teacher pay to student test scores in schools they are working hard to defund.

The contrast is striking, isn’t it?

Just not raining hard enough in Buena Vista Township, I guess…

This is front page of the Buena Vista School District website this morning. While it says that school will be closed on Thursday, apparently nobody has been to work yet today, either, because the school is still closed today. This is the fourth day the school has been closed because it has no money to pay teachers and staff.

This is truly outrageous. Where is Governor Snyder in all of this? Why is he waiting and allowing this to go on?

It’s gotten so bad the Congressman Dan Kildee has weighed in (and not subtly):

Gov. Snyder can – and should – immediately act to keep these kids in their classrooms for the remainder of the school year. It is fundamentally important that these kids go back to the same classrooms with the same teachers who have been guiding them through their curriculum all year long. Children in Buena Vista have a constitutional right to an education and the state must act to provide it to them.

Gov. Snyder and the Michigan Legislature have previously acted to provide financial assistance for financially challenged school districts. H.R. 4445, passed in February 2012 by the legislature and signed by Gov. Snyder, provided $4 million in emergency appropriations to the Highland Park School District after it announced that it could no longer meet its payroll. The bill allowed those students and teachers to remain in their school facilities. After signing the legislation, Gov. Snyder called it a way to “address the critical education needs of Highland Park students” and a way to “keep…children in the classroom, where they deserve and need to be.”

As in the case with Highland Park, Gov. Snyder has the authority to promptly provide funds to keep schools operating through the end of the school year. Immediate action is necessary. The longer Gov. Snyder waits to act, the more the children of Buena Vista will continue to be set back through no fault of their own.”

Yesterday, in an open letter, Congressman Kildee called on Gov. Rick Snyder to act to ensure the Buena Vista Schools reopen.

Article VIII, Section 2 of the Michigan Constitution requires that the state provide free public elementary and secondary education to Michigan students, stating “the legislature shall maintain and support a system of free public elementary and secondary schools as defined by law.”

In other words, do your damn job, Governor. One wonders if you would be acting this slowly if the private school your kids attend with its nearly $20,000 annual tuition bill were closed due to lack of money. As the newly flush Rainy Day Fund sits there like some sort of prized Republican possession to brag about, it’s raining like Hell in Buena Vista.

Do your job, Governor, and fix this.

Adding…Buena Vista isn’t the only school that is out of money. Pontiac schools are broke, too. Also, I’m not the only one looking at the $400 million in the Rainy Day Fund and asking what the hell these “leaders” are doing. So is State Rep. Stacy Erwin Oakes from Saginaw.

UPDATE: Governor Snyder is declining to intervene:

Snyder said Thursday he hopes to quickly resolve the financial crisis that caused the small Saginaw County system to lay off employees and close its doors. But the rainy day fund won’t be used to bailout Buena Vista schools, Snyder said, because “that’s not what the rainy day fund is really intended for.” {…}

Snyder said the lengthy process for installing an emergency manager in Buena Vista schools makes state intervention impractical for keeping the district running through the end of the school year.

Leadership!

Oh, I see how this works

Over the past two years, Michigan Republicans have stripped over a billion dollars from schools and are working to defund them another $825.1 million this year, as well. They’ve also reduced teachers’ benefits and made their ability to collectively bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions more difficult.

Now that they’ve done so much to make a teacher’s job so much more difficult, one Republican is ready to make their pay primarily based on student progress. Current law says that teacher pay should be using job performance and job accomplishments as a significant factor. House Bill 4625, introduced by Republican Pete Lund, would make teacher pay based primarily on these factors.

Talking to Michigan Radio, Democratic Representative David Knezek suggested that such a move should wait until a report on a statewide merit-pay system comes back. He said to journalist Rina Miller, “I don’t know why we’re jumping the gun on this. We should be waiting for what the commission comes back and says to us is the proper course of action.”

That sounds smart to me: get the facts first, then make policy and law.

Apparently having all of the facts in hand before plowing ahead with passing a new law isn’t a prerequisite for Pete Lund:

Bill sponsor Pete Lund (R-Shelby Township) says the commission’s recommendation could be more useful if they already have a system in place. Lund says tying educators’ pay to their performance in the classroom would promote student growth and weed out bad teachers.

“We no longer say you are a better teacher just because you’ve been teaching for a long time,” Lund says. “If teaching a long time has helped you, your students will grow, they will be better students, they will learn more, and you’ll be properly compensated properly for it.”

That’s all well and fine if Lund and his ideologically extreme and anti-teacher, anti-public schools Republican colleagues hadn’t spent the last two years knee-capping teachers and making their job so much harder. They have essentially made it harder for teachers to help their students succeed and now want to punish them by making progress, something that is much, much harder to achieve, the basis for their pay.

Every teacher I talk to tells me how they are constantly being asked to “do more with less”. It’s gotten worse under the current crop of Republicans. This bill of Rep. Lund’s is just a backdoor way of driving down teachers’ wages in preparation of converting most if not all of Michigan schools to for-profit charter schools. Lower teacher wages and benefits = higher corporate profits. But, before that can happen, they have to eliminate competition from public schools where teachers are paid more.

Let’s just be very clear about that.

No need to know math if you’re working at Walmart, I guess…

Republican legislation was passed out of the House Education Committee yesterday that reduced graduation requirements by allowing students to graduate without learning a foreign language or taking mathematics through Algebra 2.

House Bill 4465 would allow students to replace the Algebra 2 requirement with completion of a “formal career and technical education program or curriculum” and eliminates the 2-credit foreign language requirement for some students. House Bill 4466 reduces the requirements for mathematics from 3½ credits to 3.

The bills will now head to the full House. All Republicans on the Education Committee voted for the two bills along with Democrat Theresa Abed voting with the Republicans on both.

Given the drive by Republicans to dismantle public education in this state with a move toward privatizing education to for-profit charter schools, all of this looks to me like a “dumbing down” of the high school education. While I understand that not every high school graduate will end up in college and many will end up in a trade of some sort or another, I feel very strongly that we should be educating our kids to a higher standard than these pieces of legislation set out. It smacks of creating an under-educated class of students who can fill unskilled service positions in society rather than making sure they are prepared for any eventuality. It’s a move in completely the wrong direction and is just one more piece of evidence that Republicans hold public education in disdain. We need MORE educated kids to compete in the world economy, not fewer.

Make yourself heard

Schoolkids photo by Anne C. Savage, special to Eclectablog

As I reported yesterday, the Michigan House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure voted to eliminate the sales tax on aviation fuel. This bill is in addition to House Bill 4539 which if passed, will eliminate the sales tax on gasoline sales in our state. My piece said that this would take $770.1 million out of the School Aid Fund (SAF). However, that amount is only for the repeal of the gasoline tax. According to a statement by State Rep. Brandon Dillon, yesterday’s repeal of the aviation fuel tax will remove another $55 million . That means if both bills are passed, $825.1 million more will be taken from our kids’ schools. This represents over two-thirds of the $1.2 billion Governor Snyder has asked for for road repair.

Here’s Rep. Dillon’s statement:

I support growing Michigan’s transportation industry, but we can’t do that at the expense of our kids, who represent our state’s future. To give big corporations such as major airlines a tax break when our schools are running on empty is irresponsible. It tells our kids that we care more about airlines than we do about them.

The bills that would change the way aviation fuel is taxed are House Bills 4571 and 4572. HB 4571 would increase the aviation fuel tax on the basis of its wholesale price. HB 4572 would then exempt aviation fuel from the state’s 6 percent sales tax. Republicans who support the bill say that the School Aid Fund would take a $55 million hit if the bill is passed. The two bills were reported out of the House Transportation Committee today without any solution to ‘fix’ the school funding shortfall Republicans created with these bills. A third bill, HB 4677, which could have replaced the School Aid Funds, wasn’t voted on by the committee and isn’t connected to the other two bills.

Our schools simply can’t absorb another funding cut. It’s wrong to punish kids who are already crammed like travelers in coach class in overcrowded classrooms that don’t have enough textbooks to go around while giving major corporations a tax break at the fuel pump.

Republicans are suggesting that they will fill this nearly $1 billion hole by asking Michigan voters to raise taxes on themselves by voting for a 1% increase in the sales tax. Given that this requires super majority votes (two-thirds) in both the House and the Senate as well a passage by the voters of Michigan at the next election, that is hardly a guarantee. It amounts to a hostage situation where the Republicans are holding our schools, kids and teachers hostage and the ransom is raising taxes on ourselves so that they don’t have to take credit for any further tax hikes in this state.

Last night on the Night Shift with Tony Trupiano Show, Tony asked me what can be done about this. I told him that we need to take a page out of the Tea Party book and start making calls, sending emails and knocking on the doors of our State Representatives and Senators to let them know that we will not settle for paying for the repair of our roads on the backs of our schools, our kids and our teachers. We all agree that our roads are a complete disaster. Nearly a decade of recession in Michigan has left our critical infrastructure in a shambles. But let’s do so honestly. If they want to raise our taxes to pay for road repair, so be it. Raise taxes. But do it honestly and do it in broad daylight so that we know what we’re voting for and we aren’t doing it under the threat of eliminating vital funding to our kids’ schools.

Here’s the audio from last night’s interview:

So, make yourself heard on this. Call your State Representatives and Senators and tell them to vote no on House Bills 4539 and 4572 and to fund road repair in an honest way. Here are some ways you can reach out to lawmakers:

1. Click HERE to go to a page with contact information for your legislators. MAKE THE CALL!
2. Click HERE to send a message to your legislator via the Michigan Parents for Schools website
3. Click HERE to send a message via the Tri-County Alliance for Public Education

Oh, and one more thing: wouldn’t it be nice if our mainstream media journalists were asking Republicans tough questions about this plan to defund schools??? Neither the Detroit News or the Detroit Free Press even reported on yesterday’s vote.

Yet somehow they’ll blame the teachers…

The Michigan township of Buena Vista, in the news recently for its racist Township Clerk, is back in the news today with the announcement that the school district has closed its doors over a month before the end of the school year. Why? Turns out the school district had taken $580,000 in state funding for a program for incarcerated youths that it no longer runs. With an outstanding bill of $400,000, the state cut off its funding and it now has no money.

The district’s 27 teachers had agreed to work without pay for a week while the district sorted out its mess but, this morning, the schools were closed:

Students and parents in the Buena Vista School District are waking up to discover that the district has shut its doors.

In financial distress and unable to pay its employees, the Buena Vista School District is closed Tuesday, May 7, a letter on the district website states.

The notice tells parents that a community meeting will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Central Office, 705 Towerline.

“We have worked diligently to attempt to avoid this situation since it first appeared as an immediate possibility to us this week and continue to work with officials at the State of Michigan in an attempt to mitigate this possibility,” the letter reads.

“The District is, therefore, taking the first steps toward confirming a financial emergency under Michigan Public Act 436 of 2012, and will continue to Work with State officials and the leadership of the District’s bargaining units to provide educational continuity to the children of the Buena Vista School District.”

Although the teachers had voted to work without pay for a week, the Michigan Education Association said it was ready to take legal action to force the district to pay the teachers, presumably because they had absolutely nothing to do with the financial emergency the district faces.

This is just a glimpse of things to come, as MEA Executive Director Gretchen Dziadosz says:

Gretchen Dziadosz, executive director of the Michigan Education Association — the state’s largest teachers union, of which the Buena Vista union is an affiliate — said during the conference call that teachers are worried about how they’re going to pay their bills and feed their children.

“We at MEA are fearful this is only the beginning,” Dziadosz said. That’s because a growing number of districts are facing financial struggles, she said.

The Buena Vista district is one of about 50 in the state that are dealing with a deficit.

This will ultimately be somehow blamed on the teachers if the past is a prelude to the future. Demonizing teachers in order to strip them of pay and benefits is the modus operandi of the anti-union, anti-public school zealots in Michigan and across the country. The next stop in the DeVos plan is to privatize as many schools as possible, preferably to for-profit corporations.

Further defunding of schools is still on the docket, too. Today, Teachers Appreciation Day, is the day a House committee meets to decide whether to slash another $770+ million from the School Aid Fund to pay for road repair. Click HERE to see how you can take action.