Dearborn Public Schools students and parents demonstrated against expected teacher layoffs outside the district’s administrative center on Nov. 23. PHOTO: Khalil AlHajal/TAAN

DEARBORN — In the district hit hardest by severe state cuts in education funding, school board members bore the brunt of students’ parents’ and teachers’ wrath Monday.

Houda Hamka and her daughter Sukayna, 9, of Geer Park Elementary School, ask the Dearborn School Board on Monday, Nov. 23 to find a way to avoid laying off teachers after massive state funding cuts. PHOTO: Khalil AlHajal/TAAN

Over two hundred people attended a Dearborn Board of Education study session, where, for about two hours and 40 minutes, dozens addressed the board or had their comments read by the district’s communications coordinator condemning expected layoffs.
The board on Nov. 9 slashed $18.6 million from its budget to address dramatic cuts implemented when the state budget was passed and Gov. Jennifer Granholm unexpectedly vetoed several funding measures to balance the budget against lower updated revenue estimates. The cuts are expected to result in hundreds of layoffs of both teachers and non-instructional staff to be approved individually by February at upcoming board meetings.

After demonstrating at the Capitol steps in Lansing two weeks ago, angry parents, teachers and students took their protest to the school board Monday, picketing outside the district’s administrative center before the board’s study session, then entering the building to demand and plead for alternatives to layoffs.

Protesters said the effects of increased class sizes and students having to change teachers in the middle of the school year would be devastating.

“It’s going to be chaos,” said Mary Salami, 16, of Fordson High School, about an expected increase in class sizes. “It’s going to be like 40 kids in a class.”

“All the fun classes are going to get cut,” said Salami’s classmate Faye Saad, 16, while demonstrating.

Ola Saad, 23, a 2004 Fordson graduate, said she worries her younger sisters will not have the same experiences and level of education she did at the school.

Arwa Alsamarae, L, and Tuba Hasan, Fordson High School graduates who now attend the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, speak to the school board Monday about their experience attending Fordson and their worries over the effects of cutting teachers and programs at the school.                                      PHOTO: Khalil AlHajal/TAAN

“They’re not going to have the same opportunities that I did,” she said.
Some demonstrators had less of a grasp of the details of crisis, but knew education would suffer.

“We came from Yemen. We came from Lebanon. We came from all over the world so they can learn,” said Seham Mawri, in Arabic, about Dearborn’s immigrant community and her children at William Ford Elementary, Woodworth Middle and Fordson High Schools. “Now they’re going to come out uneducated.”

“I’m hoping that they will hear our voices,” said Massada Khouryzat, who has children at Fordson and at McCollough-Unis School.

Parent Khodr Hamka said he moved his daughter from a private school to Geer Park Elementary School and has been happy with her experience there. He worries he’ll have to consider moving her back to private school if the quality of education in the district diminishes as a result of the cuts. He said he also worries about the setbacks faced by students who benefit from English-as-a-second language programs.

“I think they’re going to suffer the most,” Hamka said.

Fordson PTSA member Jacklin Zeidan, who organized the demonstration, said the protesters felt the school board has not exhausted every effort to find ways to save money without cutting teachers.

“Did we look at everything?” she asked. Did we look at every angle, everything we can possibly do before we dramatically change these kids lives?”

Board members, some visibly shaken and offended by suggestions during the long public comment session that they did not care or didn’t recognize the gravity of the cuts, said the decisions were agonizing but necessary.

Dearborn Public Schools students and parents protest expected teacher layoffs outside the district’s administrative center on Monday.                        PHOTO: Khalil AlHajal/TAAN

“We continue to take a lot of heat and we understand that,” said board member Mary Petlichkoff near the end of the meeting. “That’s what we were elected for… But unfortunately, when the reality hits in the middle of the school year and we don’t have time to wait and try to find some alternatives… we have to make payroll and we don’t have that luxury of trying to find out whether turning off TV sets [to save energy] is going to get us the savings that we need. The cuts have to either come in compensation or people in programs at this point, because this is something we have to act upon now, not in June.”
Board Vice President Aimee Blackburn said Tuesday that 85-89 percent of the budget goes toward staff salaries and benefits.

She said that while some other districts are trying to implement some alternative cost saving measures, Dearborn Public Schools have being making efforts to do so over the last decade, including a major energy efficiency overhaul, leaving few non-personnel cuts left to make.

“We’ve decreased a lot of our spending over the last ten years. They’re now doing the things that we’ve been doing,” she said about the ability of some other districts to weather the cuts without massive layoffs.

Blackburn said Dearborn is the hardest hit district because of its large size and diversity, both ethnically and socio-economically. The district took cuts in funding for at-risk students — students facing language or low-income hurdles — and also took cuts aimed at schools with higher than average per-pupil spending.

“Most districts only got hit with one of those,” she said.

Superintendent Brian Whiston said the fight to keep teachers, secretaries, media specialists and paraprofessionals in the schools should be aimed at Lansing.

“We’re going to continue to put pressure on Lansing to resolve this,” Whiston said, “because Lansing cutting $655 [per student] five months into our fiscal year has put us into this mess. And we want the legislature to address it so we don’t have to make these cuts.”

But Blackburn is skeptical the legislature will restore funding without taking money out of next year’s budget.

She said getting teachers to take retirement buyouts and getting the Dearborn Federation of Teachers to take contract concessions may be the only way to prevent layoffs.

The board discussed Monday offering an early retirement package to teachers who make more than $75,000 and have at least 10 years of service. They would take $25,000 buyouts to leave their jobs in January. The plan currently calls for a minimum of 40 takers.

A student who addressed the board at the study session echoed the sentiments of many teachers and union leaders, saying the board may be taking advantage of the budget crisis for use in ongoing contract talks.

“It seems to me that some of the members of the board may want an artificial crisis in order to use it as leverage in union negotiations,” said Jon Akkari, 17, who attends Fordson.

“I can understand why they feel that way,” Blackburn said. “We have a budget crisis to deal with and we have contract negotiations at the same time to deal with… But when the largest expenditure is people, that’s where we have to go. I can see why they would get the impression that the contracts are being held hostages, but we just don’t have the money to give them, and I don’t see the state being able to raise the money fast enough. It’s not that they’re going to cut money. They have already cut money. The payments that we’re getting from the state are already reflecting the cuts.”

Union officials have submitted to the district lists of suggested operational cuts the district can make to avoid layoffs or cuts in salaries and benefits.

Whiston went over one list Monday and showed that the board has moved to implement some of the suggestions.

“There are lots of little things that we could do,” said Blackburn. “But we need $15 million worth of little things. I appreciate the people that come before us and say ‘there’s got to be another way.’ I really wish I could see that other way… We all have sleepless nights over this.”