With the exception of early childhood classrooms, traditional class sizes are bulging particularly at the middle and high school levels. Of course many think that the additional students bring additional dollars so what's the problem? There are several:
- Those dollars have not come quickly enough since a sizable cut in per-pupil funding back in 2010.
- The value of those dollars have eroded substantially since 1995 due to inflation. In fact, just to keep up with inflation would require our district to receive a 33% increase in the foundation allowance, the primary K-12 funding allocation set each year by our legislature.
- Most of the growth in enrollment has been with high-needs students who are growing up in poverty and many of which have limited English proficiency skills; this leads to higher costs for a greater level of supports.
- Michigan is a school-choice state and districts have to compete with each other for programming or risk losing students; this leads to higher costs for higher-level academic and extra-curricular programs to keeps students enrolled.
- To find and keep quality teachers and administrators in a high-risk, over-populated district also means we have to compete with neighboring, more-affluent districts in salaries and benefits.
And on top of it, solving problems the old way doesn't model the kind of problem-solving our students need to learn: human-centered design thinking.
Traditional problem-solving typically looks for the traditional solutions to old problems. Traditional strategic planning typically takes the financial situation and builds a vision around it. Neither takes into consideration the needs of the students nor do they focus on ideating and prototyping creative solutions that center on empathy for the students and teachers. They are band-aid processes that simply look to stem the bleeding and that is it.
So as we wrestle with the wonderful problem of more parents and students wanting to move into our district and attend our schools, it's going to take real design-thinking to move us forward.
The question is whether or not our administrative team and teacher leaders are up to the task?