Michigan pits small, big schools for funding. It’s an unfair fight, leaders say

In a small office in a tiny school district in a county with no traffic signal, Michelle Wesner sits at her desk looking worried. On her computer screen is an application for an $80,000 state grant for a welding career tech program that the superintendent knows her 200 kids at Posen Consolidated Schools desperately need. It’s also a grant she frets she won’t receive, like some others she’s applied for in the past.

Many bigger districts across the state have an administrator or a team of staffers who craft grant applications. But in the many small districts in rural northern Michigan, school leaders squeeze such work between lunch supervision, substitute teaching and, in at least one district, running a front loader to remove snow from the parking lot.

In Posen, situated among pine forests of Presque Isle County in the northeast Lower Peninsula, some grants don’t get completed because Wesner doesn’t have the time. Others only get her attention late at night after basketball games or before the sun rises across the nearby potato fields.

“It kills me that I have to do these between zipping coats and recess duty,” Wesner said.

Michigan’s rural students, who have fewer opportunities than many of their peers in more populated school settings, are further disadvantaged by the state’s reliance on competitive grants, say local and state education officials. School leaders say that means students in districts like Posen are less likely to have access to classes from welding and computer programming to advanced placement courses for college credit.

In the 2024-25 school year, there were 102 state grants totaling about $7 billion available to districts. That’s an average of almost three per school week for grants that, for some, can take days to complete.

And while complaints about those applications led to a lessening of grants this year, superintendents, state officials and policymakers agree the system continues to harm the small school districts.

“They’re minnows competing against sharks,” said Craig Thiel, research director at Citizens Research Council, which published a report last year criticizing the reliance on some grants.

Winners and losers

Even before the state’s huge increase in funding buckets, a 2013 study found that Michigan had 50 categories of school funding — five times the national average.

Many categorical grants are meant to reduce disparities by directing money to underserved populations, such schools that enroll more low-income or English as a second language students. There are also categorical spending funds that specifically funnel money to small districts, such as dollars for transportation costs in rural areas.

But in practice, small districts often don’t have time to complete the forms to compete for the $351 million (1.7% of total state funding) in state competitive grants available this year, and a portion of the $1.1 billion in formula grants for which payouts are determined by a formula established by the Legislature.

“There’s growing agreement that the budget is too categorical (grant) heavy,” said Vanessa Keesler, former deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education and now president of education advocacy group Launch Michigan.

The Michigan Department of Education doesn’t track how small, rural schools fare with competitive grants compared to larger districts.

Still, local and state school leaders who spoke to Bridge were unanimous in their belief that small districts — with enrollments of less than 1,000 — likely get less than their share.

About 87,000 students attend those schools, about 6% of all public school students but almost a third of Michigan’s traditional public districts (170 of 539.)

In those schools, administrators often do multiple jobs, like Katy Xenakis-Makowski, superintendent of Johannesburg-Lewiston Area Schools, which straddles remote sections of Otsego, Montmorency and Oscoda counties.

She does the 600-student district’s communications and social media, as well as serving as its chief financial officer and grant writer.

The school has career tech education programs in construction, business and accounting, and is in the same competition as Posen for career tech funds, hoping to offer culinary arts and computer programming.

It was 5:30 p.m. on the deadline day of Feb. 27 before Xenakis-Makowski hit send on her application.

“In this office, it’s (the school secretary), our finance director who is on vacation, and me,” Xenakis-Makowski told Bridge on a recent visit.

To illustrate the imbalance in staff capacity, Xenakis-Makowski points to new State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko’s former school district, the 20,000-student Dearborn City School District, which has more administrators (111) than Johannesburg-Lewiston has total employees (107), according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

“We try to insulate our students as much as we can, … (but) we have left money on the table just because we couldn’t make it happen in the timeframe or do the data collection that was required.”

For example, last school year, the district had been approved for a $2,500 grant for a literacy camp, but the paperwork to get the funds transferred was too cumbersome for the time Xenikas-Makowski could devote.

“It just wasn’t worth it,” she said, shaking her head.

Across the Mackinac Bridge in Chippewa County, 600-student Rudyard Area Schools faces similar hurdles. With 600 students spread across 402 square miles, the district spends 11% of its budget on transportation before kids get to class, compared to a statewide average of between 3% and 4%.

On the day Bridge visited, Superintendent Tom McKee was up at 3 a.m. to drive roads to see if they are safe for school. When school started, he filled in for a paraprofessional who was absent, and after school, he planned to run a front-loader to clear snow off the school parking lot for a girls’ basketball game that evening.

It’s rare when grants make it to the top of his to-do list. Recently, he had to jettison a plan to apply for a $20,000 library grant because the paperwork “might have taken me three weeks.

“A lot of times, when those grants come out, it’s a balance of how much money I might get and how much of my time I need to commit,” McKee said.

Rudyard is luckier than many other small rural schools like Posen and Johannesburg-Lewiston, because it receives $690,000 from an Eastern Upper Peninsula Intermediate School District millage for career tech.

The impact of that tax is evident in Rudyard’s sprawling CTE corridor, with five different programs operating daily. There is furniture and cabinetry room with an assortment of tools and a 3D printer that was buzzing with activity from more than a dozen students on a day Bridge visited. In a nearby room, a student was tinkering with a robotic arm, and an underwater drone was ready for testing with a new gyroscope.

Even with the millage, Rudyard is in the running for MDE’s career tech grant, with McKee saying he’d like to add cosmetology and middle school agriculture.

Money for ‘life skills’

Meanwhile, the closest thing Posen has to career tech is an old wood shop. On a recent day, high school students built a bench from boards donated by a local lumberyard, to add to the collection of benches in the hallways students have made over the years. Last year, students built a deer blind for a fundraiser at the Posen Potato Festival.

Past a cement block wall is the room where the welding program would be housed if the district gets funding. It is lined with decades-old machinery. A large chain hangs from the ceiling, looming over a thick wooden work table scarred with nail holes and burn marks that Wesner acknowledges were likely by the grandparents of some current students.

She is applying for a CTE expansion grant, which is from a pot of $68.5 million the Legislature set aside for high schools and middle schools in underserved CTE regions to grow their career tech offerings. The $80,000 grant would be used for welding equipment and to hire an instructor for a program that superintendent Wesner says would teach “life skills” for the primarily low-income teens who know they need to become self-sufficient in a region with few services and low pay.

Without a grant, Posen’s Wesner said there’s not an easy way to carve out the $80,000 needed for a welding career tech program out of her $3.3 million annual budget.

“That would be cutting three paraprofessionals, cutting busing or cutting a teacher,” she said. “Not one of those things are acceptable.”

Just 4 of the 10 districts in Otsego, Cheboygan and Presque Isle counties have access to any CTE programs. Distance between districts in the 2,100 square-mile region makes it difficult for students to travel to another school where career programs are available.

A welding program would come in handy for students repairing tractors or piecing together four-wheelers, Wesner said. But with less than 50 high schoolers in the district, only about five to seven students would attend.

Meanwhile, her application, along with similar career tech grant requests from Johannesburg-Lewiston and Rudyard, will compete for dollars with programs around the state, from expanding agriscience in Alcona Community Schools to a middle-school aeronautics program in Wayne County.

ZIP ‘shouldn’t matter’

Both former State Superintendent Michael Rice and Michigan’s new top school leader Maleyko have been critics of a system where the state picks winners and losers.

“Providing more funding through grants where districts have to meet the eligibility criteria to receive the funding and less funding through grants for which districts would have to compete would be helpful,” Maleyko said.

Another option is for the Legislature to create yet another pot of money for intermediate school districts to hire professional grant writers to support small schools. John Severson, executive director of the Michigan Association of Intermediate School Districts, isn’t a fan of the idea, saying it would exacerbate the dog-eat-dog atmosphere where schools “chase uncertain dollars.”

The better solution, Severson said, is to move the money now in competitive grants to “weighted” formulas that get dollars to all schools that meet the criteria. An example: more funds for small schools or rural transportation.

Meanwhile, the application deadline has passed for the career tech competitive grant that Rudyard, Johannesburg-Lewiston and Posen are bidding on. They’ve been told by state officials to expect an answer by the end of March.

“I’m hoping they look at it from the lens of who doesn’t have these programs to offer students, and not just how many students there would be,” said Posen’s Wesner

An hour south, Johannesburg-Lewiston’s Xenakis-Wakowski is hoping for the yes, but girding for a no.

“We’re responsible to educate all the children in our state, no matter what ZIP code they’re in,” she said. “They should all have equal opportunities, and it’s honestly not that way.”

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This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.