Education budget makes strides on Whitmer’s free pre-K and community college plans

Michigan lawmakers expanded access for free pre-K and community college in the Fiscal Year 2025 education budget, which were centerpiece plans for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who’s planning to sign the bill Tuesday afternoon in Flint. 

Education advocates said Whitmer’s plan would normalize additional free schooling on both ends of the traditional K-12 track, which could help improve Michigan’s workforce. 

“No one questions that kindergarten is available to their child,” said Michelle Richard, the deputy director for higher education at the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential (MiLEAP). “And so this is the next step, and I’m really proud to see the governor and the legislature continue to say we need to make an investment in our children, and making sure that you can have this early learning experience when you’re four is one more critical step.”

Whitmer pushed for free universal pre-K for 4-year-olds and two years of community college for recent high school grads in her plan for the budget earlier this year, but the final state-spending deal did not include her entire education wishlist. 

Universal pre-K for four-year-olds did not make it into HB 5507, the bill covering the education budget, but access to free early childhood education increased from last year.

Lawmakers pulled an all-night session late last month to get the $23.4 billion education budget and a $59.1 billion spending plan for the remaining state agencies and departments passed and sent off to Whitmer’s desk for final approval. The budgets received enough votes to go into immediate effect, so it can be implemented by Oct. 1, the beginning of the fiscal year. 

Whitmer had proposed a $241 increase in per-pupil funding for public schools, but the final budget includes no such raise. While most schools will maintain the current $9,608 allowance, they will realize funding increases elsewhere.

Generally, education advocates expressed support for the free pre-K and universal community college programs funded by the budget. 

“It wasn’t necessarily the easiest budget to wrap up,” state Sen. Darrin Camilleri (D-Trenton) told the Advance. “But I’m glad that we did, and I believe that again, we are sending historic money back into our classrooms, and our school will be better off because of it.”

Camilleri chairs the Senate Appropriations Pre-K-12 Subcommittee and said the biggest sticking point in negotiations for the education budget revolved around a plan to redirect nearly $600 million from Michigan’s teacher retirement system towards school districts. 

That money came from $670 million that would have been paid into the Michigan Public School Employees’ Retirement System (MPSERS), but instead had been freed up, according to Whitmer’s administration, by paying off certain liabilities early. 

The budget agreed to last month allocates $598 million in the MPSERS offset by reimbursing school districts, libraries and communities for about 5.75% of payroll costs. It also eliminates a 3% contribution for Fiscal Year 2025 to retirement healthcare required from some public school teachers. 

However, legislation that would have permanently eliminated the 3% contribution requirement and decreased the contribution rate required from public schools, HB 5803, sponsored by Rep. Matt Koleszar (D-Plymouth), and SB 911, sponsored by Sen. Kevin Hertel (D-St. Clair Shores), await approval from the Senate.

That left education groups upset at the lack of certainty for their budgets. 

Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance, said the one-time nature of the funding made those additional dollars “difficult to impossible, frankly, for districts to spend.”

Koleszar told the Advance on July 1 that it was not the final word on permanently eliminating the contribution.

“I think that this funding was a little unexpected, and so maybe the runway wasn’t as long to have a game plan for how to best use it,” he said. “But that’s why these conversations have been good, and we still have some time here. I know in even-numbered years, it seems like we don’t have a lot of time, but I think we still have time to get this done.”

Not quite universal pre-K

Camilleri also worked on the plan to expand access to pre-K in the state. 

Whitmer wanted to make free pre-K universal for all four-year-olds, proposing a budget that would bring 6,800 new children into the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP), which handles  state-funded early childhood education. The final version of the budget accommodates an estimated 5,300 additional children and prioritizes care for lower income families, according to a release from Whitmer. 

The budget gives free pre-K to four-year-olds who live in a household 400% above the poverty line or lower, and children who do not meet that threshold could still be eligible if their local provider has open seats. Richard encouraged parents to apply online for the program, regardless of whether they think they qualify or not. 

One of the main concerns with making free pre-K available to everyone at this point is that there are not enough teachers and classrooms yet. 

“We’re excited about the opportunity to expand more slots and more availability for families, but we need to ensure that the overall system is ready to take on an influx with full universal preschool,” Camilleri said to the Advance. “We’re not quite there yet. We need more teachers. We need more classrooms. We need more program operators, and we are ramping those systems up.”

The budget offers financial support for new teachers and grants for a start-up or growing pre-K program. 

“I think workforce continues to be something that we have to continue to focus in on if we really want to get to universal pre-K,” said Alicia Guevara Warren, CEO of Early Childhood Investment Corp. 

Flexibility for families, including before and after school care are important to make this education accessible, Guevara Warren said. School districts partnering with private providers can help create more resources for families with young children, a move that appeared in Whitmer’s proposed budget and for which business leaders and advocates lobbied. 

Outreach about the expanded free pre-K opportunities may also be a challenge. MiLEAP will work to get out the word about the GSRP, and the budget set aside $2 million for marketing the program. Reaching people where they already are, like a Women, Infants, Children (WIC) office, to inform them about opportunities will be important to creating a successful program, according to Guevara Warren. 

“Being able to get it from somebody that I both trust working with, but in a space where I’m already accessing and participating in other programs is another good way,” Guevara Warren said. “So I think it’s important for us to really ensure that we are partnering with as many people as possible who are touching families in order to get that message out.”

Creating a ‘college-going culture’

Recent high school grads in Michigan will be able to attend two years of community college for free under the new education budget starting in the 2024 fall semester. 

“It says how much money you have in your pocket shouldn’t drive what your opportunity is after high school,” Richard said. 

It’s not quite a universal plan, as students will only be able to attend a community college in their district for free — and not everyone in the state lives in a district with a community college. Students who do not attend a community college in their district will be eligible for other scholarships funded by the state. 

Additionally, students who qualify for the federal Pell Grant will receive $1,000 for costs associated with going to school, including transportation, books and technology. 

“More than anything, the Community College Guarantee sends a very clear message to high school students that not only can they afford to go to college, they really do need to continue their education beyond high school,” said Brandy Johnson, the president of Michigan Community College Association. “It helps to build a college-going culture.” 

The state previously offered scholarships to cover the associate degree, but advocates for more accessible higher education said that making the programs completely free removes a lot of concerns and questions from potential students. 

“We think that that clarity really helps people make informed choices about what’s next,” Richard said. “You should know how much it costs, and here in Michigan, if you’re deciding to go to a community college, there’s a tuition free option for you.”

Ryan Fewins-Bliss, the executive director at Michigan College Access Network, added that a lot of students feel that college has to be really expensive and therefore inaccessible to them. This program will “cut through that noise” and give students a tuition-free opportunity to pursue higher-ed, he said. 

Fewins-Bliss also said that he predicts many students who will end up using the guarantee program would have already qualified for federal scholarships covering trade school or community college. However, he said the application process for grants and scholarships can feel intimidating and turn students away from trying, making the explicitly tuition-free program important to motivate new high school grads. 

“You sort of got to get deep in the system to figure it out,” Fewins-Bliss said. “But most of the time, folks have ruled it out before they can get that deep.”

This story was originally published by the Michigan Advance