For most, the only way to reach Beaver Island is a two-hour ferry ride from Charlevoix.
Want to live in the vacation haven in Lake Michigan? Most houses cost more than half a million dollars.
That leaves Beaver Island Community School — where the starting pay for a new teacher is about $43,000 a year — in a bind.
“What ends up happening is I’m not able to recruit and retain necessarily the teachers I’d want to be able to attract to serve my students,” said Wil Cwikiel, principal of the 50-student, 15-teacher Beaver Island school district.
It’s a predicament statewide, but especially acute in tourist destinations and resort communities. That inspired state Sen. John Damoose to author legislation allowing schools to build houses for employees, including through the use of voter-approved sinking funds that are otherwise reserved for school construction or technology upgrades.
The bill is stalled in the state Senate Education Committee, but Damoose said he has bipartisan support and plans to push the bill hard in the fall.
The affordable housing shortage “is sort of endemic throughout our entire district here,” said Damoose, R-Harbor Springs, who represents the northwest Lower Peninsula and eastern Upper Peninsula. “We’re looking for creative solutions.”
Not everyone is a fan.
Jarrett Skorup, a spokesperson for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, called the idea “an indirect, convoluted and ineffective way to solve the problem of high housing costs.” Rather, he said, lawmakers should focus on removing regulatory burdens.
“If that doesn't happen, forcing taxpayers to take out a loan to build housing is an expensive solution for only a very few number of people,” Skorup wrote in an email to Bridge Michigan.
The effort comes as Michigan grapples with some shortages of teaching positions — and surging home prices.
Statewide last year, schools reported 9,500 unfilled teaching positions out of 92,508 total spots, according to the latest report from the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University. Damoose and educators told Bridge Michigan the bill could help alleviate that shortage.
Since 2020, Michigan home prices have soared more than 45% — and even more in some parts of northern Michigan.
Damoose’s bill is one among many efforts to build more houses in Michigan. The Legislature this year gave $5 million to a consortium of Traverse City-area schools and education groups to build dozens of houses for educators there. The state set aside $10 million for employers to build worker housing.
Several states either allow schools to build houses or are considering doing so, such as in Colorado Springs, where one school district is building a duplex on an acre of school property, or in San Diego, where a school district is mulling over the construction of 1,000 housing units.
Caitlin Baareman, a teacher at DeTour Area Schools, which serves Drummond Island, knows firsthand how hard it is to find housing. She likes the idea of district-built housing, but there are a ton of details — from deciding which teachers get housing to determining if it’s part of the union contract — that remain unanswered.
“I have a lot of follow-up questions,” she said.
‘Right now, you really can’t’
When he moved to Beaver Island eight years ago, Cwikiel initially found a rental that would only allow him to stay from October through June. He was out in the summer, though, because the home’s owner could make double the monthly offseason rent in one week to vacation renters.
“That’s just the economics of some of these resort communities,” Cwikiel said. “I lived in a camper for two summers.”
Less than 1% of the housing stock in Charlevoix County, where Beaver Island resides, is vacant and available, compared to roughly 2% statewide, according to state data.
The superintendent said housing is inevitably one of the first questions applicants ask during the interview process, and it has caused applicants to turn down job offers and caused existing teachers to quit.
It’s a situation facing many of Michigan’s island schools. Last school year, Bois Blanc Island’s school faced the prospect of closure because it couldn’t find a teacher.
“I don’t want housing to be a reason why a teacher that I offer a position to says no,” Cwikiel said.
Cwikiel called the district’s attorneys, who quickly shot down the idea of the district building housing because Michigan’s School Code doesn’t explicitly empower schools to build houses. The attorneys told him he’d have to change the law.
“Right now, you really can’t,” he said. “I mean you could, but then you would potentially expose the district to a lawsuit, someone saying, ‘Hey, Superintendent Cwikiel is misappropriating funds.’”
The district has a $3.3 million budget and projected a roughly $64,000 surplus last school year.
‘It would not have been an option’
Baareman, the DeTour teacher, was lucky.
When she moved to Drummond Island during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, housing prices were starting to skyrocket. But her boyfriend at the time — now her husband — owned a trailer and she moved in with him.
“It would not have been an option for me to move here if that were not the case,” she said.
Now, she and her husband are considering buying or building a new place, but they’re having trouble.
About 2% of the housing stock in Chippewa County, which includes Drummond Island, is vacant and available, state data shows. The median listing price for a new home on Drummond Island is $325,000. Teachers there start at nearly $42,000 a year, but the district provides a hiring bonus of $12,000 a year for the first three years, in part to help with housing costs.
“Our contract is a generous contract compared to a lot of districts near us, but it’s not comparable to a lot of downstate districts, and our housing prices are comparable if not inflated compared to downstate districts,” Baareman said.
DeTour schools has just under 100 students and 18 teachers. It has a roughly $5 million budget and planned for a nearly $12,000 deficit last school year.
Robert Vaught, the DeTour superintendent, said the district’s attorney has advised the school board against becoming a landlord. If he did seek a sinking fund to build teacher housing, he said he’d also hire a management company to oversee the properties.
“It’s something we’ve considered,” Vaught said. “I don’t personally want to be involved in the leasing or renting business as a district.”
But Vaught said he wouldn’t fault any school for building housing.
“If you’re in that predicament, why not?” he said.
‘Our community … knows our need’
Mackinac Island schools couldn’t wait for a state solution.
The roughly 60-student, 11-teacher district can only be reached from the mainland by ferry (or sometimes by snowmobile in the icy winters). The district’s starting teacher salary is a bit more than $45,000 a year, while the average home price on the island — if you can find one for sale — is close to $500,000.
One Mackinac Island teacher lives in St. Ignace and commutes to the island daily. That teacher has been looking for three years for a place to live on the island, school Superintendent Kelly Lipovsky said.
“If we have a teacher retire, then we will not have anywhere on the island to put someone new,” she said.
So, in 2017, the district used school funds to build a duplex to house teachers. This year, the district built another duplex, meaning it’ll have four units available to teachers come October.
The district charges $1,100 a month in rent, comparable to city-owned townhomes for island workers.
Mackinac Island is an “out-of-formula” district, meaning it receives too much from local property taxes and therefore doesn’t receive per-pupil funding from the state. That gives Mackinac Island more flexibility in how it spends its dollars, the superintendent said.
“I think our community knows what our need for the housing is here,” Lipovsky said. “It’s critical for us to keep our school up and going.”
The Mackinac Island school district has a roughly $3.4 million budget and expects to have a more than $200,000 surplus by the end of the upcoming school year.
Lipovsky said she wasn’t very familiar with sinking funds and didn’t think her district would need one.
But she said Damoose’s bill could help other districts.
“It’s potentially better for a lot of schools, because there’s a lot of schools in the Upper Peninsula and in areas where houses are so expensive that are struggling to find housing for teachers,” she said.
This article first appeared on Bridge Michigan and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
