People across central and northern Michigan will be voting on school bond proposals on election day Tuesday.
School districts rely on bonds for renovations and upgrades, general upkeep and more. Bonds can be used to fund upgrades on security systems, the building of a new gym and more. If bonds do not pass, school districts may revise the bond and put it up for another election in order to get the renovations and upgrades it needs.
Many school districts throughout Michigan have struggled to pass bonds in recent years. Many of the bonds on this year's ballot are repeats from bond of years past. Over half of school districts in the state failed to pass a bond in 2024, according to an analysis from Michigan Public.
“In many areas, bonds and millages are the only mechanism a school has for maintaining their brick and mortar,” Katy Xenakis-Makowski, superintendent of the Johannesburg-Lewiston school district in rural northeast Michigan, and former president of the Michigan Association of Superintendents and Administrators said. “If you think about owning a home, you have to invest in your home … all of those things you do to your home, we also have to do to our schools and the funding mechanism schools have to fix that.”
Xenakis-Makowski said bonds fail to pass for several reasons including politics within the school board, communities feeling as though their needs are not being met and a community’s “rhetoric of public education.”
“In order to get some of these bonds and millages passed, our school systems have to figure out what benefit they are to the community and explain that and get out front and talk about it,” Xenakis-Makowski.
Gladwin Community Schools is one school district with a pattern of bonds failing to pass.
In 2023, the school district proposed a bond that would borrow $50 million to build a new Jr. High School and was voted down. Last year, another bond was turned down to remodel the current Jr. High School for $17 million.
Chuck Frisbie, superintendent of Gladwin County Schools, said the school board opened public hearings and surveys to listen to the wants and needs of the public.
“One thing our community told us when we had our meetings and surveys was that don’t go above 1.95, which is where our millage was three years ago,” Frisbie said. “I think we’ve done everything we could and should have done and I feel like we did a good job of communicating to the community this time around.”
This year, the district wants to raise the rate from 0.55 mills to the previous 1.95 mills to upgrade security, add classrooms in the elementary school for preschool programs and remodel the junior high school building.
Frisbie said many who vote no on bonds do so because they are concerned about their tax rate being too high. In Gladwin County, he said many residents are paying assessments to repair the Edenville and Sanford dams that were damaged in a 2020 flood.
“We have a number of community members that were impacted by those dams, they’ve got the assessments that they’re going to have to pay to get those dams back,” Frisbie said. “They feel like they’re overtaxed and we understand that.”
One of the biggest mix ups, Xenakis-Makowski said, is that there is a correlation between student achievement and money being invested.
“There’s been a lot of rhetoric about student achievement, and ‘We’ve invested money, and why aren’t we seeing the student achievement?’” Xenakis-Makowski said. “Schools aren’t businesses. We don’t control the product. We take every child, no matter their situation, into our buildings and we grow them. … you can’t look at a district and say, ‘Well, we put this money in and we’re not seeing it come out.’”
Voters can learn more about what issues will be on their ballot through the Michigan Voting Information Center.
