Michigan school districts are shrinking. None want to consolidate. Why not?

• Michigan school district leaders say school choice policies and declining birth rates are causes for declining enrollment
• Many have asked the state to help fund internal consolidation where districts close buildings or centralize operations 
• But district consolidation where districts merge together is not popular 

Back in 2022, lawmakers allocated $5 million for school districts to explore consolidation. 

No one took the lawmakers up on it in the first year. 

But the following year, 16 districts got money to study consolidation. Still, no local district has actually consolidated.

K-12 enrollment in public schools is declining amid lower birth rates in Michigan and policies that give parents more choice in where to send their children to school. 

That has left some districts with far more capacity than they need. But rather than merge with neighbors, Michigan school districts are closing buildings and expanding programs they think will increase enrollment. 

Merging districts remains unpopular. Experts say consolidation is hard for several reasons: residents like the identity of their local schools, there are logistical challenges and managing joint debt is tricky.

“It’s a challenge to consolidate districts,” Ypsilanti Community Schools Superintendent Alena Zachery-Ross told Bridge Michigan. “People really value their own identity. They value local control, especially in Michigan.” 

The former Ypsilanti Public School District merged with Willow Run Public Schools to form the community district in 2013. Zachery-Ross said it “took a long time” for the new district “to find its own identity.”

People value their local schools’ sports teams and mascots, but they also appreciate feeling their community school district shares the same values as them, she said.

Still, lawmakers have tried to nudge districts in the direction of consolidation. The state has about 800 districts.

“For sure you would have to talk to local districts, but from our perspective, there are too many districts in the state of Michigan,” said Diane Golzynski, deputy superintendent of business, health and library services at the Michigan Department of Education. 

“We need the locals to be interested and willing to look at where there might be consolidation and efficiency,” she said. “It's not something that I have heard local districts being interested in doing.” 

So, what are districts doing instead? One alternative is “internal consolidation,” which means districts close some buildings and may build new ones or renovate existing ones to meet enrollment needs. Internal consolidating can also mean local districts within the same region share business services.

MDE awarded over $100 million for districts for consolidation activities in the last two years. 

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Districts repeatedly cited school choice policy and declining birth rates as reasons for declining enrollment, according to a Bridge analysis of grant requests. 

“It’s pretty clear that unless we see a dramatic turn around to population decline, that consolidation’s going to be necessary where practical,” said state Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Waucedah, who represents an area where local schools consolidated decades ago. 

McBroom said consolidation is “not a panacea” but when districts get too small, it becomes challenging to offer students a wide breadth of courses.

“In the past, it’s taken brave people at the community level saying ‘this is the right thing to do for our kids, this is the right thing to do for our area,” McBroom said. 

He said the state could consider “incentives and assistance” to help with districts merging when there is district debt involved, to help make a merger “more palatable or less painful.” 

The state could potentially help with transportation concerns and construction costs to help a community accept the merger, if the state has the money for it, he said. 

Debt, school taxes, construction and salary schedules are all things that have to be rectified with a merger, said Peter Spadafore, executive director of the Michigan Alliance for Student Opportunity. 

“It’s not just a simple flipping a switch, there’s a lot to be considered,” Spadafore said. 

Spadafore and McBroom both said there are times when consolidation is not practical, where students would have to travel on buses for long periods of time to get to school.

Coping with declining enrollment

There are 1.38 million K-12 students in Michigan during the 2024-25 school year, which is down 0.5% compared to the previous school year.

School choice programs, which allow students to attend a different traditional public school than the one they are zoned for or attend a public charter school, are also popular.

Statewide, 1 in 4 K-12 students attend school at a charter or in a school choice district, according to a previous Bridge analysis. Nearly 200,000 students left their district to attend another one during the 2023-24 school year, and another 150,000 attended a charter school.

Battle Creek Public Schools Superintendent Kimberly Carter said her district’s strategy to mitigate enrollment declines that have resulted from the state’s schools of choice policy “is to create in-district choice.” 

The district is converting a building to expand childcare to babies through 3-year-olds.

“If you think about it, what it helps us do is capture our families early by offering them a high-quality early childhood education. Creates higher readiness for kindergarten, develops a relationship early on and that helps us mitigate the out migration that happens at later grade levels,” Carter said. 

The district has also launched an International Baccalaureate program in the elementary school, converted the high school to a “career academies model,” and launched a science, technology engineering and math middle school. This fall, the district will open a K-8 visual and performing arts school. 

The broader challenges of school funding

There remains questions about the long-term sustainability of Michigan school funding as buildings age and student enrollment shrinks. 

In a news release announcing internal consolidation grant winners, State Superintendent said a recent state study outlining $23 billion in needed repairs and renovations plus the high number of applicants to the internal consolidation grants “demonstrate the great demand for addressing Michigan school infrastructure.”

The state recently funded a report released earlier this year that estimates school buildings across the state need $23 billion in renovations and repairs. That doesn’t include the state’s nearly 300 charter schools.

“I think the bigger issue that we are facing in the state is the condition of our school buildings and the release of the school infrastructure study really indicated that our buildings are in horrible disrepair,” said Golyznski, the state official. “So we need to somehow either eliminate those buildings or find a way to bring them up to the bare minimum standards for health and safety reasons.”

Michigan is one of 12 states, plus the District of Columbia, that don’t provide funding to local districts to construct buildings, according to a 2023 analysis from the Education Commission of the States. 

Without a dedicated pot of funds, schools have to factor in construction costs in their general budget or ask voters to approve taxes to support construction. 

Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency broke ground this month on a career center funded by a $100 million anonymous donation.

Kalamazoo RESA Business Manager Brad Storms told Bridge if had received the state internal consolidation funds, the district would have been able to use the donated money to help with long-term stability. Still, the donation is a “huge win for us,” Storms said, and ultimately, the district will save money in the long-term. 

Ypsilanti’s Zachery-Ross said it’s important to remember that a district still incurs costs for maintaining vacant buildings: cleaning, heating and ensuring pipes don’t break.

The district recently applied for state funds set for internal consolidations to open a dual language immersion program at a vacant middle school building. The district did not win the grant but is moving forward with the plan using other funds, in part possible because the state forgave previous district debt.

Statewide, voters rejected nearly $1.2 billion in school bonds out of about $2.1 billion requests in the May election. 

Voter skepticism can also hinder funding efforts in districts that have previously merged. 

The communities of Marshall and Albion fully merged school systems in July 2016. At the time, Marshall had $48.5 million in debt and Albion had $3 million, according to the internal-consolidation grant application.

“Between 2016 and 2019, it became clear that there was an inequitable experience among students attending facilities in the two communities now being served as one school district.”

The district tried to pass a $45.5 million bond in November 2021 but was unsuccessful, the district learned from the community that “the imbalance between bonded indebtedness and unequal millage rates was a clear motivation to vote no.”

While districts are not jumping at the opportunity to merge with another, there are instances where districts are consolidating services. 

Zachery-Ross said her district shares technology services with Lincoln Consolidated Schools, which “works extremely well.” 

Peter Spadafore, executive director of the Michigan Alliance for Student Opportunity, told Bridge he isn’t aware of instances where school districts are choosing to merge out of their own accords, not because of financial concerns. 

He said intermediate school districts are increasingly helping smaller districts consolidate their business services. For example, one person can do financials for multiple local districts. 

“There’s not a lot of folks sitting around just wanting to merge boundaries and offices, it’s usually borne out of necessity.”