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Court: Mich. schools forced to bear reporting costs
BY DAWSON BELL • FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU • JULY 7, 2008
LANSING – Michigan state government has been shortchanging local school districts millions of dollars a year by failing to reimburse the cost of enhanced reporting requirements under education reforms enacted in the last decade, the state Court of Appeals ruled today.

The 2008-09 budgets for K-12 schools and the Department of Corrections cleared the House Appropriations Committee, receiving few changes from their subcommittee versions. Under the K-12 budget, the per-pupil foundation allowance would go up by a minimum of $55 per student and a maximum of $110 per student.

Taken from a lengthy article about here presentation:EDUCATION: She also asked the business community to get behind her 21st Century Schools Fund, which uses former payments to non-Durant schools to cover grants to design or build smaller high schools to replace current schools that are struggling."Replace those large impersonal high schools that fail with small personal high schools that work," she said, adding that the six middle colleges around the state are examples of what the program would create.And she said the program is even more attractive because, as proposed, it would no

More than 30 Michigan high schools are among 1,300 nationwide that have been listed in Newsweek’s annual listing of the best high schools in the nation. Click to view the article.

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Thousands of high school freshmen across Michigan are failing Algebra I, the first of four math courses this class of students must take and pass to fulfill what are among the toughest graduation requirements in the
nation.
The failure rate -- estimated at 20% to 30% of about 113,000 freshmen -- has some predicting a crisis by the
time these students are juniors and must take Algebra II.
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AT&T High School Success
Special Grants Program

Overview
In April 2008, the AT&T Foundation launched a new grant program
focused on high school success for at-risk students. The program will
direct funds to eligible nonprofit organizations and schools across the
country and offers two types of grants:

Hundreds of home schooling parents and their children descended on the Capitol today to defend what they contend is a lifestyle choice.
Rep. Jack HOOGENDYK (R-Kalamazoo) and Rep. Bill HUIZENGA (R-Zeeland) encouraged the crowd to let lawmakers know that efforts to extend the state's reach further into the home-schooled community just weren't going to fly.
"The constitution doesn't mandate that every child get an education," Hoogendyk said. "That's the job of the parents."

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