Rice: Schools Passing 'Overly Cautious' Budgets Due To Missed Deadline In Lansing

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 07/02/2025) When it comes to making the next K-12 budget, State Superintendent Michael Rice says legislators failed to meet their July 1 deadline to give school districts an idea of what they have to spend, which pushed schools to design “overly cautious” spending plans.

The majority of lawmakers left Lansing for the Fourth of July weekend on Tuesday night, without the Capitol's top leaders – the Governor, the House Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader – agreeing on spending targets on how the final K-12 budget should allocate public school funding.

"With so little clear information coming from the Legislature about the state budget, many boards of education likely felt it necessary to pass overly cautious budgets that could result in lower staffing levels than would otherwise have been necessary, to the detriment of children," Rice said in a press release today. "I urge the legislature to work to pass the school aid budget within the next few weeks so that school districts have time to make necessary adjustments to hiring and other spending before the beginning of the new school year."

The July 1 deadline was created by legislators in late 2019, but does not penalize lawmakers.

Rice has received criticism from the Republican-controlled House for maintaining his leadership role while student assessments show learning stagnation and inefficient reading and math performances.

Meanwhile, Rice continues to give the House flack for proposing an "outlier budget" while the Senate and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's proposals are much more similar, skewing school leaders' abilities to confidently project what funding will look like.

Rice wants the Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 budget to feature designated pots of money – or "categoricals" – for addressing the teacher shortage, reducing class sizes in high-poverty K-3 classrooms, literacy coaches and other "science of reading" training programs, free meals and school safety and mental health upgrades.

Tom McMillin, a Republican who's served on the State Board of Education since the start of 2017, issued a response to Rice's statement, requesting legislators to actively eliminate "left-wing political ideology" concerns out of classrooms through appropriations.

"Better educational outcomes would certainly be realized if local districts would focus on the basics and stop with the left-wing efforts of sexualizing young children, pushing anti-American ideologies and discriminating based on race with DEI and pushing divisive ideas of 'white privilege' and the like," McMillin said. "I hope Republicans in the legislature take whatever time is necessary to force Democrats to agree on a budget that will remove the harmful politicization of education."

As for teacher unions, like the Michigan Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in Michigan, they don't want legislators to settle for an education budget that isn't investing every dollar possible.

For example, one of the concerns among Senate Democrats' top budget negotiators is that House Republicans want to hold off on spending new School Aid Fund (SAF) money anticipated for the end of the fiscal year.

"The fact is that Michigan still ranks in the bottom half of school funding nationally. For our students and economy to thrive, we need every level of education – from preschool to K-12 to higher education – to have the resources necessary for success," said AFT Michigan President Terrence Martin and MEA President and CEO Chandra Madafferi in a joint statement.