As more students reconsider whether to enroll in remote learning come the fall, schools dependent on tuition revenue are facing a growing shortfall.
Meanwhile, college costs are skyrocketing. As a result, some students are saying that remote learning is just not worth the cost and choosing to stay close to home, enrolling in in-state public school or community college or even taking a gap year.
The San Francisco Art Institute is undergoing a major restructuring, which includes dropping degree programs and offering on-site and online studio art classes instead. Due to an "unsustainable enrollment decline," Notre Dame de Namur University, also in the San Francisco Bay Area, said it would not enroll new undergraduate students for the fall, although the school added "we hope to find a way to remain open in the future.
More from Personal Finance: Post-pandemic, remote learning could be here to stay Demand for refunds intensifies among college students College enrollment could drop if schools stay closed. A number of other colleges are freezing tuition in an attempt to entice more students and families to attend.
Already, universities have furloughed thousands of employees and announced revenue losses in the hundreds of millions, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. As the recession wound down in , for example, Idaho lawmakers approved legislation allowing school districts meeting certain conditions to declare a financial emergency, allowing them to renegotiate teacher contracts.
The following year, state leaders declared a financial emergency for all school districts to allow them to take advantage of the law. Under Michigan law, if a school district is declared by the state to be in a financial emergency, the school system can choose among an emergency manager, a consent agreement, mediation or bankruptcy. Five school districts in the state are currently operating under emergency managers. Griffith said 29 states can take over school districts and 23 can take over individual schools.
Since New Jersey became the first state to take over a school district Jersey City in , about 50 school districts nationwide have been taken over or reorganized by states, whether for financial reasons, academic reasons or both. Beyond state takeovers, some states allow school districts to file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 9 of the federal Bankruptcy Code, which gives municipalities, including cities, towns, school districts and municipal utilities, a chance to reorganize their debts.
Of the public entities that have filed for Chapter 9 since , only six have been education-related districts, according to James Spiotto, managing director of Chapman Strategic Advisors, who wrote a book about how municipalities deal with financial emergencies.
Spiotto said that while it's not unheard of for school districts to run into money problems, states have historically done a fairly good job of flagging school districts in danger and helping them dig out, unlike municipal governments and authorities, which can often run into serious trouble before anyone notices.
Still, there is some concern that as unfunded school employee pension obligations grow, more school districts could find themselves in dire financial straits. But because the pension obligations are long-term, it can be difficult to judge just how serious the problems might be, he said.
But I still have to tip my hat to [DeKeyser] for making some very difficult decisions, and to the staff for making some very tough choices to ensure the viability of the district. But there are still potential lessons for other districts facing similar challenges, he said, including cutting costs — especially administrative overhead — while minimizing the impact to student services and classroom instruction.
That [Whitmore Lake] managed to do this is pretty remarkable. DeKeyser knows the reorganization might have looked like a gamble at the time, and some of the decisions were contentious. It only succeeded because the entire school community agreed to go all in.
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Email Address. Thank you, your sign-up request was successful! Please check your email inbox to confirm. The district has struggled since then to pay off its construction debt. Jill Henry, director of instruction for Whitmore Lake Public Schools and a graduate, is grateful that her alma mater climbed back from the brink of deficit. Students move between floors at Whitmore Lake High School, a spacious facility that is under capacity as enrollment has steadily declined in recent years.
Emily Richmond hechinger. Letters to the Editor.
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