Michigan school districts face tough choices as their fiscal years began Tuesday while the Legislature remains deadlocked on the state K-12 budget.

The Republican-controlled House and the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, adjourned and left town earlier this week after it became clear they would not reach a deal by the July 1 deadline set in state law. There are big differences between the chambers’ differing versions and it appears possible if not likely the budget will hang fire into the fall.

“We’ve seen school districts passing budgets that make cuts, that pink slip employees, that dip heavily into their reserve funds that they aren’t supposed to be touching,” said Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan.

McCann said this outcome was foreseeable as the budget process lagged months behind the typical process and missed key benchmarks, including getting initial versions adopted in the spring so they could move to bicameral, bipartisan conference committees to hammer out final versions. Those conference committee versions would have to be approved without amendments in up-or-down votes of the House and Senate before they would go to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for her signature.

“And instead we were left with this sort of chaos situation of trying to scramble something together before the deadline and, ultimately, there wasn’t the will or the way to make that happen and it’s really because of months and months of inaction,” said McCann. “This failure has been happening over the past five, six months now of delays and inaction and seemingly not caring about the urgency of getting a K-12 budget done on time.”

There are no consequences to lawmakers for missing the July deadline, which was enacted by the Legislature after a 2007 deadlock between then Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) and a politically divided Legislature led to a brief partial government shutdown.

The state’s fiscal year begins in three months on Oct. 1, when the Michigan Constitution requires a balanced budget to be signed.

The director of the Michigan State Police spent an hour and a half Tuesday testifying and taking questions from lawmakers about morale in a department that appears skeptical of his leadership.

Col. James Grady II had to answer for trooper and officer surveys showing widespread dissatisfaction with his leadership. Grady told House lawmakers he does not trust the accuracy of the trooper and command officer union surveys. He said the department has its measuring tools that do not show similar results.

But, mostly, Grady said that is because he is not hearing complaints from the troopers and officers under his command.

“They tell me how happy they are with the work that they’re doing — that they’re satisfied with the work that they’re doing, that they’re satisfied with the support that they have in our agency,” he said. “So, I get it face to face because I am that type of person that will strike up a conversation with anyone.”

But Rep. Jaime Greene (R-Richmond) said it is not just the union surveys that are concerning. Committee members have been meeting with MSP staff, who she said shared in private interviews that they feared retaliation. She read some of the responses to him.

“These are from your own officers that they feel as if they are being retaliated against,” she said. “How have they come to that conclusion?”  

Grady repeated he does not believe officers under his command fear retaliation. Grady also said he doesn’t believe the Michigan State Police has a serious morale problem. The proof of that, he said, is officers showing up and doing their jobs and the reduced violent crime rate in Michigan.

But Rep. Jason Woolford (R-Howell) told Grady he should take those union survey findings seriously.

“When people lose faith in their leader, the result is a cascade of issues, and we’re seeing that,” Woolford said. “There’s low morale, poor cohesion and, at the end of the day, a mission that’s going to be compromised.”  

Both the Michigan State Police Troopers Association and the Michigan State Police Command Officers Association have called on Grady to resign.  

Grady was a 25-year veteran of the department in 2023, when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appointed him to the post. In a statement sent to Michigan Public Radio, Whitmer Press Secretary Stacey LaRouche said the governor remains confident in Grady.

“Thanks to the work of Colonel Grady and troopers across the state, in partnership with local law enforcement, Michigan has seen major drops in violent crime recently,” she said. “He’s also had troopers’ backs by fighting for pay raises for the men and women who risk their lives every day to keep our state safe. We have full confidence in Colonel Grady to continue getting the job done.”

A ballot campaign plans to launch in July to ask voters to ban political donations from committees affiliated with utility monopolies and from businesses with substantial state contracts.  

A coalition of progressive organizations are behind the campaign for a voter-initiated law to reign in the influence of utilities and insurance companies with market dominance as well as contractors that do more than $250,000 in business annually with the state, which would appear to include Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — a prolific political donor.

“This isn’t just another policy tweak,” said Sean McBrearty, Michigan director for Clean Water Action, one of the groups backing the proposal. “It’s a line in the sand. We want to stop corporations from buying off our democracy.”

The Michiganders for Money Out of Politics campaign said Consumers Energy and DTE Energy, in particular, have used their clout to fend off efforts to award bigger paybacks to customers for power losses.

“One of the biggest reasons we don’t see progress in Lansing is because too many politicians are bought and paid for,” said Ken Whittaker with Michigan United. “The political will to fix this mess just isn’t there, but that’s by design. We’re not new to this.”

The campaign needs to collect almost 357,000 signatures of registered voters to qualify for the 2026 ballot. They said the signature-gathering effort will be all-volunteer without using circulators who are paid by the signature. They say the specific language will be revealed closer to having it approved by the Michigan Board of State Canvassers.

But they say it will be very similar to legislation that has stalled in the Legislature already.  

The campaign said utility influence has held back reforms that would improve service and make rates more affordable. Spokespersons for two large Michigan utilities said their companies behave ethically. They said donation decisions are made independently by political action committees run by employees and shareholders.

Statements from Consumers Energy and DTE Energy said they and their corporate political action committees strictly abide by existing campaign finance laws. DTE spokesperson Ryan Lowry noted the utility agreed to publicly disclose all political donations of $5,000 or more as part of a 2023 rate settlement agreement with the Michigan Public Service Commission.

Lowry also said political action committee decisions are made by employees and shareholders.

“These disclosures showcase DTE’s commitment to our customers and communities we serve, helping us meet our aspiration of being best in the world and best for the world,” he said in an emailed statement. “The political contributions the company makes are supported by the DTE voluntary employee PAC or DTE shareholders — not from customer revenue.”  

A state House committee voted Wednesday to advance legislation to blunt the impact of a Michigan Supreme Court decision on automatic life-without-parole sentences for young adults.

The bills could allow for longer sentences for 19- and 20-year-olds convicted of first-degree and felony murder, among other serious crimes, and allow prosecutors more time to review cases for potential resentencing.

“Life without parole was not given out lightly to begin with,” said Rep. Sarah Lightner (R-Springport), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and sponsored the bills. “You have to remember these people are murderers.”

The court ruling released in April struck down automatic life without parole for 19- and 20-year-olds convicted of first-degree and felony murder as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. It followed a similar ruling applying to defendants 18 years old and younger.

Now, people who already got mandatory life sentences are being resentenced. Sometimes, that will be to multiple shorter prison terms. The current default in Michigan is for sentences to be served concurrently.

Lightner said concurrent prison terms are not tough enough. “There’s only justice given to the first victim,” she told Michigan Public Radio. “There’s nothing in law that says you have to stack the sentences consecutively, because we have concurrent sentencing.”

Consecutive years-long sentences would effectively be life in prison in some cases.

Deborah LaBelle, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan said the Michigan Supreme Court decision is clear on young lifers. She said sentences of life with no chance of parole for young defendants should be rare.

“They should, when they have had the opportunity to mature and grow, be looked at again and determined whether in fact they have been rehabilitated and should be able to at some point rejoin the community,” she said.

LaBelle says the legislation would probably be found unconstitutional if signed into law because it would force consecutive sentences automatically without court hearings.

The bills, which now go to the House floor, were adopted on party-line votes.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sat before the Michigan House Oversight Committee for roughly an hour and a half Tuesday testifying on glitches in the portal for elected officials to file legally required financial disclosure statements.

Benson, a Democrat, acknowledged the problems while defending her department’s work.

“There are sometimes bumps in the road and things don’t go as smoothly as I would have liked,” she said. “Transformational change does not happen easily. It is the harder path. But just because things are hard and difficult at first doesn’t mean we run away or sit on our hands and do nothing.”

Benson said it was tougher than expected to merge multiple systems with antiquated technology.

“What we didn’t anticipate is just how challenging it would be to migrate these 24 million data points from a 25-year-old system that in many ways existed on a floppy disk into a new modernized system,” she said.

She said the next round of updates to the Michigan Transparency Network (MITN) should be ready to launch next month. She also said the contractor has made a partial refund to the state for the period when the portal was not fully functional.

Rep. Jay Deboyer (R-Clay Township), chair of the House Oversight Committee, suggested maybe the state should have stuck with the old system while the bugs were worked out.

“It does not work in a manner that’s acceptable to the users,” he said. “We can sit here as government officials all day and pat ourselves on the back in what it is that we’re doing, but the reality is when you talk to the users, madam secretary –” at this point Benson interrupted and said, “We have been talking to the users.”

“As have I and they are very unsatisfied,” replied DeBoyer.

The system is part of the state’s compliance with a political transparency amendment approved by voters in 2022. The amendment also made changes to term limits for legislators.

House Republicans and Benson have had a strained relationship. They are currently in court battling over a subpoena approved by the Oversight Committee for election materials that the secretary of state says could endanger election security if released without redactions.  

The July 1 deadline for the Legislature and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to have a budget deal wrapped up arrives in just over a week and the House and Senate don’t appear to be close.

The House has yet to adopt its version of a budget package. But Republican House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) has proposed a stop-gap budget and called Democrats “not serious” about getting a budget done. Hall said this week he has hopes of getting education budgets out of the House soon, although earlier he suggested the House isn’t bound by hard budget deadlines.

In his weekly press conference Wednesday, Hall accused Democrats of not being serious about the budget.

“I’ve never had confidence that the Democrats, because of the people we’re working with, and you look at the quotes, that we’re going to get something done by July 1,” he said. “But I’ve always told people I’ll work in good faith to do it on some of them.”

The House did adopt a higher education budget last week with big reductions to state funding for the University of Michigan and Michigan State University while other public universities would get boosts. The House also adopted a school aid budget this past week. Both are a month behind the Senate’s actions on budgets. The House has yet to approve its versions of budget bills for state departments and agencies. That spending does interact with school, community college and university budgets in some areas.

Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) said Thursday that Hall is single-handedly driving the state toward a budget crisis. She said it’s not reasonable to expect the Senate to rubber stamp House-adopted budgets on arrival.

“By its very nature, it must be negotiated by the House and the Senate and the governor, so it’s incredibly irresponsible to wait until the last minute,” she told the Michigan Public Radio Network. ” At the end of the day, this is very Trump-like behavior to cause a crisis and then to come in at the last second and pretend that they’re being heroic and pretend that it’s somebody else’s fault that it doesn’t get done.”

Local governments, community colleges, public universities and K-12 schools all have fiscal years that begin July 1. There is a state law that requires the Legislature to have their budgets wrapped up by then, but there are no specific consequences for missing that deadline.

The state’s fiscal year begins October 1. 

The mother of the Oxford High School shooter has asked to be released from prison while she appeals her involuntary manslaughter convictions. The attorney for Jennifer Crumbley filed the request this week with the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Her attorney argues that Crumbley should not be forced to remain prison while the legalities of the first-of-its-kind case are sorted out.

“At present, Mrs. Crumbley has been incarcerated for over three-and-a-half years,” says the filing dated Tuesday. “She should not be forced to serve additional years of incarceration before the appellate courts can decide, with finality, her dispositive and substantial legal questions of first impression which may result in her convictions being vacated.”  

Michael Dezsi, Crumbley’s attorney, told the Michigan Public Radio Network that Crumbley does not pose a threat if she is released on bond.

“The other thing that she has to prove in order to get a bond on appeal is that she has a substantial issue of law or fact and I don’t think anybody can deny that Mrs. Crumbley has a substantial question of law that she is presenting on appeal, namely which is did she even commit a crime in the first place,” he said.

Dezsi said the state’s manslaughter statute has never been used in this way to level charges against the parent of a murderer.

“They were different from anything we’ve ever seen before and it is our position that there certainly is no law in Michigan that allows for the prosecution to charge her for the intentional criminal acts of a third person, whether that be her son or somebody else,” he said.

Last week, an Oakland County judge denied the requests of Jennifer Crumbley and her husband, James, for new trials. Judge Cheryl Matthews held the Crumbleys received fair trials, although the prosecution should have shared details of some witness agreements.

Crumbley’s son is serving a life-without-parole sentence for the 2021 school shooting that killed four students and injured seven people. A jury convicted Jennifer and James Crumbley of involuntary manslaughter after prosecutors argued they failed to address clear signs their son was spiraling toward violence.

A spokesperson for Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said her office opposes releasing Jennifer Crumbley in part because she would be a flight risk.

“A jury convicted Jennifer Crumbley for her actions that led to the deaths of Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Madisyn Baldwin, and Justin Shilling. That verdict was upheld after careful review by the Circuit Court,” said spokesperson Jeff Wattrick in an email. “Bond has been denied multiple times previously because Mrs. Crumbley was, and remains, a flight risk with no known ties to the community and a past attempt to conceal her whereabouts. The interests of justice are served by again denying bond so she can continue serving her sentence.”

Deszi said he expects the Court of Appeals to rule quickly on his motion. The court will also have to rule on whether to hear the appeal. He said whichever side loses will almost certainly take the case to the Michigan Supreme Court.

A group of Democratic state lawmakers is calling for an expansion of Michigan’s civil rights law to specifically include protections against antisemitism.

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This is following recent acts of alleged antisemitic violence in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.

The legislation would add the word “ethnicity” to the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act’s wide range of protected characteristics that already include “religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, height, weight, familial status, marital status, or source of income.”

Supporters say they view recent incidents of violence against Jewish people — some of which have been labeled by police and the alleged perpetrators as alleged antisemitic violence in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. to protests of Israel’s actions in Gaza — as evidence that antisemitism deserves to be specifically included in the civil rights law.

An annual survey by the America Jewish Committee found roughly a third of Jews in the U.S. say they have been target of antisemitism, and an Anti-Defamation League report found antisemitic incidents reached a record high last year.

“There is a tremendous conflict going on that has evoked a lot of emotions, but when Jews here are subject to harassment, intimidation and incitement of violence, that is antisemitic,” Sen. Jeremy Moss (D-Southfield) told Michigan Public Radio. “Jews should be able to be safe in this country where they stand.”

State Rep. Noah Arbit (D-West Bloomfield) is a lead sponsor of the bill. He said the concept of “collective guilt” is an antisemitic trope that has been resuscitated.

“The idea of collective responsibility, collective punishment, used to be thought of as racist,” he said. “Now, suddenly, all American Jews — and frequently not just American Jews, but Jews in France, Jews in the U.K., Canada, are being held collectively responsible for the actions — right or wrong, agree or disagree — of the government of the state of Israel.”

A United Nations special committee investigating Israel’s warfare in Gaza found last year that it was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there.”

The Jewish population of the U.S. has been split in its attitude toward Israel and its war on Gaza after a Hamas-led attack killed more than 1,100 Israelis.

Arbit said politicians on the right and the left have failed to stand up against antisemitism. He said an expansion of the civil rights law would show elected officials are taking the new rise of antisemitism seriously.

Other headlines for Wednesday, June 4, 2025:

• Last week, the Trump administration paused funding for all Job Corps centers — a decades old residential career training program. A group of Michigan Democrats sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor urging them to reverse the order, stating the move has left staff and students scrambling. 
• Former University of Michigan president Santa Ono left Ann Arbor expecting to become the president of the University of Florida. However, that’s not going to happen, as the board that oversees the sunshine state’s public universities rejected Ono’s appointment, overruling the school’s own board of trustees, which approved his appointment in May.
• The Department of Natural Resources is inviting Michiganders to take advantage of free fishing, ORVing and state park entry during “Three Free” weekend June 7-8. 
• The city of Detroit’s Retirees Task Force is hosting a hybrid meeting from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. this Friday, June 6, at the Coleman Young Municipal Center.

Do you have a community story we should tell? Let us know in an email at detroiteveningreport@wdet.org.

Northern Michigan school districts forced into an extended shutdown due to massive ice storms this spring will have a waiver from attendance mandates under a law signed Monday by Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

“Many Michigan families are still reeling from the effects of the ice storms that devastated northern Michigan earlier this year,” said Whitmer in a statement released by her office. “I’ve been committed to supporting recovery efforts, protecting Michigan families from additional disruptions to their daily routines. That’s why I’m proud to sign this bill that will remove unnecessary penalties and obstacles for students and schools who are just trying to get by.”

This is one of several storm recovery bills sent by the Legislature to Whitmer’s desk with wide bipartisan support. This measure means school districts will not have to choose between losing state funding or forcing students and staff to stay in school into the heat of summer. That would have added unplanned utility costs as well as the expenses of paying staff salaries and for transportation.

“Had we not passed this legislation, the financial burden to our schools would have been yet another blow to our communities that have already been struggling following the disastrous ice storm,” said Senator John Damoose (R-Harbor Springs).

The ice storms in late March left many districts unable to meet the state’s 180-day school day requirement without extending the school year. The new law allows forgiveness of up to 15 days from the state’s mandated instruction time.

Schools in a dozen counties were forced to close due to ice-covered roads, power outages and other storm-related damage. The waiver applies to schools in counties covered by Governor Whitmer’s ice storm emergency decree. Whitmer has also asked for federal storm recovery assistance.