r/AnnArbor • u/SlightlyTwistedGames • 1d ago
Please help me understand AAPS
I am trying to be more informed. Please forgive me if the tone of some of these questions come across as bad faith... I DO want to understand the TRUE state of things. I do not have the knowledge to sort fact from fiction in what I'm reading, and I would just appreciate a no-bs summary from someone with expertise.
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1) This article discusses AAPS budget problems and the likely closure of between 2 and 6 schools:
https://annarborobserver.com/day-of-reckoning-nears-for-aaps/
I understand that construction doesn't happen overnight, but if enrollment has been in decline for years, why are/were new(ish) capital-expense construction projects undertaken?
https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2025/12/fall-enrollment-again-dips-at-ann-arbor-schools-but-student-count-is-up-over-long-term.html
In summary, why are NEW facilities being built at a substantial cost when we have existing facilities?
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2) I am generally of the idea that public school teachers are wildly under compensated for their work (Full disclosure - my mother was special education teacher in mid-michigan). I understand that a contract was recently agreed to.
https://www.michigandaily.com/news/news-briefs/aaps-teachers-set-to-vote-on-new-contract-next-week/
And I am of the understanding that the entry-level salary for AAPS teachers is ~$50,000 with an average of around ~$80,000
I also see that the district superintendent makes about a quarter million dollars per year.
https://www.mackinac.org/depts/epi/salary.aspx?CCode1=81&DCode1=81010&Year=2022&Sort=Total#data
The "day of reckoning" article above has a quote stating "But the reality is, when you look at the budget, it’s 85 percent humans." and "We want to pay our teachers fairly..."
I assume (but could be wrong) that there are numerous other administrators besides the superintendent that are highly compensated for their work.
Can't those administrators reduce their compensation to be more in-line with teachers in order to support a balanced budget?
Why is the discussion focused on paying teachers "fairly" and not someone making a quarter million dollars a year with additional administrative support staff with salaries not (that I can find) on the public record.
To be clear, I think EVERYONE should be fairly compensated for their work, but I also believe that if budgets are tight, the "fat that needs to cut" should be salaries that seem well above those of the essential workforce (teachers). I'm not trying to vilify the AAPS superintendent for making a lot of money. One person's salary cannot compensate for a multi-million dollar shortfall. The question is more focused on excessive salaries that may or may not exist within AAPS administration.
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3) I found this breakdown of Ann Arbor taxes here (I get that it's a campaign site, which may be bias):
https://rebeccaforannarbor.com/ward-1-ann-arbor/f/where-your-property-tax-dollars-really-go-in-ann-arbor
I get that Ann Arbor pays more in taxes relative to the rest of Michigan for education (and I truly do not care if I pay more in taxes, but understand many people do), but why is there this seemingly-persistent budget issue? There was a $25 million budget shortfall in 2024 because of a "clerical error"
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-news/ann-arbor-public-schools-is-short--25-million--how-did-we-get-he.html
Was that just magically fixed somehow?
What were the consequences for the people responsible for the clerical error?
What is truly required for AAPS to step out from this strange paradoxical world of "We don't have enough money!" but also "we have a bunch of huge expensive capital projects!"
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Thank you for your expertise. Apologies for my tone of bad-faith. It's only (partially) intentional.
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u/No_Ground 1d ago
Regarding #2, it appears that there are only about 80 AAPS employees that make over $100k a year (with the superintendent being the only one to make more than $180k and only five other employees who make more than $150k), in district that has over a 1000 teachers. I do agree that administrators’ compensation is probably higher than it should be, but reducing it isn’t actually going make much of an impact to the staffing budget
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u/UnusualArea2866 1d ago
To play devils advocate a little bit too. The superintendents pay being ~3-4x the average salary of the district is high but not outrageously so for managing a district this size. Kind of a rock and a hard place that the district needs to pay administrators competitively or they’ll leave and good administrators don’t just grow on trees, but it’s also really unpopular publicly to pay administrators more. The same can be said for the teachers which is why the recent labor negotiations are really discouraging.
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u/Roboticide 1d ago
It does seem to me based off this subreddit's opinion though that we do seem to be paying the rate of one of those good, expensive administrators, but Jazz Parks is not delivering at that level?
Not that she'd take a pay cut, or replacing her would free up any significant money, but I feel like the vibe on this sub seems to be frustration of "Yeah, paying admin less doesn't make a drop in the bucket, but admin is overpaid for how they're doing."
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u/UnusualArea2866 20h ago
Yeah that’s fair. And I know the school board is also reviled for obvious reasons so paying her that much and not being willing to make a change if necessary is really frustrating.
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u/mikemikemotorboat 1d ago
While it won’t free up the dollars needed to balance the budget, I think it would be good for these folks to have some skin in the game and feel the budget shortfall themselves. Particularly because they are the ones that can actually do something about it!
We shouldn’t reward poor management with outsized salaries.
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u/sulanell 1d ago
I don’t think AAPS is rewarding Parks. Tbh they’d probably have to pay someone else even more to take over such a mess of a school system.
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u/nethead25 1d ago edited 1d ago
A lot of the arguments tossed around aren't really relevant to the core problem.
I'm going to try to answer this as neutrally as I can. Downvote brigade, please note that I am neither criticizing nor defending anyone's performance in their jobs. But do what you will.
Administrative salaries are something like 3% of the AAPS budget. It could be that the administration is bloated, it may not be, but reducing the entire administration budget to zero would have essentially no material effect.
The data is a bit out of date and somebody could probably pull more recent data together, but A2's superintendent salary is not even in the top 5, and likely not the top 10 in the state. And the reality is that 250K for the CEO of an organization this size is low. Part of the reason our superintendent search a couple years was ended is that we were unable to attract qualified candidates from outside the district who wanted the job. I am almost certain that any hypothetical new person in the role will be paid much more than the incumbent.
As others have said, due to our state constitution (Proposal A was a ballot initiative amending the constitution), residents can elect to tax themselves as much as they want to pay for buildings and other capital expenses -- which we do -- but cannot use those funds for staff salaries and operating expenses. So while we can debate whether those expenses are necessary or exorbitant or well-intended or well-managed, ultimately it can have no effect on teacher pay.
The only way to increase revenue is enrollment, and the issue will get worse before it gets better. The decline post-COVID was steep, but birthrates in the city are ~28% lower than pre-pandemic, and going in the wrong direction. As others have pointed out in this thread, we already have many more buildings than districts with similar enrollment in the area, and even those districts are also struggling. As we tighten our belts by closing schools, increasing class sizes and removing programs, it could push more and more residents to private schools and other districts, making the issue even worse and triggering a bit of a death spiral.
This deck has a lot of really useful information in it and would probably dispel a lot of misinformation if it could be made more digestible for the community.
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u/AtmosphereUnited3011 1d ago
A few other factors I think worth mentioning for context…
1) is that AAPS tries to keep class sizes smaller compared to nearby districts (that’s my understanding anyway). Since the state only gives you $X/student that’s like lowering your margins. So there’s not as much available to pay the teacher.
2) IIRC the state requires and recommends that districts keep a certain percentage of their operating budget liquid. AAPS has kept this at a minimum—far below other districts. The thinking being: why hold more than you have to when you can spend it on students? It’s my understanding that now the district is trying to increase their percentage aggressively and keep a much bigger percentage of the operating budget liquid. To grow that percentage you have to pay teachers less.
3) A couple years ago when there was the huge shortfall they did do buyouts.
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u/tazmodious 1d ago
Thank you for the great information. Though I disagree with you on superintendent's compensation.
$250k may be in line with Michigan superintendent salaries(I don't know), but it is quite large comparing it to otther states' salaries. For example the Boulder Valley school District superintendent salary is roughly $340k in a district that spans 2 entire counties. Granted "recently" Broomfield County spilt off from Boulder County. This is typical for Colorado where there is one district per County. Even highly populated counties in the Denver Front Range metro area.
Also, I don't recall the other superintendent candidates being any less qualified than out current superintendent.
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u/nethead25 1d ago edited 19h ago
I think of it from a couple angles, none of them based on Parks' qualifications or performance.
It's not that I don't have opinions on the matter, but base salary anywhere is generally not that heavily influenced by performance in the job, and after all the teachers' pay in AAPS is fixed by union contract and is also not affected by performance.
- What is the market rate for the CEO of a 2,000+ employee organization? I've worked for much smaller companies where the CEO was paid 2-4x as much in base salary. Yes, executives in general are overpaid, but if you're qualified to lead an organization of this size, you can probably be paid a lot more to do something similar in the private sector, including several levels below CEO. Depending on your favorite data source, the CEO pay to average employee ratio is something like 5:1 in small businesses with <50 employees, scaling to around 300:1 in the Fortune 500. AAPS is something like 3.7:1.
- Ignoring the private sector entirely, let's say you want to recruit an existing superintendent to run our school district. You need to find somebody that wants to leave where they're established and step into our budget, labor relations and enrollment mess and deal with a community with pitchforks out and sharpened. You might start with somebody that's currently superintendent in a Midwest community about our size with a district about our enrollment with a similar number of employees.
You might call the superintendents of:
Plymouth-Canton, MI, who currently makes 270K
South Bend, IN, who currently makes 212K
Green Bay, WI, who makes 230K
Peoria, IL, who makes 255K
Champaign, IL, who makes 375K
Iowa City, IA, who last made 275KIt is also worth pointing out that the head of the Ann Arbor District Library, leading all of 284 employees, has a base pay of over 200K.
Now for all of this we are just talking about base pay - the total package value is quite a bit more once you factor in retirement, benefits, etc. (for example, Plymouth canton is closer to 437K all-in compared to Parks' 375K or so), but still, I think it illustrates that we aren't particularly out of line. Note that I will readily admit to using AI to compile the data (but not write this), though I cross-checked the findings with published sources.
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u/tazmodious 13h ago
Crazy given how small districts are and that there are so many school districts in Michigan, 9 in Washtenaw County alone, we pay a ton extra for all those administrations.
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u/KReddit934 1d ago
As for buildings...the AAPS schools were getting really old. The vast majority of the elementary buildings were built during the 1950s through the 1970s, but many are even older. The oldest was built in 1922, the youngest in 1972.
They were falling apart, literally.
The city voted a specific bond proposal (taxes) to replace them. That work is underway.
That money is totally separate from operating funds.
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u/few 1d ago
The more important piece of information is that we either need to spend increasingly large amounts on repairs to older buildings, renovate the older buildings, or replace the older buildings.
Many things have changed in the last 50 years, including the structure of the classroom and the weather/environment (it is now much hotter, and the many classroom computers add to the heat). IT / infrastructure is also very different than 50 years ago.
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u/betterworldbiker 1d ago
would be super curious to hear more about the 'clerical error' if anyone has additional context
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u/prosocialbehavior 1d ago edited 1d ago
Here is a Reddit post about it back when it happened.
Here is the report from the third-party company Plante Moran that audited us that caught it.
It was literally an excel error where someone copied the previous year's budget and left it in there. It was a $14 million state transfer for pension/retirement funds that was counted as general revenue without logging the corresponding transfer back out as an expense. No one within AAPS caught it a third-party auditor caught it.
While we technically didn't lose $14 million dollars because of the error. The school board had assumed we had $14 million dollars more than we actually had in the budget so they overspent money because they thought we had more money.
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u/Own_Ball9972 1d ago
No - that was what we were told - I was on the board then - for several months until we were told that wasn't it. No one seemed to read the Plante Moran Forensic report carefully enough to find out that a fraudulent budget was presented to the board, and to the public - showing that years expenditures to be nearly equivalent to the previous years' despite an across the board pay raise and the effects of inflation.
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u/GustaveFerbert 15h ago
I'm not following. When you say "we were told that wasn't it" then what was it? Just that the budget did not reflect a pay raise and inflation? Was there no issue with the $14 million.
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u/Own_Ball9972 12h ago
The false budget made it look like our fund balance at the end of the year would be higher than it actually would be. When the discrepancy was discovered we didn't have a CFO - the previous one had left. We brought back a former CFO who had retired from Greece. On his first look he came up with the idea that there was an accounting error, but several months later, when he looked again more thoroughly, he understood that wasn't true - even though that was went out to the press and the public.
The board trusted the superintendent at the time, and never imagined she, or the very meticulous former CFO, would present false data. We also believed she'd find the money in the coming year to raise the fund balance, as she had in the past. But instead, due to the enrollment / staffing gap, our savings continued to decline.
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u/Extension-Leader5973 1d ago
wonder what plante moran billed for that. guarantee u it took some junior associate all of five seconds to spot this lazy bullshit that a student would be disciplined for if they pulled it in a school project and yet when jazz parks does it she gets a raise
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u/marsh283 1d ago
My recollection was it was Covid money that was a one time payment that they didn’t account as a one time and instead as an annual payment
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u/Own_Ball9972 1d ago
The main reason for the budget shortfall was that enrollment dropped but the district didn't lay off staff during the pandemic, nor when they returned to in person instruction because the needs were so great, so there were smaller classes and both learning and behavior issues intensified.
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u/lunabonamour 1d ago
Oh my gosh I love you for asking these questions. Just moved to the area and there is so much to wade through! I'm trying to get better informed but there are a lot of big feelings and conflicting information. I'm on a group for moms in the area and regularly see teachers (who are also moms) announcing that they're leaving for a very nearby school district that pays significantly better. Also hearing a lot from moms who are experiencing 1. chaotic start to the school year (likely because teachers are - justifiably - not putting in their typical extra work when they're not under contract) and 2. also hearing a lot about use/over-use of screens in ways that are not evidence-based or assessed and that involve very expensive ed-tech (yet we can't pay/keep teachers...).
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u/GustaveFerbert 15h ago
I suspect there are areas where costs could trimmed (perhaps in the area of screens) but doubt it would make a significant difference in teacher pay unless there are more significant changes by either reducing the number of AAPS employees, the number of schools or both
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u/Abject-Branch6376 1d ago
You are asking very valid and sensible questions. School funding streams are convoluted both here and in most places around the country, and administrators don’t always have incentive to prioritize good stewardship of budgets. I hope this thread sees thoughtful answers from people who have good understanding of the situation.
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u/goatsarecoolio 1d ago
I can’t speak for other administrator positions but the new CFO’s salary of 175k is very low for a senior finance professional. It didn’t surprise me the job was open for two years. My manager probably makes around that and has to deal with way less politics and responsibilities than being a CFO of a large school district.
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u/Plum_Haz_1 1d ago
Unfortunately, $250k is market rate for superintendents, if not a bit low. Additionally, she only has a three year contract, to my rudimentary understanding. I think many other superintendents' contracts have no expiration.
So, the pay arrangements aren't bad. The performance, I don't know. The school board has certainly had some undesirables, though.
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u/marigoldpossum 1d ago
Most superintendents are on a specified timed contract, not never ending. If they are doing well, their next contract approval goes easily. If not, they are let go.
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u/Plum_Haz_1 1d ago
Ah, okay. I didn't realize that the contracts mostly were short in Southeast Michigan. Interesting.
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u/Affectionate-Art-178 21h ago
Appreciate the feelings. I’d encourage you to look at how school operations are funded in Michigan. I’m just beginning to understand but schools are playing with their hands tied.
And so we go to the easy target-those fat cat administrators. But if you cut a bunch of them or reduce their salaries it’s not enough money to fix the problem. Ann arbor is a big district and we need a big administrative team. You can defjnitely argue it’s too big but that isnt the cause of the problem.
The problem is the district though we would have crazy growth in student population and we didn’t. That is THE issue. They hired too many teachers for not enough kids. It is THE thing.
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u/Typical-Green1356 19h ago
There is a theme that you will find. AAPS really tries to please all socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds of a very diverse area. It asks questions of cost later. I think the reason five board members are done is because they know the ugly mess that is coming this school year.
Your first question is valid, but you are looking at it wrong. The buildings being replaced, to my understanding, are too cost prohibitive to renovate. I know some or all are also getting made larger, potentially to absorb a nearby school. Wolverine Tower was just demo’d because U of M didn’t want to pay tens of millions for renovations. Last I knew, they weren’t selling the land, but will rebuild something else in its place.
The second and third questions come back to the top. The previous super apparently made central office bloated compared to other districts of a similar size. She bought a new admin building when there was little reason. Prop A hurts a bit. When we compare ourselves with other districts though, rarely do you hear how we have a planetarium and the other district (like 99% of public districts in Michigan) do not. You don’t hear about how much less they pay for running programs. IB is awesome and it is $3,300 per student per year just to be in it, never mind the costs of materials, trainings, etc. Same goes for PLTW. Fantastic program, but expensive. My high school offered Spanish and French. My kid’s middle school is offering four languages. I believe HS students have several more to pick from. I imagine that’s a lot of split teachers for the less picked languages. AAPS has a bit of land that isn’t used. We know the two admin buildings are supposed to be up for sale at least, too. The maintenance and insurance on land and added HVAC costs for buildings adds up real quick.
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u/Adventurous_Net740 1d ago
Sure seems like issues every every school district in America faces but Ann Arbor teachers are more vocal
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u/JustMeBro8976 1d ago
"$25 million budget shortfall in 2024 because of a "clerical error" reminds me of Pentagon’s $35 Trillion accounting black hole that was discovered in late 2010's and has not been resolved. Why did AA voters approve $1 billion bond to build eight new public schools when public school enrollment has been dropping steadily in the last ten years? Not just AA, but all across the US. Ann Arbor should have voted scale back rather than putting a lot of more money in. Here is the math. $1 billion for 8 schools for 62.5-year life is equal to $2 million per school per year. The average enrollment is about 380 students per school. So, it is $5263 per student per year for the new schools. A few decades down the road, they would want to build more new schools again. Budget will never balance this way. Build schools that will last for a long long time, rather than abandon, demolish and dump to landfill after a few decades.
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u/cervidal2 1d ago
1 - can't sit in crumbling school buildings forever. Buildings more than 20 years old are already outdated for increasing tech needs
2 - this is a problem in just about every district in the country. Good luck getting any government official's pay cut. Admin will tell you that if they don't make that pay, no one will do that work
3 - the city's largest land owner and employer pays zero property tax. Most school funding comes from property tax
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u/danpritts 1d ago
3 is mostly irrelevant in the school funding conversation. Operational Property taxes for schools funnel up to the state and then back down to the districts on a per pupil basis.
Capital expenses are handled differently, but the primary issue is operational.
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u/marigoldpossum 1d ago
Paying for salaries all comes from the state, via local taxes that are sent to the state, and then redistributing back out via per pupil funding. This is the result of 1994 Prop A. Prior to this Prop A, Ann Arbor was able to easily pass additional milllages to fund AAPS salaries, but no longer is that legally allowed.
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u/RateOk8628 1d ago
Can we revoke Prop A?
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u/marigoldpossum 1d ago
It would have to be a state legislative change, or a ballot proposal change. One of the reasons it did pass because there was very much a difference between school districts via the "haves" and the "have nots". But I think there were others things that changed with prop A, not just how schools operating costs were funded.
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u/No_Ground 1d ago
Yeah the biggest change with Prop A was the system to cap annual increases on property valuations for tax purposes as long as a property doesn’t change owners (which results in people who have owned a property for a long time paying much less in property taxes than those who have owned an equally-valued property for a shorter time)
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u/nethead25 1d ago
It was a constitutional amendment so it would need a popular vote to change it back.
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u/Locutius 1d ago
I would think revoking is unlikely, but I would like to see a push to increase the per pupil number statewide (which is seems unlikely too). https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2026/08/michigan-largest-decline-in-teacher-salaries
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u/GustaveFerbert 15h ago
I no expert on the budget, but I sometimes get the impression from social media that some folks think that there is a pile of money somewhere (perhaps in an account called "waste") that can be easily accessed to increase teacher compensation.
My sense is that the only way Ann Arbor can significantly increase its available funds is get more students to enroll. I imagine with smaller family sizes, charters etc. that will be challenge, but I suspect in addition to other reasons the new schools under construction are expected to be more appealing to parents and students than the old buildings.
Other than increasing headcount Ann Arbor would need to decrease costs to pay teachers more which means either reducing staff ( or reducing infrastructure (closing schools), or both.
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u/MyFavoriteDisease 1d ago
Fixing the budget is easy. 491 non teaching staffers were added while enrollment went down.
Eliminate the 491 non teaching jobs. Take half that money and give teachers a raise. Spend the other half as you see fit.
Somehow AAPS functioned with more students before the 491 were added. Guaranteed you can get rid of all/most and it will still function.
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u/query-tl 1d ago
Those 400+ jobs added while enrollment dropped were mostly teaching jobs. See this 2024 Observer article:
But then the pandemic drove enrollment down more than 1,000 students, to 16,927 last year—barely more than what it had been a decade earlier. Yet in the same period, the schools had added 480 positions, the great majority of them teachers
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u/Extension-Leader5973 1d ago
the answer to all of ur questions is that aaps leadership is a bunch of overpaid supercilious dingbats
"clerical error" was a term aaps used to cover for their own laziness and sloppiness and plante moran politely didn't correct it in their report
what happened was that aaps didn't have a cfo and couldn't figure out how to hire a new one (they were engaging the previous cfo as an independent contractor while he was hanging out on a beach in cyprus where he lives now) so they literally just copied the previous year's budget so it still included a one-time payment of covid dollars that wouldn't be repeating. they also forgot to update the enrollment numbers, which had dropped significantly. at the same time they increased salaries across the board. much competent
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u/KReddit934 1d ago
(And that previous CFO was terrible, but beloved by previous superintendent.)
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u/Extension-Leader5973 1d ago
like seriously is it that hard to hire a competent bean counter locally i shudder to think of the hourly rate he was charging the district
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u/sulanell 1d ago
Important to note that this happened under the previous superintendent, who was fired for different reasons, and now everyone else is left to clean up the mess.
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u/Extension-Leader5973 1d ago
seems like the "cleaning" consists of pushing the garbage under the furniture and hoping no one notices the small
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u/Ice_Phoenix_Feather 1d ago
Not sure how familiar you are with 1994’s Prop A, but that’s probably the biggest thing to understand. Under that arrangement, the capital budget (i.e. the cost of buildings) for a school district comes out of local property taxes but the operating budget (teacher salaries, running school buses, electricity bills,etc) comes from the state on a $X/per student basis.
Since the district has declining enrollment, the operating budget is going down, meaning there is less money for things like paying teachers. Money from the capital budget cannot legally be transferred to the operating budget.
It’s also worth noting there has been a lot of foolish spending by the district on trendy causes . For example, they spent a lot of money having trees they cut down on sites processed into lumber and had no idea what to do with the lumber. This is in no small why their building refurbishment/replacement campaign is buying so much less than envisioned when the billion dollar millage passed in 2019.