A DPSCD parent filed suit in Michigan state court last month against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, and members of the State Board of Education. The complaint seeks increased state funding for Detroit Public Schools Community District and the elimination of district debt accumulated during state control. Bridge Detroit and Chalkbeat reported the filing on May 6.
The plaintiff is the parent of two DPSCD students. The suit seeks class-action status. The attorney is Gerard Mantese, a Troy-based corporate lawyer with a civil-rights line of practice.
The funding number at the center of the complaint is $10,050. That is the per-pupil state foundation allowance DPSCD receives. Wealthier districts receive more under a grandfathered structure dating to the mid-1990s, when Proposal A capped local property-tax-driven school funding and froze in higher allowances for districts that had been spending more before the cap.
The complaint also names the district's outstanding debt. DPSCD carries debt from the state-control years, when emergency managers ran the district and used borrowing to keep operations open. That debt has been a fixture of every district financial conversation since the return to local control in 2017.
Superintendent Nikolai Vitti has supported the underlying argument about unequal funding for years. The district's infrastructure backlog is $2.1 billion. Federal pandemic relief covered $700 million of capital projects. The remainder is what the suit's framing puts on the state.
The complaint is the latest in a long line of school-funding cases in Michigan. The 2020 right-to-literacy settlement, the 2018 Royal Oak case, the older Bolt and Snyder filings. None of them produced a wholesale rewrite of Proposal A.
The state has not responded publicly. The case is in the early procedural stages. Class certification, if granted, would expand the plaintiff pool to similarly situated students across the district.
