A judge ruled that Bobb had overstepped the boundaries of the emergency management law at the time. The school board at the time successfully sued to stop him from overhauling the district’s academics operations. He also pushed for the conversion of some district schools into charter schools.
He closed dozens of schools, cut a lot of positions, and privatized many services.
Rather, they “failed to address the structural operational issues plaguing DPS,” the report’s author, an attorney for the Allen Law Group in Detroit, wrote.īobb, who ran the district from 2009 to 2011, was a highly controversial figure. The report argues that emergency managers didn’t solve the problem. And across the state, school districts like Benton Harbor and Flint face the same challenges that pushed Detroit Public Schools to the brink of bankruptcy. While the Detroit district is in much better financial shape today, recently posting a small budget surplus, its leaders warn that the progress is threatened by the district’s aging buildings. The four other emergency managers appointed to run the Detroit school system did not respond to requests for comment. The new, debt-free district is in better financial shape, although it faces a looming facilities crisis.īobb’s comments add to a long-running debate surrounding one of the thorniest education policy problems in Michigan: What do you do when a school district is headed for a financial cliff? The stakes could hardly be higher for the thousands of students currently enrolled in districts that are struggling financially and academically. The era of state control ended in 2016, when the legislature created a new district to educate students while the old district collects tax revenue and pays off debt. The report, which was commissioned by the school board, found “startling mismanagement” by the state officials who largely ran the district between 19. “Either we close the doors, or we go to short-term borrowing that will have a negative impact in the long term.” The district could not even pay its utility bills,” he recalled. Like others appointed to run Detroit Public Schools amid a financial crisis, Bobb took out loans to cover the district’s short-term costs, an approach that led to ballooning debt and interest payments. Robert Bobb, one of those emergency managers, says Band-Aids were all he had. Emergency managers appointed to heal the Detroit district’s finances did little more than apply Band-Aids to a major wound, according to a recent report.
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