Posen Consolidated Schools sits in a rural pocket of Presque Isle County in northeastern Michigan, far from the kind of administrative infrastructure that larger districts use to chase state funding. Michelle Wesner, the district’s superintendent, said grant work competes with constant day-to-day school operations—duties that include supervising lunch, covering for absences and doing other tasks that leave little time to complete lengthy applications.
Wesner described applying for an $80,000 state grant for a welding career-tech program her 200-student district needs, while also worrying that the district might not receive it, as it has with some past grant requests. She said some grants in her district do not get completed at all because she does not have the time, and others only get attention late at night or before sunrise.
The challenge, education officials and advocates said, is tied to how Michigan structures funding: the state relies on competitive grants that require districts to meet eligibility rules and complete data-heavy applications within deadlines. With small rural districts spread across large areas, leaders say students have fewer opportunities to access programs ranging from welding and computer programming to advanced placement coursework for college credit.
In the 2024-25 school year, Michigan made available 102 state grants totaling about $7 billion, an amount that works out to nearly three grants per school week on average for programs that, for some districts, can take days to finish. Even with complaints leading to “a lessening of grants this year,” education leaders and policymakers interviewed in the story said the system continues to harm small districts.
Craig Thiel, research director at the Citizens Research Council, said the competitive dynamic pits districts with limited capacity against ones with more staff and expertise, saying they are “minnows competing against sharks.” Thiel’s comments came as the group released a report last year criticizing the state’s reliance on grants that smaller districts struggle to pursue.
Vanessa Keesler, president of Launch Michigan and a former deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education, said there is “growing agreement” that Michigan’s education budget is “too categorical (grant) heavy.” She argued that the emphasis on categorical competitive funding leaves rural districts with fewer resources to pursue programs that require application work and short timelines, even where the intent of categorical funding is to reduce disparities by directing money to particular populations and needs.
Johannesburg-Lewiston Area Schools is another district where grant-writing is tied to one person’s already-packed schedule. Superintendent Katy Xenakis-Makowski, who described the district as handling communications, social media and grant-writing while also functioning as a chief financial officer, said the paperwork and time demands can keep the district from completing certain grant steps even when the district is approved for money. She described hitting an application deadline on Feb. 27 at 5:30 p.m., when, she said, staffing coverage was limited and she was balancing multiple responsibilities.
Xenakis-Makowski also cited a previous example in which the district was approved for a $2,500 grant for a literacy camp, but she said paperwork to transfer the funds was too cumbersome for the time she could devote, leading to the district leaving the opportunity behind. She contrasted that experience with a larger district’s capacity, pointing to the contrast between the 20,000-student Dearborn City School District, which she said has more administrators than Johannesburg-Lewiston has total employees.
Across the Mackinac Bridge in Chippewa County, Rudyard Area Schools faces a similar problem under compressed schedules. Superintendent Tom McKee described days that start before dawn, including driving roads to check their condition for safe school, and later covering for staff absences—along with planning tasks like clearing snow with a front loader. McKee said a library grant had to be dropped because the paperwork could “might have taken me three weeks,” and he said grant timing often forces districts to weigh how much money they could receive against how much time grant work would require.
Rudyard, the story said, has career tech funding available through an Eastern Upper Peninsula Intermediate School District millage that provides $690,000, which officials described as supporting multiple career-tech programs. Even so, McKee said the district is still in the running for additional career tech funding through the Michigan Department of Education, including proposals to add programs such as cosmetology and middle school agriculture.
For Posen, the welding grant application represents a potential step toward expanding career tech offerings that the district does not have in-house beyond an old wood shop. Wesner described the planned welding program as a way to teach “life skills” for students she said are primarily low-income and need pathways to become self-sufficient in a region with few services and low pay. She said without grant funding, there is no easy way to carve out the $80,000 needed from the district’s $3.3 million annual budget without cutting staff or transportation.
Wesner said it is difficult for students across her 2,100-square-mile rural region to access career programs elsewhere because only four of the 10 districts in Otsego, Cheboygan and Presque Isle counties have access to any career tech programs. She described a welding program as useful for students who might repair tractors or work on equipment such as four-wheelers, even while noting that with fewer than 50 high school students in the district, only about five to seven students would attend.
Even when districts prepare applications, the outcome depends on statewide competition against programs that can include expanding agriscience in Alcona Community Schools or adding middle-school aeronautics programs in Wayne County. With the application deadline having passed for the career tech competitive grant that Posen, Johannesburg-Lewiston and Rudyard are bidding on, state officials told the districts to expect an answer by the end of March.
Michigan’s new top school leader, Glenn Maleyko, and former State Superintendent Michael Rice have both criticized grant-based competition, according to the story. Maleyko said one potential improvement would be providing more funding through grants where districts meet eligibility criteria, rather than requiring districts to compete for dollars. John Severson, executive director of the Michigan Association of Intermediate School Districts, said an alternative proposal—creating a dedicated pot of money to hire professional grant writers for small districts—could worsen a dog-eat-dog atmosphere in which schools “chase uncertain dollars.”
Severson said he favored moving some of the money now distributed through competitive grants into “weighted” formulas that direct dollars to all schools that meet criteria, including more funds for small schools or rural transportation. In Posen, Wesner said she is hoping grant reviewers look at the need for programs through the lens of which students lack access, not only how many students could attend a program. She said her district’s goal is equal opportunity for students regardless of ZIP code, an argument echoed by Johannesburg-Lewiston, where Xenakis-Makowski said, “They should all have equal opportunities, and it’s honestly not that way.”