Lori Higgins

Detroit Free Press

The newly elected school board for the Detroit Public Schools Community District is hiring a law firm to possibly sue the state over its plan to close as many as 16 schools in the district.

The board held a special meeting today, going into closed session to discuss the lawsuit. When members emerged, they voted unanimously to hire the Miller Canfield law firm.

When the board voted to hire the law firm, there were cheers throughout the crowd gathered at board offices in the Fisher Building in the New Center area.

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"We are authorizing DPSCD to take legal action when timely and appropriate to present why we believe these school closures cannot legally move forward," Iris Taylor, the board president, said while reading a statement after the board voted.

She said the board hopes to avoid legal action.

"However, we reserve the right to do so," Taylor said.

The state School Reform Office announced last month that 38 schools statewide will potentially close at the end of the current school year because they've been ranked in the bottom 5% academically for three straight years, from 2014 to 2016. Such schools are called priority schools.

The list included 25 schools in Detroit — 16 in the Detroit district, eight in the Education Achievement Authority, and one charter school.

The achievement authority, a state reform district that opened in 2012 to turn around some of the worst-performing schools in Detroit, is being phased out after this school year and the schools returned to the Detroit district.

The school reform office has been under fire since it started aggressively trying to intervene with failing schools. The East Detroit Public Schools last year sued the state to block the office's plan to appoint a CEO to take over the academics of four of its schools. The four schools had been on the priority list, but three of them have since been removed. The lawsuit, meanwhile, is before the Michigan Court of Claims.

The office is to make final closure decisions by later this month or early March. A school can get a reprieve if the office determines that closing a school would pose a hardship for students who would not be able to enroll in a better-performing nearby school.

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The board Wednesday also criticized letters the reform office sent parents - letters the Free Press wrote about two weeks ago. According to a statement read during the meeting, parents were told "they should consider sending their child to communities as far as Holly and East China to find a quality school."

The board said the district has closed more than 150 schools since 2009 - closures that have "imposed serious hardship on Detroit schoolchildren."

Alycia Meriweather, the district's interim superintendent, said she's thankful the board "is willing to fight to keep our schools open."

"At the end of the day we are keenly aware that we have to make some improvements," Meriweather said.

The management team, Meriweather said, is working around the clock to develop improvement plans for those schools. Within the next 10 days, she said, those plans will be finalized.

"There are going to be some very different approaches being made, under local control," Meriweather said.

"I don’t work in this district to close schools," Meriweather said. "I work in this district and I took this job to improve school ... I’m confident that we’re going to be able to move that forward."

Last week, the district held a summit in which leaders from several districts nationwide came to share their school turnaround efforts.

And several other groups, including the Detroit Parent Network, have held parent meetings in recent weeks to discuss what to do about the planned school closings.

A meeting is planned for 6-8 p.m. Thursday at Pershing High School, 18875 Ryan Road. That meeting is being organized by Detroit City Councilman Scott Benson.

Meanwhile, at noon Thursday, the state Senate Education Committee will hold the second hearing in as many weeks on proposed legislation to repeal the law that allows the reform office to close failing schools. Sen. Phil Pavlov, R-St. Clair, who introduced the legislation, has said the law itself has been a failure and has done little to improve struggling schools. He plans to introduce a replacement.

Miller Canfield is the same law firm that provided a legal opinion last summer that said the state was unable to close schools in Detroit for three years. The lawyers had argued that because the Legislature in June passed a $617-million financial-rescue package that resolved the district's debt - and created the DPSCD as a new district - the reform office wouldn't be able to close schools until 2019.

But Attorney General Bill Schuette issued a conflicting opinion in September, saying that if the Legislature had intended to give the district a three-year reprieve, that would have been clear in the legislation. He said it was not.

The law firm's earlier work, said Board Vice President Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, means "we're not starting from ground zero on this."



Contact Lori Higgins: 313-222-6651, lhiggins@freepress.com or @LoriAHiggins.