Now, Detroit Public Schools are so far in the red it might not be able to pay teachers through the end of the school year, and two bills are moving through the Michigan legislature aimed at preventing a financial catastrophe. The version passed by the House of Representatives in the early hours of May 5 includes $500 million in debt relief for the district, which would remain under state control. The bill would also impose restrictions on teachers’ ability to bargain contracts and outlaw the strikes over crumbling buildings, among other provisions. Meanwhile, in March the state Senate passed a bill favored by Detroit lawmakers that would return control of the schools to the local, elected school board and create a Detroit Education Commission with the authority to make decisions on things like school closures and minimum acceptable outcomes for charter schools. A conference committee will now attempt to reconcile the radically different bills.

Heard was part of the group that drafted the recommendations on which the Senate bill is based. As the political process unfolded, she’s become a citizen lobbyist, driving parents to the Capitol to explain to lawmakers why they should abandon the policies she believes have driven the school systems’ rapid decline. “Families here are beat down and bitter,” says Heard. “I should be going to parent-teacher conferences and volunteering at the school as much as I can. But instead I’m driving back and forth to Lansing.” Heard and her fellow parents want the legislature to approve the Senate bill on the grounds that it would enable an entirely new system of oversight and drive quality. No one knows whether it will work—there hasn’t ever been anything like it.

But then again, the country has probably never witnessed an education crisis quite like Detroit’s.

* * *

Inside a church on Detroit’s East Side, Mayor Mike Duggan faces a crowd of hardened skeptics. It’s been a generation since an elected official delivered in this city in any meaningful way, but the mayor has shown up with a PowerPoint laying out precisely what his 2-year-old administration has done since he took office in 2014.

After clicking through slides mapping new streetlights, foreclosed homes, and the teardown of crumbling buildings, he finally gets to abandoned schools, which he calls “one of the worst contributors to the blight.” Since the state first took over the city’s schools in 1999, almost 200 Detroit Public Schools buildings have closed; 81 sit vacant.

If they think about Detroit at all, most people likely imagine a city in inexorable decline caused by the collapse of its auto industry. But the roots of the problems confronting its schools actually go back further—to 1966, when enrollment peaked at close to 300,000 students and white flight began. And as Duggan highlighted, there’s also another, much more recent backstory to the current crisis: the state-appointed emergency managers who seized control of Detroit Public Schools in 1999 and ran the district for all but several of the years since then.