#robert bobb

Robert Bobb is announcing a budget tonight that by law was supposed to be made public five days before adoption. Presumably today is adoption day, as it goes into effect in a few hours.

Yet the budget was still being changed as of yesterday. Despite the…

It's unclear if Bobb is still in the running. "Soon" is not defined, but sounds like weeks rather than months. Any external candidate would need significant time to be brought up to speed on the District's status.

Also interesting is an increasing amount of direct State intervention. The details are vague:

Bobb acknowledged that the state treasury department has taken a more prominent role in the district’s finances, such as monitoring payments.

"I fully intend to use the authority that was granted," Bobb said, referring to a new law that gives emergency managers the authority to modify -- or terminate -- collective bargaining agreements. It was the first time Bobb had publicly indicated he intends to use the expanded authority.

Lots of insights into Bing's thinking about DPS, the upcoming mayoral election, and the ability to get work done.:

The mayor, who has already signaled that he's running for re-election in 2013, had been amusedly exasperated by a story that day that criticized him for spending too much time in the office and not enough time pressing the flesh in the neighborhoods.

via Mark Maynard :

Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, just announced that he plans to shut down 70 of the city’s 142 remaining public schools in oder to close the much-talked-about $327 million budget gap. This move, he acknowledges, will bring high school class sizes to approximately 60.

I’d like to write a wonderful, thoughtful post on what this means for Detroit and the rest of the country, but it’s late. So, I’ll just leave you with this question… Who in the fuck would teach a class of 60 high school students, in Detroit, or anywhere else for that matter? And, here’s an even better question. At what point do the people of Detroit take to the streets and demand that their children be given the same opportunities that the students of Ann Arbor are given? [...] 

Teachers cannot effectively teach in an environment where they have less than a single minute to spend with each student per day. This is warehousing. This isn’t education. And the only thing it’s going to accomplish is better revenues for our for-profit prison industry. One way or the other, we’re going to spend money on these kids. I cannot believe that we’d rather pay to house them as criminals than teach them as children, but it looks like that’s the choice we’ve made. 

I wish I could find the quote about Detroit foreshadowing the United States - I'm paraphrasing, but - the stament argued that if we can't turn Detroit around, or to be more specific to the problem and not the symptoms, if we can't turn ourselves around and find meaning in the change it would take to turn a a ghost city like Detroit around, then Michigan will follow; and the midwest will follow, and all the states hit hardest by our gutted out educational system and tax policies will follow... if the above is an example of what we as a society do when faced with difficulty - ie, reduced revenue - then things are going to get much, much, much worse before they start to get better.