For years now, Michigan’s public schools have been grappling with a persistent teacher shortage and lower-than-national-average funding.
The numbers tell a difficult story: Michigan’s education workforce has grown over the past three years – but teacher shortages still persist across many parts of the state, particularly in special education.
That’s despite the state spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a wide range of efforts to train new teachers and keep them on staff, including apprenticeships, mentorship and recognition programs, and research into the teacher workforce.
Grand Rapids Public Schools, one of West Michigan’s largest school districts, is feeling the strain. The district – once home to the best high school in the state as ranked by one publication – is now struggling to hire and retain teachers like elementary school teacher Malori Salamango.
When she spoke at a recent school board meeting, it had been just under five months since Salamango, a second-year teacher, last stood before the Grand Rapids Public Schools Board of Education.
“I spoke in January when my caseload was at 21, which is one over the limit. After that meeting, I was fact-checked, not given adequate support,” she told the school board at a meeting in May.
Since then, she said, things had only gotten worse. Her caseload has continued to grow, and she’s been working more than 60 hours a week just to keep up.
“That's how you lose teachers like the resource teacher before me, and that is why I am resigning from my position,” she announced, the crowd groaning as they heard the news.
Salamango has spent the last two years working at GRPS’ Southwest Elementary School - Academia Bilingüe, a dual immersion school in English and Spanish. As a special education teacher, she works with students with disabilities from kindergarten through fourth grade. Her job is to update and keep track of each student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP).
In the classroom this could mean pulling out a student for specialized instruction for a number of minutes per week.
“I have some students that have a really low amount of of minutes, like 30 to 60 minutes a week, and then I have some that are all the way to 376 minutes per week, and legally I have to be meeting those minutes every single week as much as I can,” Salamango told Michigan Public in an interview.
An IEP outlines the educational goals and services to which each student is entitled, according to federal guidelines.
Salamango said she’s not supposed to have a caseload of more than 20 students, but this year her school lost its only other resource teacher, and she had to take on additional students.
Salamango isn't alone in facing these challenges. The teacher shortage has persisted across Grand Rapids Public Schools since 2020 when the district’s daily substitute rate surged from 1.8% to 18.6%.
State data reveals the scope of the problem. In the 2023-24 school year, GRPS employed 866 full-time teachers — a 10-year low for the district.
Now, GRPS officials say, more than 90 teaching positions remain unfilled across the district. To keep classrooms running, the district has turned to stopgap measures, relying on long-term substitute teachers and, in some cases, remote instruction delivered via video conference.
Some critics point to the district’s teacher salaries as a driving factor behind the ongoing shortages.
“If you look at the career earnings of a teacher in Grand Rapids Public Schools, it pales in comparison to other districts,” said Matt Marlowe, president of the Grand Rapids Education Association, the union representing teachers at GRPS.
Over half of Grand Rapids' full-time teaching staff have 10 or fewer years of experience. Data from the union shows the median salary for those teachers was under $50,000 last school year. A report from Michigan State University found schools are relying on new teachers more, but those new teachers are also more likely to leave the profession.
The highest salaries in the district are just under $88,000, but the majority of teachers anywhere near that salary level have decades of experience and masters degrees. The union wants the district to increase salaries by shifting funds from executive positions to teachers.
“The district spends less than half of their money on instruction, which is very unusual, and about half of their employees are non-instruction, not counting administration,” said Marlowe.
High salaries for district leaders have long been a point of contention. State data show the district’s superintendent and other top officials each made an average of over $200,000 in 2024. The district’s best-paid teacher received less than half of that.
Over the past year, the union has been pressing the district to raise teacher salaries by 7.5% before the teachers’ contract expires at the end of the month.
“We are working to rectify through our negotiations with the union and we greatly appreciate what our teachers are doing every day inside of our schools and we are working to improve upon that,” Luke Stier, director of communications and community liaison at Grand Rapids Public Schools.
Stier pointed out that teachers already received a raise at the start of the school year and that the district has offered to make it retroactive — bringing the total pay increase to roughly 3%.
This last school year the district has been operating with a shortfall of millions dollars caused in part by the cuts to COVID-19 emergency relief funds from the federal government.
“We’re projecting that our general fund balance will have gone from $40 million last year to about $28 million this year,” Stier added.
To make up for the deficit, the 2025-2026 school year budget includes a salary freeze for district leaders for the immediate future, along with the removal of at least nine existing positions including two executive director roles. Union and district officials have not confirmed what percentage of the funds budgeted for instructional expenditures would go toward teacher salary raises.
The salary concerns at GRPS reflect a statewide pattern. Michigan's struggles with teacher compensation aren't new — during the 2021-2022 school year, the state offered the lowest average starting salary for teachers among all Great Lakes states.
Some economics and education experts trace this back to 2002, when the state made significant cuts to public education funding that continue to reverberate today.
“It was the sharpest decline in education funding of any state and it lasted for 15 years,” said David Arsen, professor emeritus and researcher at MSU College of Education.
Arsen has spent the last several decades analyzing the state’s school budget and its impact.
A 2019 report from Michigan State University on the state’s school funding found that the total K-12 education funding declined by 30% between 2002 and 2015. About three-quarters of that drop was due to declining state support for schools. During that same period, per-pupil revenue declined by 22%.
That drop happened as the proportion of students requiring extra help rose.
“We did a very poor job of adjusting the revenues, matching the revenues that districts received for the differences in costs of educating special education, children from poverty, and English-language learners,” Arsen added.
As demographics in the state have changed, its budget priorities haven’t. In fact, Michigan ranks dead last among states in total education revenue growth.
“This represents a decline of over $1 billion annually in state revenues for K-12 education between 1995 and 2015,” Arsen said.
Even though state funding has risen slightly in recent years, Arsen said it still hasn’t made up for lost ground. Meanwhile, Michigan students continue to score below the national average, especially in reading.
These consequences have been especially apparent in Grand Rapids, Arsen said, where state data show more than 75% of kids are economically disadvantaged.
To help fix this, some advocates are backing a ballot initiative that would add an additional 5% income tax rate on earnings above $500,000 for individuals or $1 million for couples filing jointly, and direct that money to schools..
The State Board of Canvassers will decide this week whether the group behind Invest in MI Kids can begin to collect signatures.
Some critics argue the proposal could hurt small business owners and keep some people from wanting to stay in or move to Michigan.
But for some Grand Rapids Public School teachers, it could be an incentive to stay.
For teachers like Malori Salamango, however, that solution would come a little too late.
“I moved here for this job. That's not a light commitment so I would have liked to stay, but I need to put myself first,” she said.
Salamango is not giving up on her lifelong dream of being a teacher, and plans to continue helping kids learn how to read. But this time, she won't be with the school district.
