LANSING – Michigan has cut real spending on students over the past 12 years, witnesses told the House Appropriations School Aid Subcommittee on Tuesday.

When inflation is considered, total spending on Michigan’s K-12 system has fallen by 18 percent in 12 years, Steven Norton of Michigan Parents for Schools told the subcommittee.

Subcommittee members also heard concerns about the costs of transportation per pupil, which is not being reimbursed.

And the head of the state’s leading charter school association urged that the Legislature to put the emphasis of school funding on the foundation grant for students and not categorical expenditures.

Norton challenged Governor Rick Snyder’s comments when he unveiled his proposed budget that the state was now putting more into schools after major cutbacks during the recession.

Even considering relatively good fiscal years, the state is spending less on education than it did at the beginning of the century, Norton said. Total spending from state sources, in 1999-2000 dollars, amounted to more than $10.5 billion in the 2001-12 budget, Mr. Norton said. In real dollars, that spending has fallen to about $8.8 billion in the current 2012-13 budget, he said.

And that does not include what local districts have done to make in up shortfalls in the cost of education for special education students, he said.

Norton acknowledged it was impossible to state exactly what schools should spend per student to help assure good outcomes. However, most the states with higher performance spend more per student, he said.

Don Olendorf, representing pupil transit providers, said the cost for running Michigan’s 17,000 school buses is some $770 million a year. It costs $776 a year to transport the average pupil, but the cost for transporting special education students runs between $5,000 and $6,000 a year.

When Proposal A passed in 1994, the separate funds for transportation were rolled into the overall foundation allowance.

Saying transportation is a “horrible expense” for rural school districts, Olendorf urged the subcommittee to look at ways to fund the service.

But Dan Quisenberry, president of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, said he was pleased that Mr. Snyder’s proposed budget put its focus on increasing the proposal pupil foundation grant and eliminated categoricals.

That helps provide greater flexibility to schools to put money where it is most needed, he said.

He also questioned whether the state’s decision to offer performance dollars to public schools was having the desired effect. Schools are reluctant to seek that money because they have no confidence the financing will continue, he said.

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