MIDLAND —In monitoring the status of privatization in Michigan schools since a 1994 law made it easier for school boards to contract out, Mackinac Center for Public Policy analysts note a clear trend: Privatization is becoming a powerful tool for saving money and improving service quality.
Food services are among the school functions being increasingly contracted out. One for-profit company alone, Canteen, now has contracts with at least 70 Michigan school districts amounting to more than $35 million in sales. Canteen did, however, lose one important contract with an organization that has long opposed privatization whenever school boards did it. Since the Mackinac Center revealed that the Michigan Education Association contracted with Canteen at its own East Lansing union headquarters, the union terminated the relationship, opting instead to have its employees eat lunch from vending machines.
In the Livingston County community of Pinckney, where privatization was a hot issue in the early 1990s, the school board recently ended its contract with Johnson Controls and brought custodial workers back into district employment.
But statewide, says Michigan Privatization Report managing editor Michael LaFaive, "the school privatization revolution is intact and picking up speed." Hardly a week goes by, says LaFaive, "that we fail to hear about half a dozen new explorations of the concept." One of the many interesting possibilities, he notes, comes from Ingham County, where the Mason Board of Education is strongly considering privatizing part of its technology training program.
