Music cuts strike inharmonious chord

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – Budget struggles have forced many K-12 public school districts to make sacrifices over the last decade – and the steady disappearance of music programs has hit a sour note among some parents and educators. You could even say it struck a discordant chord. About 77 percent of teachers and 64 percent of parents rated music and arts education important or extremely important in a nationwide survey dubbed “Striking a Chord” andconducted by the National Association of Music Merchants Foundation. The foundation supports research and develops public service programs to improve music participation. “K-12 education includes exposure and experiences in the arts, and I think that when students don’t have access to that, it makes a huge impact on their present learning as well as their future career opportunity,” said Linda Wacyk, director of communications for the Michigan Association of School Administrators.

No easy solution for underfunded teacher pensions

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – The Michigan Public School Employee Retirement System (MPSERS) is setting new records – and not in a good way. The pension system is underfunded by $26.5 billion – the biggest hole ever, according to the Midland-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. MPSERS serves K-12 public school districts, community colleges, intermediate districts and a handful of libraries and public universities. As of last year, it had 227,756 active members and 204,512 retirees. The fund’s liabilities have been increasing for decades, said Jarrett Skorup, a policy analyst with the Mackinac Center.

Proposal to stop paid leave for school union reps draws fire

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – A Republican-backed bill targeting public union officers could end up leaving schools suffering, say some education experts. The Michigan Education Association (MEA) and Michigan Association of School Boards both oppose a bill they say would hit collective bargaining and is a state overreach into decision-making by local school districts. The bill would prohibit school personnel and all other public employees except police officers, firefighters and prison guards from having union officers with full-time union duties on their payroll. That’s something normally decided between employers, unions and employees. Employers like school districts would also be unable to pay part-time union representatives for time spent on union duties like meeting with school boards and coworkers.

Advocates say state needs more discretion with youth offenders

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – Michigan’s tough approach to youth crime is under scrutiny. It’s the result of a bigger problem, says Kathleen Bailey, a professor and director of the School of Criminal Justice at Grand Valley State University. The problem boils down to “get tough” policies Michigan and many other states passed in the 1980s and 1990s on juvenile crime, she said. Those laws created policies like “adult time for adult crime,” which encouraged charging youth as adults ¬– often with stricter sentencing and more jail time – in the wake of what many people feared was a massive juvenile crime wave. “What happened is you got these unforgiving sentences and policies against youth offenders that were kind of built by a lie – the Armageddon never came,” Bailey said.

Debate continues on how to get the lead out – of ammo

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – Hunting is killing Michigan wildlife – and not just in the way you think. It’s because a toxic metal – lead – has been a hunting staple for centuries. Despite being removed from products like paint, gasoline and pesticides, lead remains popular for shot and bullets due to its malleability and tendency to fracture, making for bigger wound tracks and faster kills. That fracturing has its downsides, however. Lead fragments in gut piles – left behind when hunters lighten the load to carry their kill out of the woods – can put wildlife at risk of ingesting remnants of the toxin, according to the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin.

New tax, regulations proposed for medical marijuana

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – Medical marijuana patients might have a bit harder time paying for their pot if tax legislation that recently passed the House becomes law. Current medical marijuana regulations don’t include any tax on the drug, but that could change under a three-bill package that passed the House in a landslide vote. One sponsor, Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville, also a chiropractor, said the legislation is an important move for Michigan as the possibility of legalization looms.

“We need to address this before it addresses us,” Callton said. “What happens in some places that legalize is you have no laws, no regulatory structure. It was really hard for them to get Pandora back in the box.

Opponents say energy bills would benefit utility companies

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – A pair of Senate bills would shift the state’s focus away from renewable energy to the benefit of large utility companies – and Michigan’s budding renewable market could be left out in the cold, according to opponents like the Sierra Club. “Essentially, these bills would destroy our current system of supporting renewables, efficiency and all the things that make our energy portfolio cleaner and more sustainable,” said Mike Berkowitz, the staff political director of the Michigan Sierra Club’s Political Committee. “The bills would eliminate Michigan’s renewable energy standard, sunset our energy efficiency standard and gut our net metering program, which would essentially destroy the solar industry in Michigan.”

But the chair of the Senate Energy and Technology Committee, Sen. Mike Nofs, R–Battle Creek, said the plan would instead make Michigan’s energy market more competitive and fair, without the state giving certain types of generation preferential treatment. He and the committee’s vice chair, Sen. John Proos, R-St. Joseph, sponsored the bills.

State’s move toward clean energy picks up steam

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – As Michigan utility companies near a state deadline for generating more power from renewable sources with wide success, a new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard could push the state toward clean energy at an even faster pace. In August, the EPA announced the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a blueprint for cutting nearly a third of carbon emissions from power plants by 2030. Power plants are the nation’s biggest single contributor to carbon emissions, producing 31 percent, according to the EPA. “The clean power plan is going to drive a major transformation in how we produce energy in the state, throughout the Midwest and really, throughout the country,” said John Austerberry, communications manager for DTE Energy Co., one of Michigan’s largest energy providers. The CPP gives states 15 years to meet emission reduction requirements and will set goals and checkpoints to guide states along the way.

Benefits of summer jobs include better habits, grades

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – A summer job might be a great way to put some money in teens’ pockets, but a recent study shows that part-time jobs offer them much more than a paycheck. In addition to earnings, students participating in Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEP) across the country have better grade point averages, showed more responsibility in social and sexual behaviors and had better attendance records than those who didn’t, according to the study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. SYEP is a federal program created in 1979 that provides jobs, including jobs for Michigan residents ages 16 to 24, especially low-income, at-risk teens, who tend to benefit the most, according to the study of SYEP programs in New York. Lisa Anderson, the youth services coordinator for Networks Northwest Michigan WORKS!, said her organization primarily assists struggling, economically disadvantaged youth. “That’s who we’re supposed to serve – the hardest to serve,” she said.

Lawmakers mull tougher poaching penalties

By BROOKE KANSIER
Capital News Service
LANSING – Poaching can mean serious problems for wildlife management – especially for Michigan’s struggling and carefully managed populations like moose and elk, according to the Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC). And state officials are working to curb it. A bill package going through the Legislature would increase penalties for poaching in the form of a steep hike in restitution that poachers must pay to the state. The legislation would also lengthen hunting license suspensions for some violations – poaching a moose or elk, for example, would get a 15-year suspension for a first-time offense and a lifetime ban for repeat offenses, up from a flat three years per violation. “So when poachers do get caught, it really hits them in the wallet,” said Sen. Phil Pavlov, R-St.