The Ann Arbor Board of Education voted to remove the $100 tuition it planned to charge students wanting to take a seventh hour class at Huron and Pioneer High Schools this year.
Glenn Nelson is the treasurer of the Ann Arbor Board of Education and was the first to suggest the tuition-based seventh hour program.Nelson says the district will not be able to support the option for seventh hour classes forever, and if the state continues to enforce its current policy of not reimbursing districts for seventh hour classes, they might have to be eliminated all together.
"There needs to be a way to pay for the expense of offering it. If we don't figure that out we are just in trouble on the kind of broad education that students need to be ready for enjoying and competing in a modern world."
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the school district, claiming the tuition charge denied students access to free and equal public education.
“We really wish the governmental public system would support a broad education for students the way it did 15 years ago... It would be very troubling to have to eliminate these things and we are working hard to keep them” says Nelson.
About 20 percent of students at Huron and Pioneer High Schools take a seventh hour class during the school year.
-Lindsay Hall, Michigan Radio Newsroom
