MARQUETTE - Children at the Great Lakes Recovery Center in Marquette now have the chance to keep up with their schoolwork as the Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Services Agency voted to reinstate its educational program in the center during their regular meeting Monday night.
"We're very, very happy to bring it back," Peffers said. "It's a key component to the Great Lakes Recovery Center program for students and we're very happy that we were able to make this work and help them provide the educational component to their program."
MARESA was forced to shut the program down last year as a result of a lack of funding, which is largely based on the number of students enrolled in a program.
GLRC needed anywhere from eight to 10 students to receive enough state funding for the year, said Peffers, but on count day - the first Wednesday of October, which provides the state with the official number of students in a program for the year - only two court-mandated students were present.
Though there were other students that day, only the ones court-mandated to be there were counted for funding purposes. After count day, even if a student was sent to GLRC, the money that was provided for that student would stay in his/her home district.
However, thanks to new legislation - specifically, Section 25 of Public Act 201 of 2012 - that will take effect this school year, students who are sent to the program after count day will bring their state provided foundation allowance with them.
"The Great Lakes Recovery Center is full, or almost full of students. We're optimistic they'll stay that way through count day," Peffers said. "And here's the benefit of the Section 25. Where last year, we only had two students on count day, now students that come in after count day, we'll be able to go back and invoice the district. If we had had Section 25 rules in place a year ago, we would have had no problems. They were essentially full with a waiting list two weeks after count day (last year)."
Jackie Stark can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242. Her email address is jstark@miningjournal.net.