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The Detroit Public Schools Community District has started planning for what it will do when it spends the last of the $94.4 million from its literacy lawsuit settlement.
Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, speaking at a board committee meeting last week, said once the one-time funds are gone, the district may have to make difficult choices about what programs to keep. The district has been spending about $30 million a year from settlement funds. The money will be gone by the end of the next school year.
Vitti said his top priority is to keep the hundreds of academic interventionists hired by the district. Last year, the district spent $17.3 million of the settlement funds to pay the salaries of 267 interventionists.
An anticipated increase in state funding could cover the cost of the positions, he suggested. If not, the district may have to make “hard decisions,” he said, including considering other budget cuts.
The 2016 federal “right to read” lawsuit alleged long-time funding inequities in Michigan led to unsafe conditions in Detroit schools, which denied children in the city “access to the most basic building block of education: literacy.” The literacy lawsuit was settled by the state in 2020, and three years later, the money was allocated to DPSCD.
District officials created a three-year plan to use the money to improve literacy instruction, provide intervention for struggling students, and boost proficiency rates. The plan was based on community input and recommendations made by a task force.
Next school year will be the final one in the plan.
The district began spending the settlement in the 2024-25 school year. Those dollars have been used to add the 267 academic interventionists to work with students in grades K-2, hire 44 more teachers to reduce class sizes in some schools, hire another 43 teachers to free up teacher leaders for coaching other educators, and contract reading tutors, among other items.
(Before the settlement, the district employed interventionists in some schools with federal and grant funding. In 2022, DPSCD received $20 million from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, which was used to hire more.)
Imani Foster, an advocate with 482Forward, a local nonprofit focused on educational equity, said the interventionists have helped close gaps for struggling students.
“I think it’s really important to keep the [academic interventionists],” she said. “It’s really unfortunate the way our budget works and that there may not be enough money to keep them and everything else the district has invested in.”
Vitti has previously pointed to district data to show how the settlement investments have paid off. For example, among students with similar performance on district assessments, students in classrooms with interventionists showed more improvement over time compared to their peers without, he said.
The district also reached an 11-year high in the percentage of third graders who met or exceeded proficiency in English language arts on the 2024-25 state assessment. Students in the district showed more year-over-year growth in proficiency compared to the statewide average.
Despite the growth, overall proficiency rates in DPSCD still lag far behind the statewide average. While 38.9% of grade 3 Michigan students scored at or above proficiency last spring, the average in DPSCD was 13%.
In order to continue DPSCD’s progress in literacy, Vitti said the district’s initial strategy will be to use anticipated increases in state at-risk funding to absorb the cost of the academic interventionists.
Initial budget conversations in Lansing suggest the legislature has an interest in continuing to increase weighted per-pupil at-risk funding, Vitti said. The amount of targeted funding given to districts in Michigan is based on the percentage of students they serve living in poverty. The dollars can be used for instructional programs and some services, including medical, mental health, or counseling services.
Other costs of initiatives paid for with settlement dollars, such as merit pay for educators whose classes met ambitious literacy goals, may be eligible to be absorbed by other state or federal grants, Vitti said.
Though Foster is glad the district has focused on improving early literacy, she said she hopes other initiatives that reach older students, like free after-school online tutoring, will remain.
Some students who are now in high school were starting school when the inequities highlighted in the literacy lawsuit were still acute, said Foster.
“We can’t forget about them,” she said.
The superintendent said the board will have to start having more in-depth conversations about making up the funding gap around the beginning of next year.
Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.
April 6, 2026: This story was updated to show the average proficiencies in third grade reading in Michigan and DPSCD.
