Public Schools: Model Use of Money

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Big Brother. Mott's money is also spent on efforts to cut down juvenile delinquency; it pays half the salary of the plainclothes detectives who are stationed in every junior and senior high school to spot troublemakers and keep them in line. The foundation supports high school courses for prisoners in the county jail, runs the nation's largest Big Brother agency, in which some 900 men become companions of fatherless kids. A high school course on unwed motherhood progresses, logically, to a course on planned parenthood.

Mott finances his own head-start program for preschool children, even a children's health center with an annual budget of $1,500,000. "It's not socialized medicine," Mott insists. "A kid just can't get an education if there's something medically wrong with him."

Mott, who spends little on himself, also donated the land and two main buildings for a two-year community college in Flint. He views the multifaceted Flint program as a pioneering effort designed to be copied by other cities. Some 70,000 educators have already come to Flint to inspect its schools firsthand, and more than 100 other communities have started versions of the Flint program. The University of Michigan even offers an M.A.-level course on the program at its Mott-built Flint branch. The 54 "interns" now in the year-long course get a minimum $5,000 stipend from the foundation.

With so many Mott millions available, the Flint schools might understandably be tempted to keep school tax rates low and rely increasingly on the foundation. But there is no better gauge of how much Flint residents appreciate what their schools offer than the fact that they have repeatedly approved any tax hike the school board has requested.