Detroit’s parent-complaint office resolved 96 issues, with 20 coaches on stipends

DETROIT — Detroit Public Schools Community District’s office for parent complaints resolved 96 issues in 2025-26, with 20 parent coaches, Hannah Dellinger reported. The Family, Advocacy, Intervention, and Restoration office, called FAIR, was piloted at 31 schools last fall and now works in every school in the district. Coaches are paid a stipend of up to $400 a month.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told Chalkbeat by email that the office exists so parents can take a complaint to the central office the right way, and so principals have help with parents “who are still learning effective ways to communicate their legitimate frustrations with schools and staff that avoid threats.” The article spells his first name Nikoali in that passage. The superintendent’s name is Nikolai. More than 1,431 parents and guardians received coaching. Staff held 58 trainings and workshops. The office heard five appeals of restriction letters. The district issued 56 of those letters in 2025-26. A restriction letter limits a parent’s access to a school after a disruption, and it lifts at the end of the school year.

An April board presentation, opened separately, is an earlier snapshot of the same office, not a second set of year-end numbers. At that point the deck counted 75 matters resolved, 1,068 parents coached, 40 trainings, and 4 appeals against 41 restriction letters. The November account is the larger, later count. The deck also names three program associates under the chief external engagement officer and says the 31 pilot schools were chosen with the Office of Schools and the district’s public-safety department, based on restrictions and incidents. Chief external engagement officer Sharlonda Buckman told Dellinger the coaching is a conversation, help finding a resource, and a handoff to an administrator when that is what the problem needs.

Enrollment barely moved

Two of the office’s stated goals are to keep students and to “improve family favorability toward the district.” Dellinger reported fall enrollment above 49,620, compared with 49,717 in 2018-19, the year she uses as the baseline for a district whose enrollment has stayed roughly flat for a decade. The fall-to-fall re-enrollment rate this year is 73 percent, 3 points higher than in 2018-19. Chronic absenteeism, state test scores, and teacher vacancies have improved in that decade, she wrote. Headcount has not.

Parent Tanisha Kuhn Sewart, who has five children in the district, told Dellinger the office is where a cleanliness problem or “bad customer service” goes. The article later spells her name Kuhn Stewart. She said she sent another parent there who was ready to leave the district because “she was not being treated right.” Vitti said the office also sat in the middle of student incidents that involved more than one family, so students could still go to graduation.

What 96 does not include

The 96 are issues the office says it closed. They are not a count of every complaint a principal heard and handled in the building. The April deck’s examples were student services, how an incident was handled, discipline, and customer service, plus informal help for the civil-rights office and meetings after an incident when a principal asked. Dellinger’s November story does not reprint that menu. Both describe the same job: a restorative meeting, or a parent who needs the discipline process explained, before the fight reaches the superintendent.

The photograph is Cass Technical High School, which the April deck lists among the 31 pilot schools. It is not the FAIR office and it is not a parent meeting.

Sources:
Chalkbeat Detroit, Hannah Dellinger, “Detroit school district opens office to handle parent complaints and mediate school conflicts,” Nov. 12, 2026, https://www.chalkbeat.org/detroit/2026/11/12/dpscd-fair-office-opened-to-de-escalate-parent-conflicts/
DPSCD superintendent report to the board, April 2026, FAIR progress figures, https://go.boarddocs.com/mi/detroit/Board.nsf/pfiles/DTERS96F5C23/$file/April%202026%20COW_Superintendent%20Report_FINAL_2.pdf
Photo: Notorious4life, “Cass Technical High School, Detroit (2012).jpg”, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACass_Technical_High_School%2C_Detroit_%282012%29.jpg

Detroit

Tags: Detroit · DPSCD · Schools · Parents