DETROIT — Seventeen years ago, David Adamany, the retired president of Wayne State University, was the first-ever emergency manager of the Detroit Public Schools.

Compared to today, the schools were doing well. There were still about 170,000 students, and voters had approved a $1.5 billion bond issue to fix physically crumbling buildings.

But when I met with him one afternoon for lunch, he spoke unhappily about his frustrations, about inefficiency, waste, recalcitrant unions, and bureaucracy.

Mr. Adamany was rightly regarded as a wizard at getting the most out of a budget, and at making systems work. He had built Wayne State, where this columnist teaches, into a fiscally solvent top-level research university, while lowering tuition.

But he wasn’t having that kind of success with Detroit’s schools. “I wish I had never taken this job,” he said.

I told him I assumed that was off the record. “No — write that. Maybe then I’ll be lucky and they’ll fire me,” he said, before indicating he was really joking.

That was 1999. Fast forward to 2016. Earlier this month, with Detroit Public Schools on the brink of bankruptcy and total collapse, the legislature has passed a package that in theory enables them to start over and have a chance for success.

But critics and educational experts say what the lawmakers passed is, in fact, a cynical dodge guaranteed to finally destroy the public schools — and maybe torpedo Detroit’s fragile comeback in the process.

There’s no real mystery how the schools got to this point. The decline has been long in coming, starting with the flight to the suburbs in the 1950s. But it moved with warp speed after the state switched to a per-pupil funding system and the proliferation of publicly funded “charter” schools in the 1990s.

David Adamany did, in fact, do a good job in 1999-2000, but nothing he or anyone else did turned things around.

The schools were returned to local control, but incompetent and corrupt school boards soon squandered their chance, and the schools were once again taken over by a parade of emergency managers. Many talked a good game, but did nothing to stem the hemorrhage of students to charters and the suburbs, or to stop the steadily mounting debt.

By the time school got out for summer this year, the schools’ total debt was more than half a billion dollars. There were barely 47,000 students left, many in crumbling buildings, some with mold, inadequate heat, dead rodents, and plumbing that often didn’t work.

The situation became so bad that Detroit Public Schools would have run out of money to meet payroll last April, had the legislature not passed an emergency appropriation.

Nobody, even the worst Detroit haters in the legislature, wanted the schools to go into bankruptcy now. Michigan’s Constitution requires the state to provide every child with an education. Had DPS gone bankrupt, the state would have been stuck with expenses that could have been in the billions.

Gov. Rick Snyder crafted a highly praised plan to save the schools, modeled somewhat on the successful General Motors bankruptcy.

The schools would be divided into an “old” system which would pay down the debt, and a new, debt-free district that would concentrate on educating the students.

The cost would be $715 million. Central to the plan was a new Detroit Education Commission that would determine where any new schools, conventional or charter, could open.

The idea was to prevent some districts in poorer areas from being underserved. Mayor Mike Duggan enthusiastically endorsed the idea, and also called for the ability to close the worst-performing charter schools, some of which fail to get 90 percent of their students to even minimum levels.

To the surprise of some, the plan got bipartisan support in the state Senate, which passed it in May. But the far more ideological state House rejected the Detroit Education Commission and cut the funding to $617 million.

Judge Steven Rhodes, the “transition manager” of the Detroit Public Schools said this was not nearly enough. In a particularly cruel blow, the legislature specified that no more than $25 million could be used to fix up crumbling school buildings. Yet the state Senate then caved in and accepted the House plan, and Mr. Snyder indicated he would sign it.

The plan passed without a single vote from any Democrats or the Detroit delegation. Nor did the leadership try to get any Detroit support. “You cowards! You damn cowards to even take up this legislation … and not have even one Detroiter in the room,” state Sen. Morris Hood, a Detroit Democrat, bellowed.

Brian Dickerson, a Detroit Free Press columnist who intensely follows the issue, had a different interpretation.

People like Speaker of the House Kevin Cotter (R., Midland) knew exactly what they were doing: They want to destroy Detroit Public Schools.

“The $617 million the legislature appropriated is the minimum necessary to avoid [bankruptcy] until a.) incumbent legislators are no longer in office, and b.) charter operators are better poised to fill the vacuum created by the district’s complete collapse,” he wrote.

There is clearly some racism involved too; many outstate legislators won’t say it publicly, but clearly don’t believe poor black people can ever run schools that work.

In fact, it’s not certain that even the governor’s plan would have saved the schools, long-term. Detroit Public Schools’ image was further marred by a scandal this spring in which more than a dozen principals were arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving nonexistent school supplies.

But now DPS seems guaranteed to fail — and possibly derail Detroit’s fragile comeback as well.

For without a functioning public school system families can trust, Detroit can, at best, be no more than a place of glittering hipsters and unspeakable slums.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com

First Published June 17, 2016, 4:00 a.m.