FOCUS D.C. Public Charter School Bulletin

March 23, 2006

--Operating, Facilities Funding to Increase in FY ‘07
--BOE Votes to Accelerate Consolidation of School Programs and Closure of Buildings
--DC Public Charter School Board Revokes Another Charter

Operating, Facilities Funding to Increase in FY ‘07

The mayor’s proposed FY 2007 budget, submitted to the Council on Monday, calls for an increase to $8,002 in the “foundation level” of the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF), hundreds of dollars above the FY 2006 amount. The increase had been recommended by the mayor’s State Education Office, which is required by law to reevaluate the UPSFF every two years.

The foundation level is the amount at which public school students in grades four through eight are funded; students in the other grades, considered more expensive to educate, are funded at between $8,242 and $9,362. Additional funding is provided for students in special education and ESL; adults are funded at 75% of the foundation level. Funding follows the student to his or her chosen school, system or charter.

In addition to the funds provided by the UPSFF, each charter student receives a per-pupil facilities allowance, which the mayor proposes to raise in FY 2007 to $2,810 per day-student and $7,586 for residential students. The per-pupil facilities allowance is designed to bring charter school facilities funding into rough parity with the school system’s capital budget: the allowance each year represents an average of the school system’s per-pupil capital budget over the previous five years.

The mayor’s budget proposes a total of $263,769,486 for charter schools, based on a predicted ‘07 enrollment of 19,345. The charter schools currently enroll approximately 17,500 students, 24% of total public school enrollment. The proposed budget also includes $1,096,086 for the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which charters approximately 70% of the District’s charter schools. In addition to receiving appropriated funds (Board of Education charter school funding is included in the DCPS budget), both chartering boards charge an administrative fee of 1/2 of 1% of the appropriated budget of each charter school they oversee.

BOE Votes to Accelerate Consolidation of School Programs and Closure of Buildings

Under pressure from parents and teachers to increase school-level funding, the Board of Education on March 15 voted unanimously to speed up the program of consolidations and closures it passed just last month. Under that program, DCPS would have had to drop its square footage by 1,000,000 by July of 2007 and by another 2,000,000 by July of 2008. Shortly after the announcement of the program the Superintendent indicated that he would seek to lease a quarter of a million square feet by this fall. Now the Board has directed the Superintendent to eliminate a million square feet by August 28, 2006, the first day of school.

According to a press release issued by the BOE, the money saved and earned by leasing this space will be added to the Weighted Student Formula, by which the District allocates operating funding to its individual schools.

According to recent studies, DCPS controls between five and six million square feet of space it no longer needs for its enrollment, which has declined by around 30% since 1996. FOCUS and other charter school advocates have been fighting for at least eight years to get DCPS to let charter schools occupy its unneeded space, but it was not until this year that a DCPS superintendent even admitted to having significant amounts of such space. The Board’s decision in February to get rid of three million square feet of this space was largely motivated by pressure from the Council in advance of its passage of the School Modernization Bill, which will provide the system with two billion dollars over the next ten years for school renovation.

DC Public Charter School Board Revokes Another Charter

The DCPCSB on Monday night voted to revoke the charter of the New School for Enterprise and Development, which opened its doors in the Fall of 2000 and currently enrolls 441 high school students. One hundred per cent of New School’s students are African American and 87% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. In a press release, the Board cited New School’s failure “to meet academic and governance performance standards....” Individual Board members spoke of “a pattern of chronic underperformance” at the school and of repeated attempts by the Board to get the school to fulfill its obligations under its charter. New School will officially close its doors on June 30.

Under D.C. law, charters are issued for 15 years but schools can be closed down at any time for financial mismanagement or failure to follow applicable laws and after five years for academic deficiencies. The DCPCSB, which currently oversees 34 charter schools, revoked the charter of Southeast Academy PCS in 2005. Another DCPCSB school, Associates for Renewal in Education, gave up its charter in 2003. Friendship Public Charter School took over Southeast Academy, reopening it as Friendship-Southeast Elementary in 2006. It is not known whether the Board is seeking another successful charter school to take over the education of New School students.

Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
1530 16th Street, NW #104
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 387-0405 phone
(202) 667-3798 fax
www.focusdc.org