Submitted by Anonymous on
Amid D.C. Council deliberations over Mayor Vincent Gray’s $77 million supplemental spending package, the District’s public charter schools have been left reeling. A recent series of political maneuvers will dearly cost the students of these publicly funded schools.
Rumors spread before the council’s vote on the mayor’s supplemental package. Among the more serious included a suggestion that charter schools’ quarterly payments from the city might be stopped unless the council voted on the spending package.
Sadly, this is merely the latest example of adults playing politics with children’s education in the District.
Recently, in an announcement made hours before the mayor spoke at an annual gathering of D.C.’s public charter school community, his office announced $9.4 million for charters to cover “spending pressures” — wrongly implying charters had overspent their funds.
In fact, the money was already owed to charters under an automatic funding formula through which the city funds them and traditional public schools. The mayor misleadingly categorized this money as a “supplemental” increase to charters’ budgets, despite the fact that the city would have to pay it anyway.
Some $2.8 million would have been provided to charters because their enrollment of special-education students increased this year. A further $6.6 million was earmarked for higher-than-expected summer school enrollment. When student enrollment increases, the city has to increase funding, as schools receive money according to the number of students they enroll.
The real reason for miscategorizing these funds appears to have been to provide political cover for the mayor’s proposal to supplement the D.C. Public Schools budget to offset $25.2 million of actual overspending. Unlike charter schools, which have to cut back if they overspend their budgets, the school system routinely exceeds its appropriation. Eventually the council approved a supplemental appropriation for D.C. charter schools of $6.971 million.
Under D.C. law, city funds to all public schools are supposed to be paid via a funding formula designed to ensure that students at both types of schools are funded equally. Instead, the mayor sought to increase public education funding by $25.2 million, and allocate 100 percent of that money to D.C. Public Schools.
These shenanigans will widen the city funding disparity between charters and traditional public schools, which has increased over the years as the city has increasingly resorted to funding the school system outside the legally mandated funding formula. What makes this more depressing is that Mayor Gray promised to close the city’s funding disparity. Over the past five years, District charter students received between about $1,500 and $2,500 less annually than their D.C. Public Schools peers in city funds.
Charter schools are a lifeline upon which D.C.’s disadvantaged students depend. Their high-school graduation rate is 80 percent compared to 53 percent for D.C. Public Schools.
The administration claims it has raised city funding for charter facilities from $2,800 per student to $3,000. But only $2,800 is guaranteed in city funds: the same amount guaranteed by his predecessor in his final year. Before Mayor Adrian Fenty cut this allowance, it was $3,109 per year.
In his budget, Mayor Gray proposes to fund the$200 difference from a federal program that is intended to support D.C. Public Schools and D.C. charter schools, as well as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which funds scholarships for low-income District students. Yet this $200 per-student portion of charters’ funds could disappear, following the mayor’s decision not to allocate any of this money to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program this year. If Congress retaliates by pulling federal funding, charter students would lose.
As an indicator of the unfairness that the city’s public charter school students face, the mayor proposes to set facilities funding for D.C. Public Schools at $7,992 per student — over two and half times what the city provides charter students.
The city’s charter students need the D.C. Council’s help in closing this funding gap. The budget negotiations are council members’ chance to force progress toward what the mayor promised but hasn’t delivered.
This entry reposts an article written by FOCUS Executive Director Robert Cane and originally published in The Northwest Current.