Examiner.com
The D.C. charter facility allotment saga continues
By Mark Lerner
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
It is the start of the Mayor's budget season and therefore another opportunity for politicians to play with the charter school facility allotment. To understand the framework for this year's discussion I went directly to the person who knows more about this subject than probably anyone in the country, the recently retired Chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board Tom Nida.
As background, remember that in 2009 Mr. Fenty wanted to find a way to tie the facility allotment to the actual needs of schools. A suggestion was made at that time to pay charters what they were currently spending for space plus additional dollars in order to secure future buildings. The Mayor took this idea and tried to reduce it to only the first part of this equation, with the justification that charters were using excess facility funds to augment their per pupil instructional dollars. After loud and contentious feedback from the charter school community the facility allotment was lowered $300 from $3,109 per student to $2,800. There was also a promise by Council Chairman Vincent Gray to bring together a task force to study the matter.
Mr. Nida headed that task force and for the last 12 months has been working on a proposal together with representatives from FOCUS, the city's administrator's office, the deputy mayor's office, and representatives from several public charter schools.
Almost as soon as the task force began meeting a couple of facts became readily apparent. First, it was assumed in the past that the rent charter schools paid was less than the facility allotment, which allowed schools to add this money to what was available for instruction. In reality, for many schools the opposite is the case. Mr. Nida pointed out that as a school becames larger it is necessary to take instructional funds and add them to the facility allotment in order to cover building expenses.
Mr. Nida reviewed some math with me regarding this issue. If we have 280 students in an average charter school and they are provided with 100 square feet per child then the school needs 28,000 square feet for its building. For the 28,000 square feet it receives $784,000 in facility funds, which means it can afford a total rent of $28 per square foot.
While it is extremely difficult to find appropriate space that rents for $28 a square foot in this city the problem is even more difficult than it first appears. This is because charter facility leases are almost always the triple net variety in which 8 dollars of the rent comes right off the top to cover operating costs of the space, such as cleaning, maintenance, and utilities. We are now left with a net amount of only $20 per square feet that a charter can spend on their facility. Compounding all of this financial pressure is that most traditional school systems like DCPS allot 150, 175, or even 190 square feet per child, especially as the child gets older and larger. Financial issues, according to Mr. Nida, are why many charters combine different uses of space into one, such the creation of a multi-purpose room, or why DC public charter schools often forgo space for gymnasiums, auditoriums, and cafeterias as unaffordable.
The other interesting part of the facility issue that the task force noticed, now with access to the DCPS capital budget provided by the City Administrator's staff, is that the amount that DCPS has spent over the past few years on their facilities has been higher than the facilities allowance charters received to spend on theirs. This information wasn't readily available last year during the budget hearings. When Mr. Nida's group reviewed the per pupil amount that DCPS has spent on average over the last 3 years the number comes out to approximately $3,200. The task force quickly came to the conclusion that this is the figure that they should request from the Mayor in order to have equity between the 2 school systems. The task force also recommended a "floor" in the charter school facility allowance of $3,000 annually per student, to provide a level of stability to reassure lenders who finance DC charter school facilities.
However, the final part of the task force recommendation was that if current city budget constraints made the recommended funding difficult, the actual facility funding for both the DC public charter schools and DCPS should be equal.
Robert Cane at FOCUS has hinted that the Mayor will try and keep the charter school facility allotment at $2,800 per pupil.
Go here to hear last week's testimony before the D.C. Council of charter school leaders whose programs are facing difficulties under the present facility allotment.