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Superintendents: Charter school funding law ‘seriously flawed’

Although they stressed they were not seeking to end cyber charter schools, three Central Pennsylvania district superintendents, advocated, with a sense of urgency, a reform in the system to eliminate inequities.

Citing unfair funding formulas and the quality of education charter school students receive, superintendents from Keystone Central, State College and Moshannon Valley school districts participated in a virtual discussion seeking to educate the public about the problem.

Dr. Jacquelyn M. Martin, Keystone Central’s superintendent, offered background on her district, which serves 3,700 students in a rural area in Clinton County and additional townships in Potter and Center counties.

“Of the 500 districts in the Commonwealth, our district has the largest geographical footprint as we encompass over 980 square miles,” Martin said.

“Just over half of the real estate in our area is designated as state lands and yields minimum tax revenue. So, you can see how the budget pressures based on charter funding is going to significantly impact our rural district,” she said.

Martin noted that of the district’s $82 million budget, over 11% of the budgeted expenses include charter tuition payments for approximately 500 students.

“These numbers should alarm anyone who understands the current charter tuition funding formula, because what that means in real dollars is that $9 million in tuition costs we pay on annually is also included in our budgeted expenditures. So, a simple calculation demonstrates that charter tuition in our district is automatically inflated by $2,400 per student,” Martin said.

“If charter tuition payments were excluded from the current charter tuition formula, for Keystone, that result would be a reduction of $1.2 million each year,” she continued.

“To put that in perspective for you, if our local board levied the maximum tax increase allowed by the Act 1 index, this would yield approximately $700,000 in new revenue. Our charter increases alone are almost $1 million a year. So, the current charter funding calculations are without a doubt outdated and seriously flawed,” Martin stated.

Martin cited an example of the inequity in funding from when she worked in another district several years ago, she approached a vendor, which also provided the curriculum for a cyber charter school that had set up shop in that district. She shared how she had managed to get district costs per student to a level below $1,000 for the same services the cyber charter school was receiving.

“At that time, the tuition paid by district was $16,000 per student per year to the charter school. Same curriculum, same teachers, huge difference in price,” she said.

“It’s difficult to understand why our taxpayers should be paying $16,000 to a charter school when the exact same curriculum could be provided for a fraction of the cost,” she added.

One problem as stated by Martin is money that is funneled from districts in the central part of the state to public cyber charter schools in more heavily populated counties in the southcentral and southeastern as well as the western counties.

“The cyber charter organizations have been receiving millions of our local dollars to educate students remotely, but spending much less than any brick and mortar school and ultimately producing sub-par academic results. There is not a single cyber charter or brick and mortar charter that receives our tuition money that has better academic results than Keystone Central,” Martin said.

“The antiquated charter school law has been draining funding away from our rural community for over two decades, pouring excessive amounts of money into the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia,” she added.

Dr. Robert J. O’Donnell, superintendent at State College School District, and Dr. John W. Zesiger, Moshannon Valley School District’s superintendent, also spoke during the virtual discussion which was hosted by the Keystone Center for Charter Change at the Pennsylvania School Board Association.

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