Charter schools will pay up

By Anna Mitchell  

AUGUST 2, 2010 10:20 a.m. (0)

As public school money grows tighter and the population of students enrolled in charter high schools expands, another dispute over funding has emerged with Greenville County Schools.

Fred Crawford, principal of Greenville Tech Charter High, said he received an e-mail May 19 from Laura Herd, the school district’s coordinator for school and program accountability, saying his school must refund the district $2,993 for every charter student who enrolls in vocational classes at one of five centers across the county.

Crawford’s school receives state and local funds through the local district, but as a charter school is governed by its own board and maintains its own classrooms on the Greenville Tech campus.

About a dozen of Crawford’s students in any given year have attended classes at one of the vocational centers as space was available and for no extra cost. A similar arrangement has been in place for decades with private school and home school children.

“Initially there were not a lot of charter high schools in the district,” said Alex Martin, the district’s assistant superintendent for career technology education. “As time went on, they’ve retained multiple high schools, and it was not addressed until we got to this year.”

Enrollment in the county’s four charter high-school programs (Greenville Tech, Brashier Middle College, Greer Middle College and Legacy Academy) is about 1,200. It had been 400 or less when Greenville Tech Charter was operating by itself.

“It’s not just the numbers,” said Oby Lyles, spokesman for Greenville County Schools. “It’s the whole philosophy of how public schools and charter schools are funded. The premise is the money follows the student.”

Greenville Tech Charter received $5,981 for each of its roughly 400 students last year – a sum of about $2.4 million (more if including special-needs students who get extra funding) – to provide them with an education. Half the per-student allocation for a year is $2,993.

Martin said the district’s four career centers and the Fine Arts Center typically organize a student’s day into halves – with academics taken at their home schools half the day and vocational or fine-arts courses taken the other half. The charge for charter-school students at the career centers was calculated accordingly.

Still, Crawford said, his kids are public school students and ought to have the same access to vocational and fine arts training as other public school students – access that will be compromised if the charter school has to give up half its funding. He said he would have preferred a discussion take place about the career centers but never heard anything about the district’s change of heart until it was a done deal.

The new charge was a change in internal policy and did not require a school board vote.

Crawford acknowledged students at three of the charter high schools do have access to tech-school courses at a reduced rate – tuition free but with fees covered by the charter school.

That private school and home school kids will continue to have free access to the Fine Arts Center and other career centers doesn’t make sense, Crawford said.

Martin said the deal with private educators predated his coming to the district’s central office and ultimately is in the hands of the elected school board.

Mary Carmichael, president of the South Carolina Charter School Association, said run-ins between charter schools and the local district are typical. Part of the disharmony, she said, is rooted in the quasi-union mentality of public schools, where teachers work on a contract. Crawford’s employees, including teachers, are at-will.

“School board associations are aligned with some of the mantra of bigger national teaching unions,” Carmichael said. “They are definitely anti-charter. They definitely are not interested in teachers who are at will.”

Further complicating the financial picture is the mix of state and federal money in career centers. Federal Perkins Act money – about $940,000 in any given year – pays to equip labs, kitchens and workshops in the vocational centers.

“If we have to pay these fees, we need to make sure we are getting 100 percent of what our students generate for the district coming to our school,” Crawford said. “That’s only equitable.”

This coming school year, Martin has worked out a formula giving charter schools Perkins money based on the number of vocational units their students took the previous year (whether on their own campus or at a career center).

The same formula will be applied to regular public school kids, and the money divided up accordingly. He said he’s certain that’s the fairest way to distribute Perkins money, still a fraction of the true cost of the centers.

But Mike Sinclair, principal at Brashier Middle College, said he’s unsure if his students got a fair share of Perkins vocational money over the years.

“It’s hard to feel comfortable writing a check to the district when you don’t know how it’s funding programs and what we are getting in return,” Sinclair said. “If I know what I’m paying for is coming out of dollars the district is giving me that I need to give back, then okay.”

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