Charters, ed groups at odds
Brown: give surplus buildings to charters
The Education Coalition, the organization that represents mainstream education groups, announced its opposition Thursday to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to require a school district to offer charter schools any building that it decides it no longer needs.
The proposal is one of several that the governor included in his May budget revision to benefit charters, which, the budget notes, receive lower state reimbursements than district schools and generally face higher facilities costs. But the Coalition noted that selling surplus property and using the proceeds for general fund purposes is “one of the few ways districts have mitigated cuts.”
“This proposal comes at a time when school districts have taken over $20 billion in cuts over the past several years,” the Coalition statement said. “This proposal would eliminate this flexibility and remove a valuable tool districts have to sell surplus property and use the proceeds to minimize cuts in programs and services for students.”
The Coalition’s members include teachers unions, the state PTA, the California School Boards Association, the Association of California School Administrators, and the California Association of School Business Officials.
The charter school community views the issue differently. By law, districts are required to offer charter schools comparable facilities. Instead, they are offering inadequate facilities to charters while at the same time consolidating buildings and putting them on the market for lease or sale, said Eric Premack, executive director of the Charter Schools Development Center in Sacramento.
Added Jed Wallace, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, “Surplus property is very important to charters. What we don’t want is a mechanism by which districts can resist offering facilities, then offload them by another mechanism.”
Brown had raised this idea in the January budget. In the May revision this week, he clarified that the provision would apply only to buildings that were funded with state money. It wasn’t clear from the budget message whether the provision would apply to school construction and renovation for any amount. Dennis Myers, assistant executive director of the California School Boards Association, said it also wasn’t clear if the provision would apply only to charters approved by the host district or any charter school that wants a building.
The Ed Coalition is proposing that charters, like other local entities, be required to submit an offer to buy a surplus building.
A report this year by the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that charters on average receive $395 per student (7 percent) less in state funding than district schools, primarily because of differences in categorical grants that they receive and the additional costs that many charter schools face with buildings. Those charters in California serving low-income, minority students are expected to fare better under Brown’s weighted student formula, although Brown is also proposing that a charter school receive no more per student than the amount going to the district in which it’s located.
Turning surplus property over to charter schools could encourage parent groups facing the closing of their neighborhood school to start a charter school. That’s what happened in Los Altos, where parents started Bullis Charter School; the parents and the district fought in court over district facilities for years, until earlier this month, when they finally reached an agreement to provide Bullis its own campus. But the new requirement also could result in a more straightforward process, and more of a fair shake for existing charters that have been leasing buildings outside of the district.
Brown is also proposing two other provisions for charters:
- County treasurers will have the authority to lend to charters as they have for school districts. Because the state has delayed payment of billions of dollars owed to schools, charters have had to borrow money in the private market at double-digit interest rates. Some districts have turned to county treasurers, which can pool borrowing at low interest. Some treasurers had questioned whether they legally could include charters.
- Non-classroom-based charters, whether online schools or blended learning schools with both on-site and online instruction, will no longer have to go before the State Board of Education to receive full funding. Doing so has been a time-consuming, bureaucratic process for the charters and the State Board, which is striving to devote more time to policies and less to charter school oversight. Non-classroom-based charters, which number about 160 in the state, will still have to comply with a lot of regulations to get full funding, including instruction by California certificated teachers and a student-teacher ratio not exceeding 24:1, according to Premack.
A couple things.
I believe the law does not allow selling surplus property and using the proceeds for educational expenditures. A district must ask for a waiver to do that. Even then, it is abhorrent that we as a society have decided that an appropriate means for covering structural funding gaps is to sell off property set aside by communities for education.
Also, offering adequate facilities and offering comparable facilities are two different things. It is, of course, possible to offer comparably inadequate facilities. That should be rather common in this state.
Finally, I don’t thing it’s fair to use funding levels as a comparison between charters and trad public schools. Due to the different makeups of the two, the appropriate comparison would actually be what money they have access to to spend on kids. There are all sorts of ways that makes the comparison a completely different one. Two that may be significant are for ‘mandated’ pension costs and special education encroachment, which seems to not uncommonly run in the 15% to 20% of general fund range.
It would also be interesting to actually try to verify the claim that charters ‘generally have higher facilities costs’. From what i can tell, charters that get prop 39 facilities get them at a cost that may clearly be lower than what it costs the district to maintain them. This may not always be the case, especially if he schools serve out of district students. But in the cases that it actually costs the district money to provide facilities, it would not be true that charters have higher facilities costs. This is even more relevant when one realizes that charters pay nowhere near market rate. Which of course means districts are forced to forgo potential lease revenue for the facility. Something that, unlike the proceeds of a sale, can more easily be used for educational expenditures.
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A Los Altos parent just told me that the agreement with Bullis is going to require closing an existing elementary school. John, can you please clarify?
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The agreement calls for the passage of a bond to build a new school so that Bullis can move into an existing school. Both sides have agreed to campaign for the new bond. If the bond fails — there may be two tries to pass it — then one of the existing schools would close to accommodate Bullis.
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I believe there is a current exemption that allows school districts to use proceeds from surplus facilities for purposes other then capital improvements. It was passed as part of flexibility language in 2009 and was set to expire in 2012. I believe it will be extend to 2015.
As a prior commenter has pointed out, cost comparison between charters and district schools in the eye of the beholder. The additional revenues school districts receive for mandated programs typically did not cover the costs of the mandated activity.
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“Passing a bond may not be easy – even with charter school support. Results from the community survey conducted the last week of April – before news of the agreement was made public – reported that a bond would fail to generate enough support to pass.”
So after 2 tries to pass it, does Bullis still get the elementary school?
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Yes, I believe so.
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Aside from making such facilities available to charters, surplus facility sales or net rental profits from them should be required to go to retiring or servicing any existing facility bond debt a district has. The fact that a district can push a bond measure burdening taxpayers with the unfair Prop 13 assessment ad valorem taxes, that supposedly can only be used for facilities, and then sell or rent facility property to spend in the general fund, something that would be prohibited with facility bond proceeds, makes no sense.
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And the existing school has to close if the bond fails or move if the bond passes? The Los Altos parent I talked to said the community is enraged, so it doesn’t sound like a harmonious agreement.
And, of course, this is just one of a vast number of examples nationwide of how the charter sector divides and harms communities. It may be an unstoppable force at this point, but it’s a very destructive one.
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As an involved Los Altos parent, there is a huge disconnect between the families at Bullis and the rest of the community. The fact that the charter laws have not caught up to what is occurring here (boutique charter with low-to no ELLs, SNKs, SEDs, tuition “ask” of $5K, geo preference in a area with higher income)is deplorable. The mediation is still being finalized and many district parents are angered that a school will be sacrificed and handed over to Bullis. The fact that Bullis was created due to angry parents when their school was closed is the icing on the cake. Now Bullis wants our district to close a school for them? You have got to be kidding me! As one parent said at the district board meeting, “Are we on the Twilight Zone?”
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And there are schools like PCS, which resembles Bullis in demographics, wealth and privilege (all meanings of that word). PCS also asks parents for thousands of dollars per student every year, ostensibly because that’s their mythical shortfall from the state. What they have never told parents is that all of that money was going straight into the bank, co-mingled with state and local revenue.
Things got complicated when they set up a separate foundation for a capital campaign to buy land and build a new school. Sharp eyes in the community caught wind and alerted the County Office (asleep at the wheel, as usual). Lawyers got involved to block the transfer of public money and donations into the separate foundation where they would have become opaque to all oversight.
The time for lax rules for charter schools is over. Either give districts all of the same flexibility or demand that charters follow all the rules districts must adhere to.
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So, it is OK to close a successful neighborhood school so the charter school can have facilities? The school that the Bullis Charter School parents petitioned to re-open has been re-opened. Some of those original Bullis Charter School families have returned to their neighborhood school. Some have not. Now that same school may be closed so that Bullis Charter School can use it. And then that local school will be closed to local neighbors yet again.
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There is a really long history of bad decision making by the Los Altos School District Trustees. They closed a school, rebalanced and moved a few kids around. The Charter was started from parents of the closed school. BCS became a very popular choice in a district that didn’t have any alternatives. LASD claims to have neighborhood schools but many of us don’t live near one of them. In 2007 after BCS had been open for 4 years, they reopened the closed school and moved students at every school but one. That is why we are in this mess. They have done everything they could to get rid of BCS and it didn’t work. Neighborhoods schools are rebalanced and closed all of time in Los Altos. Sorry that one might have to close now…but that is do to poor decision making and planning by the LASD Trustees, not BCS.
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