LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS ®

of CONNECTICUT

1890 Dixwell Avenue, Suite 203, Hamden, CT 06514

Tel. 203-288-7996    E-mail - LWVCT@lwvct.org

The League is a nonpartisan organization which does not support or oppose political parties or candidates.

Home

LWVCT Opposes Proposal to Require Local School District Funding of Charter Schools 1/4/10

Date:  January 4, 2010

To:  State Board of Education Members

From:  Katherine Wilson, School Finance Specialist, League of Women Voters of Connecticut

I am writing to you today on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Connecticut to express the League's opposition to Proposal #2 in the State Department of Education's Charter School Proposals, as presented to you at the December 2, 2009, Board meeting.

The League of Women Voters of Connecticut supports a system of public education funding that makes available to each community financial resources sufficient to provide a suitable program of educational experiences to each child.  We believe the state should fund through grants to towns 50% of the overall statewide cost of public elementary and secondary education and that those funds should be distributed in a way that recognizes both the relative ability of different communities to finance schools from local resources and the various factors that influence the cost of educating different children.

Proposal #2 violates each of these broad principles.  

By requiring local school districts to take over fiscal responsibility for charter schools and by contemplating no increase in ECS grants, it would reduce the already insufficient funds provided to towns by the state for local public education.  The state contributed only about $2.4 billion, or 33%, of the total $7.2 billion operating cost of local public elementary and secondary education in Connecticut in 2008-09, well below the 50% share supported by the League and espoused by the State Board of Education itself in the early days of ECS.  In fact, the state has never achieved the 50% cost share intended when the ECS formula was developed.  Given this history and the flat-funding of the ECS grant in the current biennial state budget, the tuition payments required under Proposal #2 would represent the complete diversion of these resources away from local public education to state charter schools, now and into the foreseeable future. 

Because charter school students tend to reside in Connecticut's least wealthy school districts, Proposal #2 also would place this burden disproportionately on many of those communities least able to pay.  In 2008-09, for example, 78% of state charter school students came from our 31 poorest towns.  If this proposal had been in effect that year, Bridgeport would have had to divert $10.6 million, or about 4% of its already strained budget, from its own schools to pay tuition for its 1,026 charter school students.  Greenwich, meanwhile, would have been required to pay only $10,306, or about .007% of its budget, for its one charter school student, and other wealthy towns like Avon, Essex, Ridgefield, and Woodbridge, who had no charter school students, would have paid nothing.  Thus, this plan not only diverts resources away from local public schools, it diverts them unfairly from schools that need them most.

Furthermore, charter school students are not and will not be numerous or concentrated enough to produce a reduction in school districts' costs commensurate with the tuition payments required under Proposal #2.  It takes the exodus of about 20 students from a single grade in a single school to reduce that school's need for teachers by one, and even that improbable event does not appreciably reduce a school's administrative or maintenance costs.  Thus, even if charter school enrollment should rise dramatically, school districts' costs are unlikely to fall proportionately. 

The League urges the Board to reject this flawed proposal that would shift approximately $50 million in education expenditures from the state to towns and would disproportionately affect poorer communities.  We hope that you will instead continue the Board's traditional advocacy of a greater state share in the cost of local public elementary and secondary education.

Thank you for your service to the state and to the school children of Connecticut.

cc: Mark McQuillan, Commissioner of Education