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New York Cuts Charter School Funding
New York has slashed budgets for charter schools in districts where more than 10% of students are enrolled. Affected districts include Buffalo and Lackawanna.
A budget bill passed by the New York Assembly in Albany will cut funding for charter schools to 2009-10 levels if they’re located in a district where at least 10% of students are charter school enrollees.
The news comes as a bitter blow to charter school leaders who had tightened their belts in preparation for an expected funding freeze. Now they say that the funding cuts, 9.5% in Lackawanna and 13% in Buffalo, will devastate their education programs, with ‘enrichment programs’ such as art, music and Spanish most likely to be cut.
“We’re going to have to relook at all the support mechanisms we have for these kids, and the enrichments we have would have to be cut back,” said James Neimeier, chairman of the board at South Buffalo Charter.
“It’s going to significantly hurt the progress that we’ve made with these kids. They get a lot of individual attention.”
About 17% of students in Buffalo attend charter schools across more than a dozen institutions, but the funding they receive from the home districts of their students is set to drop from $12,005 per student to $10,429. Charter school leaders are warning that the cuts would translate to ‘bare-bones instruction’. The cut to charter school funding is an effective increase in the budget for district schools and will work out to about an $11 million budget increase for Buffalo Public Schools. The move will be considered a victory for opponents of charter schools who feared that they would erode state education entirely. It will discourage new charter schools from forming in areas where charter school take-up is already approaching 10%, so creating an effective cap to charter schools while funding remains linked.
Funding for charter schools needs to be separated from the funding for district schools — a point that charter leaders as well as district leaders generally agree upon
Thursday
March 22nd, 2012
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Comments
poor charter schools, having to tighten their belts just like the public schools.
Public schools get 18000-plus per student in public schools, and 6000 for each student at a charter school, while Charter schools will go from about 12000 per student to about 9 or 10,000 dollars per student. So if you think Charter school belt tightening is the SAME as Public schools….well, I just hope your not a math teacher.
What is the per student funding for the Buffalo Public Schools? The information in needed to evaluate the numbers in the article.
I did some additional research. In the article at , the per student funding for Buffalo Public Schools is $22,063 per student. This makes the cutback to the charter schools very unfair.
The charters don’t have to carry the same burdens public schools do. This is entirely fair.
That is how it’s always going to work. You strip the charter schools of funding, “tighten regulations,” set them up to fail and then when they do, go “See? I told you so.”
so it is okay to do what you describe to a public school, but not a charter school?
TT, you read mcp’s comment just as I had. This isn’t being done to public schools. The level of funding of public schools is going to be higher going forward than charters and that’s hardly a level playing field.
if you think this isn’t being done to public schools you are completely out of touch.
and it will never be a level playing field. charter schools can remove problem students. charter schools have motivated parents. that unlevels the playing field dramatically.
You mean exactly what we do to public schools?
From what I have seen on their negative ads (ReformEd’s radio campaign last summer) and the way some of them play fast and loose with money and services promised to parents, these people need no help from anyone in setting themselves up to fail. They have that angle covered.
“tightening regulations”
Hey, charter advocates, get over it. You know, the way you told Buffalo Teachers to shut up and be graded on the failures of empty desks ? After all this only applies to places where there are all ready 10% of students in charters,. Really, how many can that be ? This is the exact argument ya’ll used against us with the percentage we’d have to eat on a kid who failed our class because of absenteeism ? Maybe next time you’ll be a little more deliberative, a little more certified and a little less qualified. Goose and gander baby. Teach to that test like you mean it.
Typical that you’d frame this as a fight between the unions and some kind of organized anti-union dark force. The fact that there are parents who send their kids to these schools is of secondary concern. I’ll keep this comment in mind next time you start to whining about how all you think are the kids! It’s all about the kids.
most parents send their kids to charter schools to get them away from the “other kids” they think are bad influences
since they know that the charter school can get rid of those kids.
what does that have to do with education?
What does anything Joe say have to do with education?
This is a break of faith with the parents of children at charter schools. We chose our charter because of the progressive curriculum available there, and we chose it over a Buffalo public school (Olmsted 64) that is high achieving. We understand there may be small cutbacks given the current environment, but this is a drastic cutback. When a parent makes a choice for their child in the City of Buffalo, we well realize the gravity of it since there are so few placements beyond kindergarten in the most sought after schools.
This is a total break of faith with parents of children at the charters.
[...] York State has recently scaled back its enthusiasm for charter schools, introducing funding changes that effectively placed a soft cap on the number of students who can [...]