After legal snafu, DOE owes charter schools $32 million

New York’s Department of Education owes charter schools--public schools that are privately managed-- $32 million, but the money might be coming out of public schools’ pockets.

Even as they face a 4 percent budget cut this year, the city’s traditional public schools have to worry about additional losses after legislators accidentally allowed a freeze on charter school funding to expire at the end of the year. Former governor David Paterson had vetoed an education bill and inadvertently lifted the freeze—something lawmakers did not intend.

Because of the mistake, the DOE legally owes charter schools $32 million—an amount the city agency said it cannot afford—in the 2012 fiscal year, even as traditional public schools remain under a funding freeze.

“Albany froze the total pot of money provided to all of our public school students this year, yet allowed the fee for charter school students to increase,” DOE spokesperson Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld wrote in an email.

If the state doesn’t allocate extra funds to help the DOE meet its legal obligation to charter schools or somehow reinstitute a freeze, the money will likely be taken from urban district funds allocated for public schools, Noah Gotbaum, president of Community District Education Council 3 said.

“Thirty-two million dollars across 1,500 schools—that’s about $20,000 per school,” Gotbaum said of individual public schools’ loss.

Zarin-Rosenfeld said the DOE doesn’t believe in instituting a freeze on charter school funding, but that it will work with the state to alleviate the burden on urban districts to pay off the $32 million.

“We’re now actively working with the State and our charter schools on a solution to meet the pupil funding under the law,” Zarin-Rosenfeld said.

Michael Regnier, who serves as the policy director of the NYC Charter School Center, said the organization actually supports recent politicians’ proposal to reinstitute a freeze on charter school funding, though he noted that the freeze on funding should have come as more of a shock than the lifting of it.

The temporary freeze was the first time in the relatively young history of the city’s charter schools that the state did not follow the usual formula it uses to determine charter school funding, he said.
“We just want fairness, it’s about fair funding,” he said.

But Gotbaum said the divide between charter schools and traditional public schools’ budgets are anything but fair.

According to a study from the National Education Policy Center published this past January, charter schools that occupy space in public school buildings on average receive more than $2,500 more per pupil than comparable public schools when in the same neighborhoods.

“Since the study was done from 2006 to 2008, if the freeze were lifted that amount would increase the funding advantage that charters have over public by an additional over $4,000 per student, or some 30 plus percent,” Gotbaum wrote in an email. “And that doesn’t take into consideration a single penny of private funds that the charters raise, which in some cases amount to as much as $10,000 per student.”

The gap between charter school and public school funds is already too big, said Ellen Darensbourg, who teaches third grade at PS 241 and has two kids of her own in public school.

“It’s really unacceptable,” she said. “They’re getting millions of dollars. Our budgets have been slashed as it is, we get slashed every year. It’s crazy.”

Darensbourg said that’s not the case for charter schools, like the Harlem Success charter school that shares building space with PS 241.

“They’re doing okay—they already have more than we have,” Darensbourg said of Harlem Success. “They’ve got two teachers in every room and all these programs that our school can’t even begin to afford because DOE won’t fund it. We’ve given up our music programs. We don’t have an art studio anymore. There’s no place for the kids’ artwork to be stored from week to week.”

Robin Shweder, a retired schools activist who lives on 110th Street, said the unequal distribution of resources between charter schools and public schools will only widen the perceived gap between the two types of institutions.

“We had more need. We need more,” Shweder said. She worked with various public schools as part of the Attendence Improvement Dropout Prevention program before she retired. “We were working without books, we had to copy everything, we didn’t have computers. Our principals had to go out of the system to get money because the public school funding system was not enough.”
Eric Chenoweth, who has a son in the Manhattan School for Children, said he wasn’t pleased either.

“We’re against it,” Chenoweth said. “This is disastrous—the whole Bloomberg policy is disastrous.”

He said the news did not strike him as surprising.

“What they’re doing is turning a public system into a private system,” he said, adding that his son was only recently able to get a spot in the public system. “So if the public wants a private system, you got it.”

Shweder noted that the divide in resources between charter and public schools will only widen the perceived gap between the two types of institutions. “If that’s what’s facing the system, that’s enshrining a two-tier system—people already think it’s a two-tier system.”

Gotbaum expressed dismay over how the plight of public schools tends to go unnoticed. “Our public school kids continue to get cut and cut and cut,” he said. “All of this, it’s a smoke screen.”

Shweder said that considering the budget difficulties she encountered while working with public schools across Manhattan, the possibility of losing $32 million doesn’t bode well for the public school system.

“A situation where the public schools would be financing these charter schools doesn’t sound right to me,” she said.

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