Public funds should follow students
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1 comment [ View ]By KATHLEEN THORNBURG and KIM FRANK
Guest commentary
All public school students should be treated equally in Utah, with equal funding from the same sources, no matter which model of public school they attend. And to set the record straight, public charter schools are subject to same standards, tests, accountability and scrutiny as traditional district schools.
The Utah Legislature agrees and passed Senate Bill 2 (SB 2), which allows students attending public charter schools to have access to a small portion (25 percent) of locally raised education dollars -- the same dollars that districts raise to educate all resident students.
It's not a new concept to have locally raised funds following students. In Utah, when a student of one district attends a school in another district, it is common practice for the sending district to pass along a portion of local dollars. Now, the SB 2 charter funding provision applies this same principle to charter schools.
Before SB 2, the state used income tax dollars to make up for the fact that charter students had no access to local education funding. Districts have been keeping the tax dollars that they raise, even though they are no longer educating those charter school students. This school year, in the Ogden and Weber districts, 2,315 students are attending charter schools while their parents' tax dollars stay in those districts.
Is that fair? If those 2,315 students were still attending Ogden and Weber district schools, the districts would need to fund the education of those students, including hiring additional teachers, providing additional transportation, even building additional schools while raising taxes to pay for it all.
Last year alone, with 22,196 Utah students enrolled in charter schools, districts statewide were "held harmless" for $48 million. SB 2 is simply an attempt to allow 25 percent of that money to follow the charter students to their charter schools.
The calculation of the 25 percent is evenhanded and does not include district debt service revenues in the calculation.
If we agree that the public should bear the cost of providing a free public education to children, then that cost should be born equally by taxpayers no matter what model of public school the child attends. And if districts are not actually bearing the costs of educating charter school students, the taxes that the parents of charter students are paying to those districts ought to find their way into the budgets of the charter schools that are providing the education.
All public schools are charged with the same responsibility of providing a quality education. We ought to be on the same team. The money raised to educate children isn't ours; it's theirs, and it should follow them to the public school they attend.
Thornburg is principal of Ogden Preparatory Academy. Frank is executive director of the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools.
Then you should give back any monies that you collected for students who return to public schools. Especially after you test them and declair them to be "Academically ineligable" for your school.