Teachers fired. Parents confused. Warning signs debated. Last week, turmoil at Paramount Charter School became the latest South Florida crisis to draw a rash of media coverage, complete with an adversarial TV interview in the school parking lot and attention from charter school critics on liberal blogs.
There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s happening at the school, which seems to have fallen on hard times almost immediately after opening its doors to students for the first time this fall. Paramount administrators haven’t returned calls seeking comment.
But financial and enrollment records tell a story of their own, and can help shed some light on proposed legislative changes aimed, in part, at stopping sudden charter school failures.
When the Broward County School Board approved Paramount’s charter application last year, the school said it planned to enroll more than 1,000 students in grades K-6 during its first year of operation. When the Broward school district took “benchmark” enrollment counts for the school year, enrollment stood at 293. District spokeswoman Nadine Drew said as of last week, enrollment had fallen to 250.
Fewer students means less per-pupil funding. In July, the charter school received two payments from the district. One was for slightly more than $213,000, and one for more than $237,000. In August, it received less than $149,000. In September, it received less than $142,000.
The gap between the school’s projections and the actual number of students enrolled might not explain all the school’s difficulties, but it likely explains some of the problems detailed by South Florida news station WPLG, which described mass teacher firings and other signs of financial trouble.
Many who weren’t fired resigned. One said that after the mass firings, she was called into the room and told that the school wanted to keep her, but that if she wanted to keep her job she would have to take a cut in pay from $36,000 to $30,000 and that promised benefits, including health care, would be cut.
“It made me feel awful like, ‘How dare you play God with peoples’ lives like this,'” one of the teachers who resigned said.
All three teachers who spoke with Local 10 News said the school was in disarray even before the mass exodus, with little structure and much confusion…
…”We had no computers for the kids. I had one lock on one door. I couldn’t lock the door from the inside,” another teacher said. “Sometimes I had third-graders with second-graders. I never really knew who was coming to my class. There was no discipline matrix. I had like no supplies.”
In an earlier interview, state Rep. Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah described a pattern that sometimes appears when charter schools suddenly founders. The new school overestimates its future enrollment, by a lot, and over the summer, it receives funding based on those ambitious projections. Then, a few weeks into the school year, once actual enrollment levels are verified, the school’s funding takes a big hit, and turmoil can ensue.
Diaz chairs a committee that’s drafting charter school legislation. One provision (lines 760-776 of the draft bill discussed last week) would require districts to fund charter schools based on their actual enrollment, rather than projections, if the actual number of students the charter has entered in the district’s enrollment system is less than 75 percent of the school’s projected enrollment.
It would also require districts (which are responsible for passing state and local funding on to charters) to set monthly or bimonthly payment amounts, which would remain stable throughout the school year.
Perhaps that change could help ensure that upstart charter schools set accurate enrollment projections and avoid precipitous drops in funding shortly after the school year starts. It’s one of several changes that, combined with improvements in the ways school districts vet charter school applications, could help Florida reduce the number of sudden charter school shutdowns.
