Charter school growth and district budgets

Vitti

Recent news from Jacksonville, according to the Florida Times-Union: The Duval County School Board is predicting charter schools will continue to grow, drawing more students from district schools and creating a multi-million-dollar shortfall in the district's budget.

There are a couple of things worth noting here.

1. Duval's superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, is not known for being reflexively anti-charter.
2. The district has proposed closing its budget gap by drawing down reserves or eliminating instructional coaches. The former option isn't sustainable; the latter option would threaten one of the main drivers of Florida's recent gains in elementary school reading achievement.
3. Limiting charter school growth — which by definition is happening because parents want more options — is not a solution. But it's an idea traditional school advocates are getting behind.
4. Those of us who support tearing down the walls between parents and the schools they want for their children can't simply dismiss these budgeting problems as adult issues.

So what to do?

Part of the issue seems to be a difficulty predicting how much charter school enrollment will grow from one year to the next, which is important for district financial planning. The Times-Union reported:

Vitti said it is becoming a consistent conversation, but it is difficult to predict charter enrollment year after year. Duval County knows the size of the charters currently operating and how high their enrollment can go, but there’s no way of predicting when new charters will come in to Jacksonville.

Where planning is concerned, it might help if districts like Duval, which already have well-developed school choice ecosystems and could soon have even more options available, adopted a New Orleans-style, OneApp system. That would create a centralized hub where parents sign up for all public schools in a district, including charters and other district schools of choice.

With such a system in place, once applications closed, districts would have a pretty good idea where students will be, months before each school year begins. That, of course, it would also require a level of collaboration between districts and charter that doesn't exist now.

That won't solve everything in districts where charter school growth is outstripping the growth of public schools overall. Districts will have to figure out ways to manage fixed costs that don't go away when students leave for other options. There may be opportunities here, too, as the growth of public school enrollment is rebounding, and some districts are struggling to house all their new students.

Building a well-functioning system that meets the needs of all students may require districts and charter to work together in new ways.