Charter schools lobby for survival funding

The adequate education costing commission will finish its work this week without doing a thing to save free-standing public charter schools like Franklin Career Academy, Cocheco Arts and Technology Academy in Barrington or the Equestrian Charter Academy in Rochester. The latter has kids from the Lakes Region and North Country who commute several hours a day. It’s a chance for them to fast-track a career as a horse veterinarian or breeder.

The adequacy bill would target aid to the neediest public schools by their number of kids getting special education, subsidized lunches or help with English as a second language. The Supreme Court told lawmakers to ignore a town’s ability to pay for its classrooms; just define and fund the learning needs of the students.

Rep. Judy Reever (D-Laconia) serves on the costing commission and has a problem with the court’s instruction.

“We haven’t been talking about the schools that struggle with their burden to pay for schools (because of a low tax base or median income),” she said. “Year after year they can’t hang on to their best teachers.”

But maybe the neediest schools are the tiny and isolated public charters, because they can’t impose tuition and they can’t raise taxes. Their state aid is all they get besides nominal fund-raising, and they’re too young to have built up an alumni donor base.

Franklin Charter lost several students and teachers this summer because of funding issues. All the teachers and the director at Seacoast Charter left. They had mortgages to worry about. The Department of Education lost all its federal seed money for charters this summer. No help there either.

Rep. Dan Eaton (D-Stoddard) a Democratic House leader, said charter schools should never receive more state aid than other public schools. Their fiscal crisis is the fault of the feds, he said, who gave seed money to charter schools with projected shortfalls.

“Then the feds pulled the rug out from under them,” Eaton said.

Schools like Franklin Career Academy got their approvals from the State Board of Education instead of from sponsoring school districts, which typically objects. Now these independent programs are predicting budget gaps next year in the $200,000 range. That’s enough to pay five or six teachers at their average $30,000 full-time salary, less than two-thirds of the state average.

None of the other bills this term ensures their survival. Rep. Nancy Stiles (R-Hampton) has legislation to let charter schools apply for transportation and building aid like all the other public schools.

“That’s existing money (already in the budget),” Stiles said. “It’s going to be hard to find more for them. The governor has just asked his department heads to make major cuts.”

Rep. Gene Chandler (R-Bartlett) said the budget shortfall is probably bigger than the $50-million the governor thinks.

“It’s a huge crisis,” Chandler said. “The Democrats passed a budget with a 17-percent hike and used inflated revenue projections to balance it. I see no way around it without layoffs.”

Veterinarian Grant Myhre serves on the board of the Equestrian Academy. He told lawmakers this week it operates on just $3,700 per student in state aid. He does free clinical rounds at his hospital every Friday for teens who want to become animal scientists. The school received one year of federal aid, not the three it was counting on.

“That was a hard blow,” Myhre told lawmakers. “It will be very difficult for us to make it.”

Some of his horse-owning clients wish they had gone to a school like this.

“It would have changed their lives,” Myhre said.

Ben Savage played lunchtime background music on acoustic guitar the other day in the Statehouse cafeteria. It was for lawmakers who could save or close his school. The junior at Cocheco wrote, acted, sang and played guitar in his own rock opera last year based on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” This winter he’ll write the score and libretto for “Othello” after he studies the tragedy in his English class. He can already hear in his mind the arias for Iago, one of the great villains of literature.

“I wrote ‘Hamlet’ in a 90s punk style,” Savage says. “Iago tricks people. I want you to think you get the music, and then you don’t. It’ll be full of time signature changes to make the audience uneasy. Cocheco is so welcoming. At my old high school, if you gave a guy a hug you were gay, which I’m not.”

Senator Martha Fuller Clark (D-Portsmouth) is pushing to let all the high school charter programs become regional career academies.

“That opens the door for them to get federal funds (for career training),” Fuller Clark explained. “They’re ineligible now. It’s an unfair disadvantage.”

Rep. Kim Casey (D-Kingston) has a child at a free-standing charter school. She said schools like Franklin Career Academy are balancing on a pinhead. She hopes they can all win voluntary support from their sending school districts the way Cocheco receives $31,000 this year from Dover.

Franklin Career Academy is unlikely to get such revenue. Its sending schools withheld its state aid one year and forced it to close. It lost a year and reopened after a new law required its funding to come from the Department of Education without passing through Franklin, Hill or Winnisquam.

Bill Grimm, the principal of Franklin Career, was at the Statehouse doing some lobbying this week. He wanted lawmakers to understand the issue. The state has to assure every charter $8,000 per kid, and the state average is better than $12,000 per student, he said.

Rep. Ken Weyler (R-Kingston) has filed a bill to help a different kind of public charter school founded by a school district. Those could survive without any state funding. Their sending districts would have to pay 80-percent of their own official tuition rates.

The eLearning Charter School, started by the Exeter School District, has been accepting no kids from outside. Why? Its own taxpayers would underwrite thousands of dollars in losses on every student from a neighboring town.

The North Country Charter School was started by a consortium of districts in Coos and Grafton counties, including Berlin. They all agreed to pay enough to create a reliable operating budget in addition to state and federal aid.

New Hampshire law requires all charter schools to be open-enrollment programs, but neither eLearning nor North Country has technically complied. In contrast, full compliance is the only way for a free-standing charter to get any students.

“That bill would certainly be the biggest bite at the apple,” Casey said. “I’m aware districts that didn’t start a charter school can have a difficult mindset about them.”

Weyler knows the attitude. Superintendents complain to him they would lose 80-percent of their own money for every student who attends another district’s charter school. He isn’t buying the argument.

“Their enrollments vary widely from year to year anyway,” Weyler said. “What they never tell you is they’d save 20-percent on each charter student they lose in the second year and every year after that. They might not have to build new classrooms. And charters don’t just siphon off the brightest kids. That’s a myth. Several serve would-be dropouts.”

Franklin Career Academy is one of them. After it opened, the soaring dropout rate plunged at nearby Franklin High. The town high school deserved much of the credit, thanks to its new programs for at-risk kids. But many of the students at the Career Academy had previously dropped out or had been thinking of it.