Last year, some 1,800 Hampshire County students opted to go to a public school other than one in their own district, taking with them more than $22 million in education funding.
But they weren’t just going to charter schools. The state’s school choice program also allows students to leave their home districts to attend another public school.
The result is an education marketplace that offers some towns financial windfalls and forces others to make do with hundreds of thousands of dollars less.
“It creates winner districts and loser districts,” Leverett resident Nancy Grossman, who works in municipal finance, said of the choice program. “The more appealing districts can be the towns that spend more money on their schools or have historically been more appealing … often become the winner districts. And in the towns nearby, more kids leave.”
As voters decide Tuesday whether to lift the cap on the number of charter schools that can be opened or expanded through ballot Question 2, proponents say such schools provide desperately needed opportunities in chronically under-performing districts, primarily in urban areas such as Holyoke, Springfield and Boston.
Opponents say lifting the cap would have disastrous effects on traditional public schools because charters draw their funding from school district budgets. Many say the state needs to revamp its educational financing formula and increase the funding of all public schools by $1 billion annually — although few hold out hope that it will happen anytime soon.
Charter and choice students who would otherwise be educated in a specific school district take a certain amount of money from that district’s coffers to the school they enroll in. For choice students without special needs, that amount is $5,000 each year. Charter tuition varies by district and year and is based on per-student funding. In Northampton it averages about $12,200 annually, but in other places it can reach toward $20,000.
Out of the 18 school districts in Hampshire County, more than half — including Easthampton, Amherst and Northampton — see a net financial loss from charter and choice-out tuition payments, according to a Gazette analysis. Hatfield is among seven school districts, most of them smaller in size, that see a financial gain.
In the 2016 fiscal year, nine Hatfield children attended charter schools, costing the district $101,323 (after state reimbursement of some lost income) while 31 used the choice option to attend schools in another public district, sending with them $194,914.
At the same time, 28 percent of Hatfield’s total enrollment comes from its 131 choice-in students, who bring with them $919,191 in tuition from their home districts. All told, Hatfield ends up $623,000 ahead — or $1,351 for every student who remains enrolled there.
Compare that to the 1,538-student Easthampton district, which saw a net loss of $832,468 in choice tuition (86 students in, 175 students out) and also paid paid $742,468 in charter tuition for 94 students after state reimbursement. That totals a loss of more than $1.4 million — or $933 for every student who remains.
William Diehl, executive director of the Collaborative for Educational Services in Northampton, said there are several reasons that charter and choice tuition payments do particular damage in rural Hampshire and Franklin County districts.
First, there are simply fewer students. The school-aged population has shrunk by an average of 220 students each year in Hampshire County. The region also sees a higher-than-average number of home-schooled students, according to state data provided by CES, further thinning the pool of prospective students and the government funding they bring.
“The charter schools add to the overall issue,” Diehl said. “Charter schools tend to have the largest impact because they draw the most funding from the schools.”
When it comes to financial impact, charter and choice are not created equal. While a departing charter student can take as much as $10,000 to $20,000 from her home district, choice-out students take a flat $5,000. Special education students take with them the entire cost of their education.
Charter tuition is more complicated and is set by a state formula. The amount sent by a student’s home district to a charter school is largely based on how much the sending district spends per pupil — a figure that varies greatly among communities in any given year.
Then there’s the state formula for reimbursing sending schools a portion of the money they lose to charters.
In the first year a student leaves the district for a charter school, the district is reimbursed by the state for that total amount. The formula calls for 25 percent reimbursement of that student’s tuition for each of the following five years.
The Legislature has never fully funded the reimbursement program, however. In the last fiscal year, the reimbursement rate was about 62 percent of what the formula calls for, according to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Last year Northampton received $272,097 in state aid for 201 students who went to charter schools. This year (with one additional charter student), the district is set to receive an estimated $192,118, or a 29.4 percent decline.
With the incomplete state reimbursement factored in, Northampton spends about $12,200 for each charter student, according to Superintendent John Provost. That creates classroom space, and a financial incentive, to welcome students who want to choice-in from other schools.
“One of the ways that districts can adjust for (low state reimbursement) is by increasing the number of choice students they allow in,” Provost said.
Northampton brings in the second-highest amount of choice tuition statewide. Last school year, the district educated 221 students who came from 29 communities, bringing with them $1.83 million in tuition.
Despite that, Northampton still had a net loss from choice and charter tuition last year. The district sent $2.09 million to charter schools last year to educate 201 students, creating a net tuition loss of $895,412 — about $330 for every student who remained.
“You would have to fill about 1.5 students in a choice seat to offset one student going out to a charter program,” Provost said.
And in Northampton, that wouldn’t work, Provost said.
“Our primary concern is maintaining favorable class sizes,” he said. “We look at the class sizes at each individual school and the district overall and make our availability of choice seats based on that.”
The aim is for 200 students per grade in grades kindergarten through 8, which equals class sizes of about 18 to 20 students. The district’s choice-in program currently has a waiting list, he said.
Provost acknowledges that the financial jockeying involving choice and charter tuition is not ideal.
“My wish would be that more Northampton residents chose Northampton, which I think would have a positive impact regionwide,” he said. “That would mean that we would be accepting fewer choice students and the neighboring communities would be keeping more of their education dollars to themselves.”
Diehl said the impact is particularly hard on rural districts.
Gill Elementary School, for example, recently eliminated a reading teacher due to declining enrollment, he said.
“On paper it looks like it should be a wash, because the money should be following the student,” he said. “It’s very, very hard for a public school to absorb the loss of a student in a grade.”
Grossman, a former member of the Leverett Finance Committee, said that 18 Boston public schools closed between 2010 and 2011 due to the competition from charters, which are governed by appointed boards rather than locally elected school committees.
“Part of the whole narrative around choice is that families are being told it’s your tax dollars to spend as you choose,” Grossman said. “I heartily disagree with that. It’s our tax dollars for us to collectively decide to spend in the best way possible.”
But for Julia Mejia, a parent of charter school children in Boston, charter schools offer the “pathway out of poverty” that traditional public schools have not.
“As a parent, I could care less if it’s a district or a charter school,” Mejia said at a recent forum on Question 2 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It’s a governance structure, a different way of doing things.”
There are 78 charter schools in the state, with a limit of 120 under current law. If voters approve Question 2, up to 12 additional charter schools each year, or expanded enrollments in existing charters each year, will be allowed.
The current cap also limits the total amount of money spent by districts on charter tuition. In the lowest 10 percent of performing districts, the cap on charter spending stands at 18 percent of the district’s net school expense. In all other districts, the cap is 9 percent of net school spending.
That cap has been reached in Boston, Fall River and Holyoke and is close to being reached in Springfield, Lowell, New Bedford and Chelsea, all of which are underperforming, according to Marc Kenen, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association.
The result is that the children who need them most — those in struggling urban districts — do not have access to enough charter schools, Kenen said.
But if Question 2 passes, the financial cap would be eliminated, which means there would be no barrier to all of a district’s funding being sent to charter schools, Diehl said.
Such a situation has happened in New Orleans, where 93 percent of the city’s public school students are educated in charter schools.
But Diehl said that if Question 2 passes, the Legislature will likely act to put in safeguards on district funding, such as placing limits on the amount that could be paid in charter tuition.
For Easthampton Superintendent Nancy Follansbee, lifting the charter cap would create a further divide in public education.
“Adding more charter schools will exacerbate an environment where we are all finding ourselves forced to become marketing managers competing for very limited resources,” she said in an email interview. “A ‘yes on 2’ victory will mean the majority of children who live in our community and attend our schools will become the have-nots in an educational system that supports exclusive institutions that divide communities and drain resources away from the schools that have the responsibility of serving the full range of families and educating the full range of students.”
A driving factor in the state’s education woes, Grossman said, is its two-decade-old funding formula, which underestimates the cost of education, according to a state review performed last year. The state underfunds public education by over $1 billion each year, the review found.
South Hadley High School history teacher Stephanie Viens said she’s not opposed to charter schools, but is opposed to raising the cap on adding or expanding them. She said charter schools have failed in their original mission: to have the freedom to experiment and bring innovations back to traditional public schools.
“If we want to expand the number of charter schools, (the legislation) should also have funding attached to it,” she said.
Since she started teaching 12 years ago, she said, she has seen South Hadley High School make cuts, including to the number of teachers in her department and the elimination of a Chinese language program.
In the face of declining birth rates and, thus, declining school enrollment in Hampshire County, Viens said district schools can’t afford to send any more of their money to charter schools.
While Diehl said charters provide important functions, particularly in urban areas for children of color and those affected by poverty, he said they can’t be the only solution to the state’s achievement gap problem.
“We have to have more than one tool,” Diehl said. He added that charter schools “can’t be the only hammer we’re using to help drive the nail for the kind of reform that needs to happen.”
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com