School directors urge lawmakers to reform charter school funding

WEST CHESTER » The West Chester Area School District Board of Directors approved a resolution this week urging state lawmakers to support legislation that would reform charter school funding statewide, potentially saving the district $2.3 million.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is proposing legislation that would reform charter school tuition calculations. The current charter school funding formula was established in 1997 and has not been modified since it was created.

Public school officials argue that the formula used to calculate costs is outdated and doesn’t reflect actual special education

student costs, nor does it reflect the actual costs to operate cyber-charter schools.

“The way the charter laws are currently written, there is one tuition rate that school districts pay to charter schools for a special education student,” said Dr. Jim Scanlon, West Chester Area School District superintendent. “We pay $31,000 to charters regardless of the types of services a student needs. So, for instance, if a child only needs speech and language help one day per week, rather than paying $1,500 for that service, we are paying $31,100.”

Scanlon added additional data to explain how the current funding formula is costing the district and taxpayers millions of dollars.

The West Chester Area School District enrolled 717 charter school students in 2015. Onehundred forty of those students enrolled in 11 different cyber charter schools, and 577 enrolled in five different brick and mortar charter schools, at a cost of $9.4 million. In 2019, the district enrolled 482 students in charter schools, with 159 of them in cyber charters, at a cost of $7.7 million.

“The school board supports charter school funding reform,” said board president Chris McCune. “We have done an analysis of the cost to operate our own cyber school, and it is significantly less than what we are paying to cyber charter schools.”

Wolf’s plan would also institute a flat cyber school tuition rate of $9,500 per student. Since cyber schools do not maintain a building, the cost to educate students is much lower than that of a brick and mortar charter school. The Charter School law does not differentiate tuition rates between brick and mortar charter schools and cyber charter schools, so school districts pay the same rate for both.

“Every school district sending students to charter schools can share a similar story,” Scanlon continued. “This broken funding formula needs to be corrected.”