Another look at appeal of local charter schools

I was thoroughly enjoying Jodine Mayberry’s recent column about West Virginia school teachers, right up to the point where she wrote, “I have never understood why poor districts should have to pay millions of taxpayer dollars to ... management companies that operate socalled “not-for-profit” charter schools ... to compete with their own public schools.”

As the CEO of the Chester Community Charter School, I wanted to reach out immediately to Ms. Mayberry to remind her that Pennsylvania’s charter schools are very much public schools themselves, created by the Commonwealth’s 1997 Charter School Law to “improve student learning, encourage the use of innovative teaching methods, create new professional opportunities for teachers and to provide parents and students with expanded choices in educational opportunities within the public school system...”

I also wanted to remind Ms. Mayberry that when parents, for whatever reasons, decide to transfer their children to a public charter school, the traditional school no longer carries the expense for educating that student, but that the charter school, by law, is challenged to provide a competitive educational experience at a per-pupil funding level that is about 75 percent of that available to the traditional public school.

The Public Interest Law Center, in 2015, cited Pennsylvania as having the second-worst school funding inequality level in the entire country. Clearly, that longstanding pattern of underfunding to low-income school districts such as Chester Upland School District, which significantly pre-dated the state’s 1997 Charter Law, has been a major reason why Chester Community Charter School has grown, on the strength of parents simply seeking better educational options for their children, to become Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter school.

According to a recent report by the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of students in which more than 75 percent of students qualify for free lunch, was higher for public charter schools (33 percent) than for traditional public schools (24 percent). An even greater 94 percent of the students at Chester Community Charter School also qualify for free lunches, based on their families’ economic status.

Perhaps those data provide answers to Ms. Mayberry’s question about why charter schools are not generally established in places such as “Radnor or Swarthmore, where parents are affluent, property taxes are high and the public system is excellent.”

By the way, our own research has disclosed that a significant percentage of parents with students at CCCS also have other students, and older students, in the city’s traditional public schools. Knowing that, we have sought to work very closely with CUSD to provide assistance, wherever possible, to all of our city’s public school children.

After reading Ms. Mayberry’s column, I wanted, most of all, to extend to her an invitation to visit our state-of-the-art campus and technology-facilitated classrooms, and to meet our parents, students and teachers. I wanted her to be able to hear, first hand, about how the Gureghian Foundation has contributed approximately $10 million in scholarships for 350 of our top graduates to attend some of our region’s most prestigious private secondary schools.

For all of those reasons, we look forward,with great anticipation, to welcoming Ms. Mayberry to our community’s charter school.