Texas Charter Schools Plan for State-Funding Cuts (TX)

February 22, 2011

While public school districts grapple with possibly severe state-funding cuts, North Texas charter schools also are trying to gauge how the state’s budget shortfall could affect them.

As the Texas Legislature weighs cutting $5 billion from public education next year, school districts have made attention-grabbing proposals about possible layoffs and school closures. But charter school administrators, who already operate with less state funding, hope to avoid those drastic measures.

Whether that’s possible for Texas’s 500 charter schools isn’t clear yet.

“These cuts of this magnitude would have a significant impact on charter schools,” said David Dunn, executive director of the Texas Charter Schools Association. “Charters are typically run on smaller fund balances, so they have less cushion in place to weather the storm.”

Charters are public schools run by private organizations that have more flexibility to adjust curriculum and instruction than traditional schools. They receive per-pupil state funding but don’t receive local tax revenue like public school districts. They try to raise money in other ways, and some receive corporate and nonprofit grants, but in the end they operate on much smaller budgets.

Like public schools throughout the state, charters are trying to outline cuts and funding estimates with limited information. The Legislature has proposed $10 billion in cuts to public education over the next two yearsand has suggested eliminating or reducing state grants for special programs, but that amount and the types of cuts could change in the coming months as lawmakers finalize the reductions.

And while school districts have received guidance from education funding experts in Austin, the much-smaller charter schools are combing through the appropriations bills themselves to figure out where they might have to trim. As a result, charter school officials have come to various conclusions.

Some say the proposed public education budgets would reduce funding by 5 percent. Others suspect double-digit percentage cuts. Either way, school programs would probably be the first to go. Before- and after-school tutoring and Saturday school could be on the chopping block, many said. Fewer teachers might be hired to accommodate student enrollment gains.

“They are talking about making cuts in a very painful general way,” said Rosemary Perlmeter, executive director of Uplift Education, which operates five charter schools in the Dallas area. “We’ve tried to be very careful and have been extremely conservative.”

Perlmeter said her best guess is that Uplift could see a 5 percent funding dip, which could be weathered without laying off teachers. She could make up part of that by redu cing professional development training and other areas, she said.

But her biggest worry is that cuts would prevent Uplift from opening two new schools every year as planned.

School officials won’t know for months what the Legislature decides to do, and that uncertainty stresses Tom Wilson, chancellor of Life Schools, which has five campuses in the southern Dallas County area.

Wilson said he has done calculations for various levels of cuts and can work with some scenarios but not all.

If lawmakers base cuts on a school district’s property wealth, charters might be spared because they don’t collect local funds. But if the state makes similar percentage cuts for all schools, that could destroy the charter system, Wilson said.

“We would be tremendously damaged because we get no local money,” said Wilson, who said his state funding would dip from $33 million to $28 million annually. “It would be horrible.”

That scenario could require layoffs of up to 74 employees out of 515.

“We are doing much with little, and they are taking away what we have,” Wilson said.

Charter schools serve various types of students, but many focus on at-risk students, including those from poor families and those who were behind at other schools. Janice Blackmon, administrative services director for Universal Academy in Irving and Coppell, said the cuts could affect those students in particular if Saturday school and after-school programs are eliminated. Still, she said, that would be better than laying off teachers.

“We don’t have fat to trim,” Blackmon said. “You would like to see that we don’t have to do this at all. We are prayerful.”