Top Court Hears Appeal on Charter School Funds (GA)

October 13, 2010

The first ever challenge to Georgia’s charter school law went before the state’s highest court Tuesday, with seven public school districts hoping to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding.

The districts are asking the court to toss out a May ruling by a Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy Shoob tha t declared the Georgia Charter Schools Commission constitutional and affirmed it wasn’t breaking any laws by moving money from public school districts to charter schools.

But the school systems’ attorneys argued the charter schools commission is illegal because it is creating an independent school system prohibited by the state constitution. And the districts say the money is actually local dollars that belong to the public school systems, not the state.

For Gwinnett County Schools, the state’s largest district, the commission is taking $800,000 annually for an all-girls charter school in Norcross. That reduction in funding means the local districts either "have to raise taxes or have to reduce services," said attorney Tom Cox, who represents Atlanta Public Schools and DeKalb County Schools.

An attorney for the charter schools said the commission is within its rights to take money from the districts because it’s state money, not local.

"There is not a dime of local money that goes out of the local district to the state or from the local district to a commission school," said Bruce Brown, who represents the charter schools involved in the case.

Charter school advocates say the money is deserved and needed to help keep their doors open.

"Without it you basically close," said Kathy Harwood, head of the Charter Conservatory for Liberal Arts & Technology in Statesboro, one of the charter schools involved in the lawsuit.

Charter schools receive public support but are not subject to many regulations that apply to conventional public schools. Even if a local school district turns down a charter school petition, state law a llows the commission to approve it and move funding from the school district to the charter school’s coffers.

The districts in the lawsuit are among the state’s largest – Gwinnett County, DeKalb County and Atlanta Public Schools – as well as smaller districts like Bulloch, Henry, Candler and Griffin-Spalding schools.

Thirty-seven other districts have signed on to support the appeal of Shoob’s ruling.

The law creating the Charter Schools Commission passed in 2008 by state lawmakers upset because they said many local school boards were unfairly turning down high quality charter petitions simply because they don’t like charter schools. Georgia began allowing charter schools in 1993.

Georgia now has more than 170 charter schools. Nationally, more than 1.5 million students are in nearly 5,000 public charter schools.