Those In Favor brilliantly put together charts showing the true financial impact of charters on Christina School District. Kavips then put it all together. This is insane. And our state has allowed this to happen. It’s no wonder Christina is in disarray. The “choice” crowd will do the whole chicken and the egg thing, but it is immaterial to the crisis at hand currently going on.
This is unprecedented. $21 million… Remember the casinos who were $12 million in the hole? Oh, its a tragedy they whined; we’ll lose jobs, we have no choice but to reimburse the profits being lost by the casino owners…. Remember when they asked for $37 million the next year? Again…. We have to do it…
Well, guess what… Jobs are being lost at Christina too. And it is solely because of Charters…. Minus $21 million!
We pay tax money to fund our public schools. Privateers bribed our legislature (piloted by Sokola (see Exceptional Delaware) into allowing charter schools steal money from public schools…
If we paid taxes to New Castle County and as an example, one fifth of then were being sent to Sussex County because Sam Wilson was a friend of Charlie Copeland and needed a welfare hand-out… we would have a legal case on hand. Our money is…
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The Season Of Myths 
Interesting – CSD needs that Charter money back in order to fund its existing rolls of about 16,000 students? So, in fact, CSD would still be in the hole if all of its students served in charter and choice were returned along with the money. Nope, you can’t balance the budget on the backs of charter/choice school students. And fear not, the pain will be shared by charter and choice once the one year lag is over.
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I have read with interest your comments about the money flowing out of Christina School District. You have missed one important part of the equation – that is that the students now in charter schools are now no longer a cost to Christina. If for instance if there are 2000 students in charter schools and we assume a 20-1 unit per teacher then there are 100 teachers in charters that Christina does not pay for. This is where the $21million that is passed to the charter schools goes. If those students were returned to Christina then 100 new teachers would need to be hired by Christina – but 100 teachers who worked at the charters would lose their jobs since there are no students to teach. The basic point here is that when money moves to charters so does cost. To think that if the students and money came back to Christina there would be a $21million infusion of new money available to Christina is not correct since you have the costs of 2000 new students to deal with. These comments are for your information and not for attribution.
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A good percentage of charter students were formerly in private school. The attractiveness of the low-poverty charters to families residing in CSD that do not consider district schools a viable option has added hundreds (likely over a thousand, at this point) of students to the public system. Christina pays the local tax share for all these new enrollees, but does not have new funds to cover that. The WEAC report from last spring has an interesting chart showing steep declines in NCCo private school enrollment as charters have expanded. To sustain that trend w/o adversely impacting existing schools, districts need more revenue. That’s what Christina’s referendums tried, and failed, to generate.
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and it is not $0 to $21Million,It has now reached $21 million is the amount for this year based on the number of kids going to charter.
The real question is why are so many going to Charter versus CSD – is it because CSD products is that bad. Instead of arguing about the cost, we should be focusing on stopping the flow of students out and then reversing it. If the quality of the product (education) were better this would not be an issue. Parents want a good quality education for their children.
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Definitely important for CSD to focus on its “product”–they have some excellent accelerated academics programs rolling out that aim to meet public demand (one example of district response to the hemorrhaging). It’s also the case that the most popular charters enrolling CSD students offer student populations that are much more affluent than the district student population. This is very appealing to families that make active school choices. It is not a feature that the district can ever match; CSD MUST serve any interested child in the community, including those with highest needs.
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Would like to recommend that you put a link on “Those in Favor” or quotes so it is more obvious you are speaking about that great blog. I had to read it ten times and then it hit me what you were saying… lol.. and I wrote the second article.. lol. I’m going huh, those if favor of what… Well, maybe you had to be there… 🙂
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