I’m seeing questions about why the District serves so many out-of-district charter students if space is so tight at our schools. Here’s the explanation.
The primary reason San Carlos adopted the charter school model years ago was financial: the State gives us more money per pupil when our schools are charters than when they are traditional schools. That’s because charter schools are funded based on State-wide averages, and historically San Carlos’ schools, on their own, were funded below average. So converting to charters made great financial sense.
Converting to charter schools also allowed the District to more easily accept out-of-district transfers. Moving a student from one traditional (i.e., non-charter) district to another requires the concurrence of both the district gaining the student and the district losing the student. Any district that gets paid based on the number of students — which is most of them — is therefore naturally going to tend to refuse transfer requests.
In a charter transfer, the district losing the student has no say; the decision is solely up to the family, provided the charter school has room.
Up until a few years ago the District had excess capacity at its schools. Accepting charter transfers used that “idle” capacity and brought more money into the District.
This benefited residents by allowing us to have a richer program than would otherwise have been possible. Put another way, by bringing more money into the District, charter conversion reduced the amount of money the District would have had to raise from the local community, through higher taxes and increased philanthropic giving, to build the high-quality educational program that everyone values today.
That win/win formula breaks down when capacity gets tight. But please keep in mind that it worked to everyone’s benefit for years.
The District is reducing the number of charter transfers it serves. But that takes time, because, under law, once a charter student is accepted he or she has the right to continue to attend that school.