9/24/08

Plain Dealer Editorial

CLEVELAND — For a Cleveland charter school on a shoestring budget, the increase in federal funding this year looked too good to be true.

Turns out, it was.

Those Title 1 dollars — extra money that Washington gives schools to help boost the reading and math skills of children from poor families — allow principals to hire more teachers and pay for more materials and equipment designed to help bring students up to speed.

In June, state education officials, who are in charge of doling out the federal money, told charter-school operators in Cleveland that they would be getting big increases in Title 1 money.

The windfall was to be so big, in fact, that many operators of those publicly funded, privately operated schools called the state to double-check the figures.

Don’t worry, they were told. The numbers are correct.

Relieved, some of those schools put the hefty allocations into their budgets and spent the largesse, hiring teachers at a rate normally beyond their budgets. They did so with good reason: Schools can’t carry over Title 1 money. If they don’t use it, they lose it.

Then came the bad news: Not only would there be no increase, but some schools would actually see their Title 1 money reduced from the 2007-08 school year.

In all, charter schools in Cleveland saw their Title 1 allocations slashed more than $5 million from the June projections the state gave them. In several cases, the drop was more than $250,000. The news came just as the new school year was beginning and plunged some schools into budget crises two months into their fiscal year.

“It’s caused chaos for some, if not all, of Cleveland’s charter schools,” said William Simms, executive director of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Somebody should be accountable for what happened. The charter schools are, at least, owed an explanation.”

That could be coming Thursday, when state officials meet with Simms and some Cleveland charter school operators to explain how the original projections changed so dramatically.

The explanation will focus on two things: An increase in Ohio’s share of Title 1 funding this year and the Cleveland School District’s calculation of its own share of that pool.

Title 1 money is distributed by public-school districts, which each divide the pool with public charter schools serving children who live within the district.

One way of determining how much Title 1 money a district receives is through the number of children who receive free or reduced meals.

In the past, Cleveland has claimed universal eligibility, meaning that the entire district qualified. But this year, the district was required to document the number — a daunting task in large, big-city districts with highly mobile student populations.

As a result, only 60 percent of the district’s approximately 50,000 students were deemed eligible under federal free- or reduced-meal guidelines. That meant the rest of the pool of Title 1 money sent to Cleveland would be divided among the city’s charter schools.

And because Ohio’s share of Title 1 money increased this year, many charter school operators felt they were simply sharing in that good fortune.

Believing its share to be too low, Cleveland asked the state to recalculate its percentage of students getting free or reduced cost meals using data from an entire school year, rather than just a brief period.

The new percentage was more than 86 percent. That meant the amount of the Title 1 pool destined for charter schools in the city suddenly dropped dramatically.

Few would dispute the notion that a school district in one of the nation’s poorest cities would have more than 60 percent of its students qualifying for Title 1 money. Some might say that the figure should have served as a red flag that something was amiss.

“No one at the Department of Education realized Cleveland qualified only 60 percent of its students,” said State Board of Education member Colleen Grady of Strongsville. “It’s disappointing to me that no one looked at the information they were plugging into formulas.”

State Department of Education spokeswoman Karla Warren confirmed that department officials notified charter schools of the change in allocation in late August.

“[This] week, the department is meeting with community school stakeholders to discuss this particular issue and further explain how Title I money is distributed,” she said.

Operators of charter schools — called community schools, in Ohio — already receive less per pupil than traditional public schools. They say the cut in federal dollars is inexcusable.

“They don’t have other sources of income,” Grady said. “It’s not like a district with 50,000 students that can move other things around in the budget.”

Simms said he hopes the state can reach a compromise that would help ease the burden on charter schools that were told they would receive one thing but got something very different.

“I don’t think charter schools should have money that belongs to someone else,” he said. “But this miscalculation has created a certain amount of financial havoc.”