CFO warns state funding formula has shifted large share of new money to charter schools; urges task force fix

Chief Financial Officer Kevin Kasky told the Chesterfield County School District board that recent calculations under the state27s funding formula have routed a disproportionate share of new state dollars to charter schools and that proposed proviso language and a task force are intended to correct structural inequities.

Kasky said about $112,000,000 in newly calculated state funding would be distributed this year to public schools; of that amount, charter schools were slated to receive roughly $51,000,000 and traditional districts about $61,000,000. He said a House change adopted May 6 would reduce some charter school weightings and, in its current form, would move approximately $18,000,000 from charters to traditional districts for this year if the conference committee keeps that change.

Kasky explained the shift is driven by weighted pupil units: "It's not just number of students because you may have a student that's weighted more heavily," he said, pointing to extra weight for students with disabilities and career-technical students. He added that the way the formula was benchmarked to prior charter per-student values produced results that do not track well year to year. "This is not something this is not us versus charter schools. This is us versus the formula," Kasky said.

Kasky told the board the combination of a lower total new-allocation number this year and enrollment shifts created a "perfect storm": charter enrollment rose by about 8,000 students while traditional district enrollment fell by about 7,000 students, leaving charters with a higher share of the new money than in prior years. He said charter schools now account for roughly 45% of this year's new allocation compared with about 24% in recent years.

He described the House27s change as a short-term correction while a task force studies the formula's structural issues. "It establishes a task force, that will be, hopefully, manned by some district personnel as well as, some personnel from the state legislature to analyze those structural inequities," he said, and that the task force would be expected to present recommendations by late December ("either December 1 or December 31," he said).

Kasky also clarified who receives the charter distributions: about 80 charter schools across the state, authorized by three authorizers he named, serve roughly 57,000 charter students; by comparison he cited about 710,000 students in traditional public schools statewide.

Board members asked whether the House27s May 6 change focused only on virtual charter weightings and why brick-and-mortar and virtual weightings differed; Kasky said negotiators likely picked what he called "low-hanging fruit" for this year's action rather than changing all weightings at once.

Kasky urged continued advocacy to keep the task force language and to press the conference committee to adopt the remedial changes for the current year if possible. He said the deadline and final form rest with the conference committee and the legislature.

What happens next: the proviso language will go to the House-Senate conference committee; the board and district staff plan to monitor developments and advocate for the task-force language and any changes that would address the inequities Kasky described.