If you’ve seen the anti-charter school ads now running on local television — specifically the one stating that charters are draining $400 million a year from in-district schools — all you need to do is drive to 1857 Middlesex St. in Lowell to realize how fraudulent the claim is.
At that location, the formerly abandoned Bradford Industries mill site has been transformed into a new educational complex called the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell.
When it opens this week, CCSL will house 630 students in grades K-6 in a one-story building outfitted with modern classrooms. Under construction is an attached four-story building that will serve for CCSL’s expansion to a full K-12 school over the next six years. Eventually, more than 1,200 students will attend the school. Currently, CCSL is comprised of a majority of children from many new immigrant and minority families seeking a choice in public education.
So how much did the $16 million construction project cost City of Lowell taxpayers? Not a dime. There was no bond issue, no application to the Massachusetts School Building Authority and no special legislation passed to fund this public charter school.
CCCL’s board of directors, headed by Lowell resident Kathleen McCarthy, went out and secured a loan through a private Virginia company that finances charter projects. For the next 20 years, CCSL will pay off the loan — nearly $1.7 million a year — and at the same time build “educational equity” (as the school pays off the loan, it frees up money to add new academic programs, McCarthy said).
So where’s the money “drain” that the Massachusetts Teachers Association and anti-charter groups are promoting?
It’s a made-up myth.
According to the Mass Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, “The vast majority of (charter) funding — about 90 percent in FY 2015 — comes from tuition payments paid by the sending district that a student otherwise would have attended. … Tuition amounts are set each year by a state formula.”
The CCSL receives $12,000 per resident-student, the same amount the Lowell public school system receives for each resident-student.
But here’s the rub: For every student who leaves an in-district school for a charter, the state reimburses the in-district school 200 percent of the departing student’s cost over the next five years.
In other words, taxpayers pay for a vacant seat in the traditional public school. That’s the real “drain,” and it’s on the taxpayer — a fact no MTA ad will fess up to.
Legislators approved the scheme to get teacher unions to back the 1993 Education Reform Act creating charter schools. Back then, charters were few and far between. Today, they’ve spread and prospered academically and are viewed as a threat to the status quo model.
The way we see it, the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell represents all “gain and no drain” — a fact that shouldn’t be lost on parents and taxpayers alike.
