Charter schools sue state, Christina

• Fifteen charter schools are suing the Christina School District and the state Department of Education.
• The suit says Christina has been withholding millions of dollars in tax revenue from charter schools.
• The case was filed in Chancery Court late Tuesday.

Fifteen charter schools have filed suit against the state Department of Education and Christina School District to get what they claim is their fair share of funding.

Christina has been withholding millions of dollars in local tax revenue from charter schools for years and the Department of Education has been complicit, the lawsuit says.

The case was prompted by the department's reversal of an adjustment this summer to the formula for calculating the amount of money public school districts have to pay to charter schools.

That adjustment had answered the charter schools' long-held concerns they weren't getting enough of the local tax revenue, and it effectively increased their funding.

But the department went back on that adjustment just as the school year was starting when public school administrators and state legislators cried foul. They argued that districts weren't given enough time to plan for the changes that would cost them, in some cases, millions of dollars.

Under the adjusted formula, Christina School District would have had to pay about $3 million more this year than it had been planning.

For Newark Charter School, one of the chief beneficiaries of those funds, that would have meant an additional $1 million in revenue.

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The dispute between those two education systems was a major cause of the lawsuit, which was filed in Chancery Court late Tuesday.

Charter schools and their supporters had long been lobbying for a review of the funding formula, which is based on the idea that education funding should follow students rather than schools. They argued that some districts hadn't been paying as much as they should.

Under state law, districts are allowed to exclude some parts of their budgets from the total pie that gets divvied up to follow students who are educated elsewhere – donations to a particular project or program are an example of what can be kept out. The more money that is kept out of the pie, the less that flows into choice and charter schools.

Over the years, an inconsistent application of that formula had developed so that districts were calculating what they owed in vastly different ways.

In order to make the formula's application uniform across the state, the Department of Education examined the exclusions that were being used and eliminated some of them. That process began in the spring and finished in the summer.

But, by mid-September, the department had faced severe backlash and reverted the system back to the way it had been.

"In light of recent conversations and legislative interest regarding the calculations for choice and charter billing... the department will not implement any changes to the calculation methodology that has been used in past years," Kim Wheatley, the department's director of finance, wrote in a September 9 email to school administrators, obtained by the News Journal through a Freedom of Information Act request.

That email followed two weeks of uproar from traditional public school supporters and some legislators.

The department will tackle the issue again for next year's budgeting cycle, she wrote in the email, saying that it would meet with school leaders and legislators "to address the inconsistencies and find a fair and equitable resolution."

The lawsuit aims at reinstating the adjustments made over the summer to the statewide formula and forcing Christina to pay back what it has withheld since 2008.

In a prepared statement, department spokeswoman Alison May stressed that the department would be working toward eliminating inconsistencies in the application of the state's formula for next year.

She also said, "we look forward to being engaged in this case and will defend the prior decisions of the DOE."

Christina's spokeswoman, Wendy Lapham, declined to comment until the district had been able to better review the case.

Kendall Massett, director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, said in a prepared statement, "We applaud the state Department of Education for recognizing the out-of-proportion exclusion requests from Christina School District this year and for taking steps to bring them in line, in the interest of fairness for students and to make the process consistent among all districts. But that decision was reversed after the deadline mandated by state law."

Contact Saranac Hale Spencer at (302) 324-2909, sspencer@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @SSpencerTNJ.