Of all the groundbreaking education reforms embraced by lawmakers over the years, charter schools may be the most remarkable. Independently developed and operated, these novel public schools represent the very cutting edge of reform, where parental choice meets educational innovation.
Charter schools offer wide-ranging learning methods and course work aimed at those students — from at-risk and special-needs kids to the gifted and talented — who too often are shortchanged by neighborhood public schools.
It’s no wonder charters’ popularity has surged, with growth off the charts in Colorado and other states. The 160 charters in Colorado now serve some 62,000 students — almost 8 percent of all students enrolled in public schools statewide.
But that meteoric growth also poses a big challenge to the charter-school movement: how to accommodate more students with limited resources. Indeed, charter schools took a big funding hit in the legislature this year, losing half of their total facilities budget. And there is no surer way to smother this important educational opportunity than to limit capacity, especially when there are 40,000 kids in Colorado on waiting lists to enter these schools.
Gov. Bill Ritter has an opportunity to turn things around and inject new hope into Colorado’s charter-school movement. The governor and the state Department of Education can pursue millions of dollars in federal matching funds under the Charter School Facilities Incentive grant program.
To become eligible, Colorado first must increase its own investment in current charter school facilities. The governor can do that if he taps into another source of federal funding, the economic-stimulus package signed into law earlier this year by President Obama.
Using stimulus dollars to leverage charter-school facilities funding won the near-unanimous support of the legislature, and Colorado’s State Board of Education concurred. Organizations as diverse as the Stapleton and Donnell-Kay Foundations are on board, and the state Department of Education stands ready to prepare the federal grant application.
An additional $5 million invested by the governor in charter schools using stimulus money could bring charters as much as $4 million in matching funds in just the first year, and more than $10 million over the next five years.
Importantly, the opportunity to apply for the Charter School Incentive Grant Program comes only once every five years. This door won’t open again until 2014. In the last five-year cycle, three states and the District of Columbia received $77.92 million in funding under the Incentive Grant Program. Notably, President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget increases the funding available for this program to as much as $60 million.
This is the opening we have been waiting for. Colorado long has been a leader in the nation’s charter-school movement, yet our state continues to struggle with long-term solutions to pay for needed facilities. The Incentive Grant Program provides a wonderful opportunity to maximize our state’s investment in public school facilities.
Gov. Ritter has a chance to fulfill his commitment not only to charter schooling but also to the education-reform movement in general. And he can do it at no cost to our own state’s strapped treasury.
Nancy Spence, a Republican state senator from Centennial, is a longtime advocate of charter schools.
