The legislation problem here at Charter

Image credit to Pennlive

Last week, I interviewed Dr.Brady and Mrs.Raike about the big issue we were and still are having about the legislative problem here at Avon Grove Charter School. I asked both Dr.Brady the head board of Charter, and Mrs.Raike a Learning Support staff a couple of important questions that I thought we should all know about this issue as a student and staff members attend Charter. I asked both teachers “what was your reaction when charter was going to get a 20% cut”? “Can you explain to me what would happen if the bills had passed”? “Where do we stand with these students”? “I asked those questions to both staff to get a different understanding of opinions. I asked each staff a spate question. Dr.Bradys question was “Is there anything the students can do to help”? Mrs. Raikes question this problem affect there learning center”? I hope you receive a lot of information about the problem were dealing with at Charter school.

What was your reaction when charter was going to get a 20% cut?

Brady-- Let me edit that first. I was shocked. I was surprised that our legislators didn’t see the kind of impact that sort of legislation was going to have on charter schools as a whole. Because in the previous two years, charter school funding and education funding in general had dropped substantially. So the current governor so far, Corbett, had cut education in a way that was shocking to everyone. And now for us, it hurt higher education colleges and universities but certainly hurt K-12 education, so both charter schools and traditional public schools. Why that is? I think it had a lot to do that when we had the recession and when the recession hit PA, there was a lot of desire among politicians to try to balance budgets and, unfortunately, the first place they tend to go is schools. I don’t know why that is.

Raike-- I was very upset, because it’s not fair that all schools are not treated based on their needs of what each school can give each student.

                                                             Photo credit to Kevin Brady

Can you explain to me what would happen if the bills had passed?

Brady-- Well, one did. But it didn’t pass in the form of a bill. What happened is—this is where politics gets really confusing –there’s a bill and the bill will be written usually by a legislator and it will go through either the senate or the house, but ultimately both. So if it starts in the senate, it will need to go through the house. And if it starts in the house, it will need to go through the senate. Both parts of the legislator need to approve it. What happened with us, though, is the part that related to teacher’s pensions (What’s a pension? If the teacher has been in education for a certain number of years in PA – 30 years—they get a yearly payment after they retire. And it’s a pretty good system in PA, and the charter school has to participate in the pension system and contribute to it.) What one of those pieces of legislation did was get rid of the state’s contribution to the employee pensions and that hurt us very, very badly. And that didn’t go through as a bill. Some legislators put a stop to it.  Some senators really helped us out. Senator Dinnimin and Representative Lawrence, our local congressmen helped a lot. So we were able to slow the passage of that bill down in the PA legislature. But then the Governor took the exact same language in that bill and put it into his state budget, which is another way that things can get through. So at the end of the year, he had that in his budget and we ended up losing 1.25 million dollars as a result. And it’s hard when I try to explain this to anyone. It’s so hard to “follow the ball” on this one. There’s a bunch of different ways that things can move politically. And so it’s hard for you guys, as students, bright students, to understand or get a sense of legislation and how that affects you.  But the system is so complicated that’s hard to do. The other thing that could have hurt us – the second piece of legislation – was a bill that could have changed the way that special education is funded in charter schools. But it would also leave alone the way special education is funded for traditional public schools. So it would just be us as charter schools getting hit. Which is really scary. If we were hit with pension reimbursement problem and then hit with the second piece, the special education funding piece, I don’t know if we’d be sitting here now, seriously. I was terrified. And I am really  happy that second shoe didn’t drop, and that was through you guys and parents and our representatives making a fuss. Had that second part hit, I don’t believe we would have been able to keep it together. Even with the pension piece, some of the things that happened because of it – custodial staff that were full time and had benefits, are not here anymore. We now go through an outside service. And that was really hard to do because these were people who had been here for years (some almost 10 years). And we had to lay them off because there was no way to fill the gap and we didn’t want to go into curriculum and hurt teachers. Sometimes the folks that do really important work everyday end up feeling the pain for everyone else. And that’s what happened. I’d like to see that not happen again. The other thing is that we are a “bricks and mortar” charter school. So we have this building and Kembelsville and both of those buildings cost money to maintain, like your house at home. We have to pay money to maintain electric bills, etc. to maintain both of our buildings. The cyber charters don’t have that and they have the same funding. That seems pretty unfair to a lot of us and we’ve had discussions with the PA Charter Coalition that we feel as if we’re underfunded. Sometimes the discussion on this is particularly unethical, but we feel like we’re doing the right thing.

Raike-- A lot of students would end up losing services and they will be able to give students free and appropriate education will defiantly be hurt.   

Where do we stand with the bills?

Brady-- So the special Ed bill could come back in another form and the last time I checked, last week, there seems like there’s another version of that special education bill that could come at us, which is really scary. What could happen is that there could be a focus group created within the congress just to discuss charter school funding. If that happened, that could be the best thing for us. If you look at the way that charter school are funded, it used to be 68% of the funding public school received. And now we’re at about 62-65%. We can do a whole lot with less, but we can’t do a whole lot with nothing. So what would be really wonderful is if the people that represent us and PA congress could sit down and say “what is a fair formula?” So I’m hoping what happens is that movement catches up to speed before the special Ed bills get voted upon. You never know which one will move more quickly. One of the frustrating things about politics.

Raike-- I don’t know there is always a threat to charter schools because most school districts do not like them for the simple reason that they see us as a threat and they don’t understand the fact that every student is not made for every school.

Photo Credit to Patrick Orlando

Is there anything that students can do to help?

Brady--For right now, and this is hard to swallow for me, too, is probably just to wait and see. Because if we’re going to do something significant, we have to wait to see what battle we’re fighting. And right now, that’s not really clear. So it’s either we throw all of our weight and influence behind the funding and reform or throw all of our weight behind fighting the resurrection of the Special Ed bill. Right now it’s not clear which path is best. But I think things should start to heat up by early December. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of all of this political nonsense. It seems like every single year we have something to deal with. Hopefully, something will happen within the legislators to stop this cycle. We should be able to focus on educating kids and making this place a place where they feel comfortable and safe, getting a valued education. But that’s hard to do when we’re under attack all of the time.

How would this problem affect the learning center?

Raike--It will greatly affect our school because it would make it harder for us to do our job and to be able to give the students all their educational needs and to make sure their education is complete.