.I read with interest yesterday’s article by the Washington Post’s Emma Brown about the District of Columbia spending $120 million to replace Ballou Senior High School in Anacostia. The reporter points out that “Fewer than one-quarter of Ballou’s students are proficient in reading and math, according to the city’s standardized tests, and half graduate within four years. Chronic truancy is also a problem: 46 percent of Ballou students missed at least a month of class in the past school year.” Yet, the city has made the decision to allocate an astonishing amount of public money to the 800 student body.
A charter school this size could never aquire this quantity of funding to renovate a building. At $3,000 per child the maximum it could obtain, if it were extremely fortunate, is a commercial bank loan for perhaps 20 percent of this amount. But with the academic results detailed above, even borrowing a dime would most likely be impossible.
Imagine what would happen if DCPS had to operate utilizing the same facility allotment that charter schools do. This would solve a major political problem. Instead of the Chancellor making decisions as to which underutilized traditional schools need to be closed, the future survival of sites would be dependent on whether the student enrollment would support the market-based rent. If a school did not have an adequate number of students in attendance to afford the monthly expenditure it would have to close or consolidate with another. No longer would there be parent protests or law suits. All judgments regarding which campuses would be allowed to continue accepting students would be based solely upon the same economics that charters have had to follow since their inception.
FOCUS has argued for years that the per pupil funding for instruction should be uniform for charters and traditional schools. Now it’s time to extend the same principle to facilities. Maybe then the Mayor will come to the conclusion, as charter leaders have done long ago, that the entire financial system regarding classroom space does not work and is not fair.
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