Daniel Fowler, The Examiner
2007-08-03 07:00:00.0
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Annapolis -

A Maryland high court decision this week will force the Prince George’s County Public School system to reallocate funds from elsewhere in its budget to the county’s four charter schools, schools spokesman John White said.

“We will need to increase the funding, and that will require money to move … with the goal of not impacting classroom instruction,” White told The Examiner.

According to White, the school system is still evaluating how much more the ruling will require the system to pay per charter school pupil.

The per-pupil expenditures for regular public school students and charter school students for the upcoming school year had been projected to be $12,474 and $6,847 respectively, White said.

Andrew Nussbaum, a lawyer for the Prince George’s County Board of Education, said the Court of Appeals of Maryland ruled Monday that charter schools are entitled to up to 98 percent of a per-pupil allotment formula, which basically calls for the school system budget to be divided by the total number of students.

“It’s not going to cost Prince George’s County any more money than they would have already been spending,” said Richard Daniels, a lawyer for Lincoln Public Charter School in Marlow Heights who was involved in the court case. “If the students were not in public charter schools, they would have been in a traditional public school.”

Prior to the ruling, Nussbaum said, the county provided charter schools with a per-pupil allotment based on money that “actually goes to schools for direct instruction.”

The formula didn’t include money from the total school system budget spent on areas including transportation, workers’ compensation and salaries for school system executives, Nussbaum said.

The Education Article of the Maryland Code says, “A county board shall disburse to a public charter school an amount of … money … that is commensurate with the amount disbursed to other public schools in the local jurisdiction.”

But there had been disagreement about exactly what that meant.

This spring, the county approved a roughly $1.66 million school system budget for fiscal 2008.

dfowler@dcexaminer.com