The head of the Bethlehem NAACP chapter, the superintendents of the two Lehigh Valley urban school districts, state Sen. Lisa Boscola, state Rep. Steve Samuelson, and a dozen school board members held a press conference at Northeast MS Dec. 5 to call for charter school reform, mirroring press conferences held by nearly 20 superintendents statewide.

Organized by the Pa. League of Urban Schools (PLUS) to coincide with the 64th anniversary of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts, the press conferences highlighted urban superintendents’ view that charter school funding in Pa. is a social justice issue. More than $30.75 million of the $291 million BASD budget for 2019-20 is state-mandated funding of charter schools, according to district documents from June 2019. Allentown is spending more than $60 million of its $341.8 million budget this year on charter schools, and Easton is sending roughly $9.26 million of its $162.7 million to charters.

BASD director Dr. Karen Beck Pooley highlighted three main areas where public school districts want the help of taxpayers and parents as advocates: cost, transparency and accountability. Beck Pooley, who has two children in BASD public schools, quoted Pa. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, who has called the state’s charter school law “simply the worst” in the U.S. She noted two major areas – cyber schooling and special education – in which publicly funded payments to charter schools vastly exceed the actual cost of educating students.

Bethlehem runs its own public cyber education program at a cost of $4,300 per student, according to Mark James, BASD supervisor of professional learning. However, when BASD students enroll in a cyber charter school, the district pays $12,500 per regular education student – a figure based on the average cost to educate students in physical BASD schools.

A similar disparity exists in special education. Although Bethlehem pays nearly $26,000 per special education student to charter schools (brick-and-mortar or cyber), charter schools’ own reporting to the Pa. Dept. of Education indicates an actual expenditure far lower – from just over $3,000 at the Dr. Robert Ketterer Charter School (a cyber program) to slightly more than $15,000 at Agora Cyber Charter School.

“Where does all of this extra money go? Who knows?” Beck Pooley asked. She called on the citizens of the school district to make their voices heard in Harrisburg.

Esther Lee, who was elected to the BASD school board in 1971 and now leads the Bethlehem chapter of the NAACP, asserted that the money diverted to charter schools is particularly missed by children in urban districts. “We’re getting shortchanged,” she said, noting that many urban children come to school with trauma requiring counseling, and commenting that bridging the digital divide is much harder with millions of dollars leaving urban districts. “We need to prevent these business people from draining our public school system,” she said. “Let us – parents and educators – stand up and be counted.”

Although Allentown School District Superintendent Thomas Parker was not present, Allentown’s challenges were part of the discussion. In June, ASD asked the charter schools to share its budget burden by voluntarily accepting a 10 percent reduction in the per-student fee paid by taxpayers. The Pa. Coalition of Public Charter Schools, speaking on behalf of 19 charter schools, refused. In a letter written to the ASD and made available to the media, PCPCS Executive Director Ana Meyers strongly implied that Allentown should instead renege on its pension obligations and cut teachers’ salaries in order to make ends meet.

At the press conference, BASD Superintendent Dr. Joseph Roy reacted strongly to the charter school association’s statement. “That was an arrogant letter,” he said, noting that with state law forbidding layoffs for budget purposes, districts are left with the option of cutting arts education and elective courses, support services for students and extracurriculars like athletics.

Boscola shared Roy’s ire. She informed those present that “[t]hose letters do not sit well in Harrisburg. [C]harters are benefiting from the status quo, so they’ll do everything they can to preserve the status quo, and that includes letters like this, which attack our public schools.” In prepared remarks, Boscola said cyber charter payments, which vary by district according to the per-student cost of education in physical public schools, “have zero to do with the cost of the program. It makes no sense.”

Both Boscola and Rep. Samuelson voiced optimism that bipartisan charter reform will happen in the next legislative session, focusing on cyber school payments as common ground. Cyber schools did not exist when Pa. charter school legislation was created, so lawmakers from both parties may choose to address that particular loophole without committing themselves to broader reform.