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Idaho's 2013 Legislature convened in Boise on January 7. We've put together a guide to the session, including ways to contact your lawmaker, how to get involved, and comprehensive information about the people elected to office.

Idaho Charter Schools Ask For More Money, Traditional Districts Say “What About Us?”

Adam Cotterell
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Boise State Public Radio

Charter school advocates in Idaho are pushing state lawmakers for money to help pay for facilities. They argue they need the money because they can’t pass levies like traditional districts. Many districts say they need that money even more.  There’s one charter school that’s become a poster child for this debate over school funding.

Cindy Hoovel’s office at DaVinci Charter School is stripped bare. Boxes of school supplies and books are stacked high around the walls. Hoovel is DaVinci’s director, or rather she was. The school closed for good last Friday. Hoovel says everything was great at their old home in a strip mall storefront until 2011.

“And then the landlord moved in a tactical firearms store next to our kindergarten,” she says. “Then a month later he moved in a brewery. And then just a few weeks before school was out the landlord said we’re not going to renew your lease. You just don’t match our business plan.”

When the 2011 school year ended they had two weeks to pack up and move out. They ended up leasing land behind a Garden City business cheaply. But other things like leasing portable buildings proved expensive.

Credit Adam Cotterell / Boise State Public Radio
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Boise State Public Radio
DaVinci's portable buildings will be gone by Friday.

“Storage in between and the pods and then we had to install sewer and power and all that, different requirements from the city,” Hoovel explains. “Things just were starting to snowball.”

They never recovered from those moving costs and the school’s board decided it didn’t have the money to finish the year. The parents of its 130 students had to make other arrangements. By last Thursday only five students were left. All fifth and sixth graders they shared essays and discussed writing in a room full of boxes.

Credit Adam Cotterell / Boise State Public Radio
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Boise State Public Radio
Five members of Pat Griffin's fifth and sixth grade class were the only students left at DaVinci last Thursday.

If DaVinci had been a traditional school district in Idaho it could have asked local taxpayers for help through levies. Charters and school districts get the same funding from the state. They both have access to federal money and grants. They both can fund raise. But charters can’t pass levies.  Districts can, and most get at least some local tax money.

The South Lemhi School District near the Montana border doesn’t have a supplemental levy. Those have mushroomed around Idaho as the state has cut its education spending. It doesn’t have a bond. That’s the only local funding stream where the state also chips in. It does have levies in two more obscure categories that bring between $200 and $260 a year from local taxpayers.

That’s well below the state average, but more than what charters would get from legislation lawmakers are considering. That bill would give them about $114 per student the first year.

South Lemhi superintendent Erica Kemery says they’re very careful but it costs more than they raise to keep up the district’s two buildings. The elementary was built in 1912.

“It had the original windows, you know, the wavy glass and the single pane,” Kemery says. “This Christmas we replaced those.” 

The high school and district office building is 50 years old and has the original heating system, which runs on coal. Kemery says they can’t afford to replace it. She says in the last few years charters and traditional districts have shared equally in state cuts. She says it’s unfair that charters should now get an advantage districts don’t have.

“I’m not trying to develop a rift between charters and traditional schools, I think there’s a lot of common ground,” she says. “But at the same time I don’t want charters to lose sight of the vision for the charter school movement in the beginning, which was to provide a free market competition for traditional schools to show them that it could be done better for less.”

Districts have requirements charters don’t, like transportation. Bussing South Lemhi’s 100 students around its several hundred square miles of mountains isn’t cheap, though the state does reimburse for part of it. Charters can choose to provide transportation and if they do they can also get reimbursement from the state.

And charters have more flexibility in how they spend their money. For example they can hire fewer teachers than the state pays them for and use the money for other things. Many of them use that for facilities.

“The charter school operators have a legitimate gripe about not receiving facilities money,” says Phillip Kelly, an educational policy professor at Boise State.

Kelly adds school districts have plenty of legitimate funding gripes as well. He says it’s impossible to say if districts or charters have it tougher financially. Though he points out for more Idaho kids go to traditional schools. Only about 9 percent of Idaho students go to charter schools or are on wait lists for a charter.

The main point for Kelly is that things are too tough on all public schools, traditional and charter. The $204 million in state education cuts from 2009 to 2011 hit everyone equally. There’s been an explosion in local levies since then. Charters see that as an unfair advantage. Kelly sees it as a symptom of a larger problem.

“Children in areas that can’t provide adequate funding suffer through no fault of their own,” he says. “And reliance on local funds exacerbates the differences. And I think that is unconstitutional and unfair.”

Kelly isn’t the only person who thinks Idaho’s school funding is unconstitutional. There’s a lawsuit working through the courts that alleges the same thing.

Those larger funding issues won’t be solved this legislative session, but charters may get their facility money. The bill is now headed to the Idaho House for consideration.

Credit Adam Cotterell / Boise State Public Radio
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Boise State Public Radio

But it’s too late for DaVinci Charter School. Cindy Hoovel thinks if the legislature had done something last year she might be educating kids now instead of waiting for her portable buildings to be hauled away by the end of this week:

“We were that close,” she says. “We were $150,000 short to finish the year.”

The current charter bill wouldn’t have been enough. It would have given DaVinci about $15,000 the first year. But Hoovel says any state support might have encouraged lenders. She says DaVinci had a loan ready to go that would have given them a permanent building, but the bank pulled the plug the day they went to sign the papers. A charter school was too big a risk.

Copyright 2013 Boise State Public Radio

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