Despite a threatened cut in funding, the president of the Princeton Charter School believes the school’s financial future is bright.
By: Jeff Milgram
The president of the Princeton Charter School believes a ruling that puts into question the school’s continued funding may be a good thing in the long run.
“The bottom line is we’re heading for a happy ending that will tie up the last point of contention about charter schools — funding,” Peter Yianilos, president of the three-year-old experimental public school, said Thursday.
The threat comes in the form of a May 11 ruling by a little-known state agency called the New Jersey Council on Local Mandates. The ruling would lower the 1999-2000 contribution from the Princeton Regional Board of Education to the charter school from $1.54 million to $1.14 million.
The state Department of Education recently informed the Princeton school board, which had already sent its May contribution to the PCS, that it had overpaid by $251,000 this school year.
Mr. Yianilos believes the ruling is illegal, and the overpayment would be much less even if it were legal.
District Business Administrator Stephanie Kennedy still hasn’t been told if, or how, the district will be reimbursed for the overpayment, or whether it is retroactive to the beginning of the school year or from the time of the ruling.
The bipartisan Council on Local Mandates, formed in 1995, was charged with reviewing laws, regulations and rules enacted after Jan. 17, 1996 to determine if they created “unfunded mandates” — mandatory costs placed upon municipalities and school boards.
The Charter School Program Act of 1995 required local school districts to pay directly to local charter schools “90 percent of the local levy budget per pupil (in the charter school) for the specific grade level in the district.”
In 1997, regulations gave the district a choice between paying 90 percent of the actual per-pupil cost, or 90 percent of the thorough and efficient education (T&E) cost, whichever was lower.
The T&E cost, which is figured by the state, is generally lower than the actual per-pupil costs. In the Princeton Regional Schools, the actual per-pupil cost is slightly less than $10,000, while the T&E cost is $7,800.
In 1998, the guidelines governing charter schools were amended to define the “local levy per pupil” as the charter school funding formula, eliminating the T&E formula option.
On May 11, the council, acting on an appeal from Highland Park, ruled that the 1998 funding formula was an unfunded mandate.
Mr. Yianilos believes the ruling is illegal.
“The core of this is that when we researched this we found that the Council on Local Mandates couldn’t overturn a law passed before it was formed,” he said. “We were never legally worried.”
Even if it were legal, Mr. Yianilos said he believes it would apply only to payments made after the May 11 decision.
Almost immediately after the ruling, Mr. Yianilos said, the state deposited almost $32,000 in the PCS account, a figure he said is equal to one month’s payment from the Princeton Regional Schools under the T&E formula.
This past Monday, the Assembly Education Committee approved a bill that would provide about $10 million more in state aid to charter schools.
According to PCS calculations, the school district, under the 1998 formula, was required to pay PCS $126,729 a month. Under the T&E formula, that figure would be reduced to $94,795 a month, a difference of $31,934. This means, Mr. Yianilos said, that the overpayment to the school district is only $63,868 for May and June.
Will PCS be required to return the money to the school district?
The state Department of Education apparently hasn’t decided. But Chiarra R. Nappi, a member of the Princeton school board from 1993-1996 and an advocate for charter schools, believes the district will never see a dime from PCS.
“It is definitely ridiculous to expect charter schools in New Jersey to return money to the districts. The money has been spent, there is no money to return,” said Dr. Nappi, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, who wrote a report for the Thomas Fordham Foundation, titled “Why Charter Schools? The Princeton Story,” in October 1999.
“The New Jersey Legislature had approved charter schools in New Jersey and has the moral obligation to make them a workable alternative in public education,” said Dr. Nappi. “The first step is to ensure that charter schools are not economically strangled by arbitrary rulings.”
Mr. Yianilos said the charter school will not appeal the ruling.
“The decision is that the ruling is too complicated to fight,” Mr. Yianilos said. “As a local taxpayer, I don’t think that the Council on Local Mandates is a bad thing. The state has taken the position that this is not about a battle. It is about school funding.”