Charters Consider Consolidation

Achievement First is looking at combining two charter schools into one building to free up hundreds of thousands of dollars from its donor-reliant budget.

At its Dec. 18 meeting, the board of directors for Elm City College Preparatory (ECCP) is expected to decide whether it makes sense to sell off the current middle school at 794 Dixwell Ave. in Newhallville and move all the students into the current elementary school at 407 James St. in Fair Haven.

The plan would then go to the Connecticut State Board of Education for final approval.

“We’ll crowd two schools into one,” Dacia Toll, Achievement First’s co-CEO, told The Connecticut Mirror’s Kathleen Megan, who first reported ECCP’s planned consolidation in this article. ​“We are going to engage the community in what this means. We will see if they agree with us that amongst a bunch of bad choices, this is the least bad choice.”

ECCP’s middle school currently has about 130 students in Grades 7 and 8.

Its curriculum is based on the Greenfield model, with a few tweaks. Meant to be more practical and engaging, students alternate their regular classes with quarterly career ​“expeditions” and daily blocks of ​“self-directed learning.”

ECCP routinely notches some of the highest scores in the city on standardized tests. Last year, its eighth-graders met an average of 71 percent of their goals in reading (20.7 points higher than New Haven) and 75 percent of their goals in math (30.5 points higher than New Haven).

Its Dixwell Avenue building, originally built in 1937, previously housed the St. John the Baptist School. The charter network bought the building in 2008. The two-story 25,458 square-foot building was valued at $7.41 million in the city’s last appraisal.

The consolidation with the elementary school is expected to save up to $750,000 annually for the next five years, said Amanda Pinto, a Achievement First spokesperson.

“This proposal will help us save costs while still serving the same number of students,” Pinto wrote in an email.

She said that it would allow more students to participate in elective classes, sports and extra-curriculars within a bigger school. And it would save parents with kids in both buildings time from going halfway across the city.

“The drawback is space,” Pinto added. ​“We’ll need to figure out how to ensure there is enough space in the building for our K‑8 programming.”

Both ECCP principals, the middle school’s Katie McPollom and the elementary school’s Andrew Poole, have said that they plan to leave at the end of the school year.

“My team responded with an understanding of the challenge,” McPollom said during a recent ECCP board meeting. ​“Many have been through several changes in the past. They jumped in and gave feedback, not only about the location and the return of Grades 5 – 8 and what some of their concerns were, but what things could be possible that are not currently.”

McPollom added that the parents she talked to, especially those with younger kids, said they’d rather have all the students in one building.

Peter Butler, a social worker at Amistad High School who said he pulled his kid out of the elementary school after his being injured five times, cautioned that the James Street building might not be big enough, especially when students can’t go out for recess during winter.

“Already in that building, a lot of times [when it’s cold], they have their recess in the classroom. They can’t go to the gym because there’s already too many grades,” he said. ​“I don’t know how in the world you plan to fit 120 more kids in that building, but that’s only going to make that situation worse.”

Two Funding Formulas

Charter schools were created to give parents an alternative to traditional public schools, with different work rules, classroom curricula and school times. They are privately managed, with periodic review by state officials; and publicly funded, with extra support from philanthropists.

Because of their unique status, charter schools are paid through a different state funding formula from traditional public schools.

Most of the state’s education dollars are disbursed through the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula, the primary way of redistributing tax revenue based on a town’s ability to raise revenue and its student body’s challenges, like growing up in poverty or learning English as a second language.

Last year, through ECS, the state paid out $8,182 per resident student in New Haven Public Schools, according to the School and State Finance Project.

Along with other state funding for specialized schools and turnaround programs, that has accounted for roughly 55 percent of the district’s budget in recent years. New Haven, like other towns across Connecticut, is expected to get the rest of what it needs from federal grants, local property taxes, tuition fees and private donations.

In recent years, New Haven has spent roughly $16,900 per pupil. Some school districts, like New Britain ($13,600 per student), Bridgeport ($14,000 per student) and Meriden ($14,100 per student), have spent even less, according to state data from 2017 – 18.

(New Haven’s own budget documents don’t give an accurate measure of per pupil spending because they exclude all the ​“in-kind” costs covered by the city-wide budget, such as employee health benefits, said Michael Morton, a spokesperson for the School and State Finance Project.)

Charter schools, on the other hand, can’t raise any property taxes on their own from the school districts they overlap with, so the state chips in more to cover their costs.

The state pays out $11,250 per student in a charter school, without giving any extra weight for higher student needs as the ECS formula does.

Toll said that’s not nearly enough. ​“They are literally starving us,” she told the Mirror. ​“We should be getting $15,000 or $16,000.”

State funding has accounted for roughly 70 percent of ECCP’s budget in recent years. It spent roughly $16,400 per student, according to state data from 2017 – 18.

New Haven runs its school buses and reimburses its special-education costs, but ECCP is expected to get the rest by fundraising from private donors.

Pinto said ECCP hadn’t lost any significant revenue recently. This summer, Achievement First stopped taking money from OxyContin maker Jonathan Sackler’s foundation; its board members made up the $350,000 difference.

The ​“necessity of this proposal” to consolidate its two buildings came out of the state’s ​“longstanding underfunding” of charter schools, Pinto said. ​“At its root it is a question of the sustained philanthropy required to make up the gap in funds.”

ECCP’s middle school is far more reliant on philanthropy than the network’s other schools in the state, with donors contributing $6,830 per pupil, Pinto said. That’s more than double the $3,334 per pupil from donors at Amistad High School, she added.

But that’s also because the school is better off, spending more than other public schools in New Haven. With a $2.55 million budget, ECCP’s middle school spends $19,953 per student, allowing it to maintain a 12.8‑to‑1 ratio of teachers to students, according to this year’s budget documents.

As it readies for the transition, McPollom said one of her middle-school parents had already tried to send her leads on a building that Achievement First might buy. McPollom said she’d had to tell the parent the move to James Street was meant to save money.

“I had to explain that the core of this is financial,” she said. ​“We can’t afford to.”