NC Senate passes bill that would allow charter schools to get county building funds

The North Carolina Senate approved a bill Thursday that would allow counties to raise capital funds for charter schools and allow charter schools to give preference to certain students.

House Bill 219, known as the Charter School Omnibus bill, would open the door for dedicated public funding for charter school buildings for the first time in North Carolina. Currently, charter schools must secure and finance their own buildings, though they can use public funds to pay for things like leases.

The bill would allow counties to dedicate funding for charter school buildings and raise taxes to fund charter school buildings. Counties do that for their local public school systems currently.

Facility funding has become more scarce in North Carolina even for traditional public school systems in recent years, with school systems reporting having $12.8 billion in unfunded capital needs back in 2021.

The measure now heads back to the House of Representatives before going to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk to be signed into law.

Charter schools are public schools that operate a bit differently: They are not managed by government entities, they do not receive funding for buildings or capital improvements, and they have significant regulatory flexibility to operate differently from traditional public schools.

If signed into law, the bill would:

• Allow counties to raise funds for charter school capital projects, including by raising taxes. It does not require counties to raise the funds.
• Keep the State Board of Education from considering a current or proposed charter school’s impact on other schools or its community when deciding whether to issue, renew or revoke the charter.
• Allow charter schools to increase their enrollment without approval, so long as they aren’t low-performing. Currently, charter schools are approved to open incrementally, expanding to new grade levels or more classes over time. Often, Charter School Advisory Board members vet applications based on financial wherewithal and planning. This change would allow the schools to accelerate their pace to their target enrollment outlined in their charter, without seeking board approval.
• Permit charter schools to give admission preference to children of active military members, so long as they don’t comprise more than 10% of the school’s total enrollment.
• Permit charter schools to give admission presence to children who attend certain preschools that the charter school partners with for admissions.
• Prohibit traditional public schools from counting the fact that a student attends a charter school against the student when the student applies to a school or special program operated by the traditional public school. That means the traditional public school could not give preference to its own students for those programs.
• Allow charter schools to enroll out-of-state students and foreign-exchange students and require them to charge at least 50% tuition. Foreign-exchange students would not count toward enrollment caps. Schools could enroll no more than 10% of their students from out-of-state and could enroll no more tan two foreign-exchange students.

Four senators posed amendments Thursday, including three Democrats, whose amendments were tabled or failed without discussion along party lines.

Democrats had sought to add requirement for charter schools and other schools receiving public funds — namely, private schools receiving vouchers — to be subject to the same accountability measures and to be barred from discriminating against students with disabilities in the admissions process. Sen. Natasha Marcus, D-Mecklenburg, further pushed to axe a new addition to the bill that would allow charter schools to give admissions preference to children from certain preschools, which could include higher-priced private preschools.

Democrats have opposed the bill from the start. An earlier version of the bill included significant other provisions that Democrats argued would allow charter schools to “double-dip” into local school system funding.

In May, Republican lawmakers pushing the bill dropped those provisions related to funding and cut a provision that would allow charter schools to establish micro schools. Micro schools are basically one-room schoolhouses with children of all ages.