NSEA Public Comment: Interim Finance Committee 4.1.21

During the 2019 session, NSEA pushed for greater accountability for charter schools. While our proposal to cap charter school expansion was not successful, the legislature passed a 5-year “Growth Management Plan” for charters. Interestingly enough, while the Charter School Authority was developing this “Growth Management Plan”, they approved nearly 5000 new charter slots.

This past week we found that charter school slots are projected to increase 8.6% in FY22 and a whopping 15.9% in FY23, while enrollment in neighborhood public schools remains relatively stagnant.

While the Charter School Authority some improvement since last session, including actually conducting site visits by the State Public Charter School Authority (SPCSA), let’s be honest with each other—the Charter School Authority is only now clearing a relatively low bar of accountability. While it is great the Charter Authority has begun to address the baked-in biases against disadvantaged students, when looking at overall charter student populations, charter schools serve proportionally fewer at-risk students, English learners, and students with disabilities. Even with progress on more diversity in new charter seats, there is no path for charters to achieve parity in the foreseeable future.

What’s most concerning is the behavior of many charter schools during the pandemic who claim to be public schools when it is convenient and something else when it is not.

According to a December 24^th article in the Nevada Current, Nevada charter schools took $31 million in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program in 2020. This included $4.6M loan to Doral Academy and $4.6M to Pinecrest. These federal funds were not available to neighborhood public schools who got hit with major cuts during last summer’s special session.

During the darkest days of the pandemic, charter schools gamed the system by triple-dipping— taking state, per-pupil funds, CARES Act funds, and PPP funds, all while playing by their own set of rules. In order to push back against charters as a drain on our system of neighborhood public schools, we would ask this committee to at the very least offset the PPP funds charters took during the pandemic from these additional CARES dollars.