By Kelly Mae Ross
A little less than two years after Rockbridge County school board members voted to close Effinger Elementary School because it was too expensive to maintain, the board is examining a proposal for a public charter school to be established in the old Effinger building.
The school would be named the Buffalo Creek School and would offer a different, more hands-on curriculum to students in grades K-5 than the district’s current elementary schools offer. The community members who organized the proposal hope to open the school’s doors in August 2013.
If approved the Buffalo Creek School would be the only rural elementary public charter school in Virginia. There are currently four charter schools in the state, but they are in bigger cities such as Charlottesville, according to information from the Virginia Department of Education.
But the proposed financial plan for the charter school is raising eyebrows among members of the community and members of the school board.
Rockbridge County schools have been working with tighter budgets for the past several years. Right now, the district is grappling with a $135,000 budget shortfall for the 2012-2013 school year, said Superintendent John Reynolds. The creation of a charter school could place additional strain on the district’s 2013-2014 budget.
Organizers of the proposed charter school say that they are aware of the district’s limited resources. One of the organizers, local Montessori school owner Catherine Lueptow, said that she and her colleagues don’t want the charter’s presence to negatively affect the other schools in the district.
The charter school organizers outlined a plan for the proposed school — which would be public and a part of the Rockbridge County School District — that contains several funding streams. The plan was laid out in a 140-page application that the organizers submitted to the state for approval.
Prior to receiving state approval, the charter organizers received a startup grant from the federal government of almost $462,000.
Now the organizers need final approval from the school board.
Board Chair Laura Hoofnagle said that the charter school’s funding proposal would have to be “budget-neutral” to gain her support. Budget-neutral means that the charter school would come at no additional cost to the district.
“The biggest concern for us is the funding, because if we had the funding available, Effinger Elementary School would still be open as Effinger Elementary School,” Hoofnagle said.
She said members of the community have reached out to her to voice their concerns about the charter school proposal.
“All of the feedback that I have received from my constituents and constituents from otherdistricts is against the charter school,” she said. “Other than the people who I’ve spoken with who are on the charter board, it’s all been: ‘We can’t afford to do this. Don’t waste any more time on it.’”
According to the application, funding for the school would come from state and federal government money allocated to the district, private donations, fundraising and tuition from students who live outside the Rockbridge County district.
The portion of the money that would come from state and federal sources would come out of the pool of money that the Rockbridge County district uses to support its other schools.
According to the application, if the charter school were to receive all of the state and federal funding for each new student it enrolls, that would amount to about $5,000 per student.
Students transferring to the Buffalo Creek School from other elementary schools in the district wouldn’t bring this state and federal funding with them, but students new to the district would, according to Lueptow.
Linda Hooks, professor of economics in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics at Washington and Lee University, spoke out against the proposed school’s funding plan at the March school board meeting. Hooks has two children in the district.
“There’s a pie and we can cut it up in different ways,” she said. “But if we give a piece to the charter school, then that piece is not available to go to Fairfield, or Natural Bridge or Central.”
According to the plan, the district would hold onto all of the county money that is allocated to each of the students that would attend the charter school. The charter school’s application says the organizers would hope to eventually receive some of this county funding, but Lueptow said the organizers later realized that might not be feasible in the current economic climate.
But the potential loss of thousands of state and federal dollars from the district’s funding pool has Hooks and other community members concerned.
Lueptow said the district would not be harmed by this arrangement.
“The county is still basically getting half of the total funding for [each] child [who] attends the Buffalo Creek School],” she said, “And they don’t provide any service whatsoever to that child.”
But under the current proposal, the district would still be providing certain support services to the students and staff at the charter school that the school would not be billed for. Those services, such as technology support and human resource services, would cost the district $370,000 over the first five years of the charter school’s operation, according to the charter school application.
“I don’t know how it truly can be budget-neutral when we start to peel the layers back and look at it,” Hoofnagle said.
But Lueptow said that she and the other organizers are confident a funding agreement can be reached.
Lueptow said she hopes the school board will approve the charter school application before the end of the summer so that she and the other organizers would have a full year to plan for the opening of the school.