New charter law steals from our children’s futures | Op-ed

Imagine that someone is allowed to come into your home and claim extra space, like a spare bedroom. They do not have to clean or pay rent, utilities or property insurance. And you have to drive them around. Your living room? Shared. Bathroom? Communal. It doesn’t matter if you need that space in the future, or if this hurts your ability to financially provide for your family.

This will be the reality for Florida’s public schools starting this week. A recent Florida law allows certain companies to take classrooms, creating charter schools operating within your child’s school. These ‘Schools of Hope’ can, and will, lay claim to space in hundreds of our traditional public schools, and it will cost them nothing.

They won’t pay for security, utilities, insurance, support staff or transportation. And there’s nothing any parent, principal or school board can do to stop it, or even to negotiate the terms of this takeover. There is nothing to stop a charter school from putting high school classes in your child’s elementary school campus. This is a real estate grab with no guardrails to protect the nearly 3 million students across Florida in our traditional public schools.

In Tallahassee, I am constantly told in debate that the, “money for education follows the child,” so why are we forced to spend money meant for traditional public-school students to support these charter schools, which already get millions of taxpayer dollars from the state? Why are these schools being funded on the backs of neighborhood public-school students? Will traditional schools be forced to pay for all services, including special education therapies like speech and language therapy for the charter school students? Why don’t the Schools of Hope pay their fair share?

These charter schools should not be funded on the backs of our neighborhood public-school students, but this new law requires school districts to cover all operational services to the School of Hope without being reimbursed. This means things like electricity, water, trash pick-up, nurses, property insurance, ID cards, cafeteria staff, custodial staff and transportation are all the responsibility of the school district and not the charter school’s budget. The portion of capital outlay funding they receive will not come close to covering these costs. This could cost districts millions.

Each school district receives state funding based on the number of students enrolled; charter schools have been similarly funded. But now, public-school dollars will cover both their own students and the costs of these charter schools on their campuses, shortchanging traditional public-school students. These charter schools also have access to millions of dollars in federal grants that districts do not, so why are we requiring school districts to subsidize charter operators?

One of these charter-school operators gave us a glimpse of the future by sending demand letters laying claim to classrooms in hundreds of schools across the state. In Broward County, that included space inside 27 schools, including high performing “A” rated schools, technical colleges with waiting lists and special education centers. These are schools that require small teacher-to-student ratios and where adult students are being taught (adults don’t count in the occupancy calculation).

This law ties the hands of traditional public schools and effectively removes control of these schools from locally elected school boards, thereby removing control from our local communities and parents. These Schools of Hope operators will be competing with each other for real estate as the law states the first one to lay claim is entitled to the space. That is why one provider sent out letters prematurely, claiming their “turf” in high-performing, successful schools, even where there are no “persistently low-performing schools” nearby. This clearly demonstrates that this is about a business opportunity and the bottom line — not about children.

It is imperative that the Legislature rewrite the law and set up guardrails protecting traditional public schools and students. They should require careful determination of need and classroom schedules, consider projected enrollment fluctuations and program capacity, and require that these charter schools pay their fair share for services. All of this should be negotiated on an equitable basis between charter operators and school districts. Nearly 3 million families choose neighborhood schools. Their opinions count, and their children’s education must be fully funded and not impacted or disrupted.

Robin Bartleman has been a special education teacher, an assistant principal in Liberty City, and served as a Broward County School Board member for 16 years. For the past five years, she has served in the Florida House of Representatives, where she represents the West Broward District 103.