Finding a facility for charter schools to call home is a challenge on a number of fronts, not the least of which is finance. Some charters have been fortunate to find an unused district school building. Here in Columbus, the high-performing United Schools Network utilizes two former Columbus City Schools’ facilities. Other charters, like KIPP Columbus have built its own school from scratch (though its first home was a former district building as well). Unfortunately, these examples are the exception rather than the rule.
For many charters, operating in a traditional school building is financially infeasible. While charter schools bear the responsibility to find their own facilities, they receive only a small amount of state money for the task. Anecdotally, we know that this has forced many charters to make ends meet by residing in facilities that weren’t originally built for the specific purpose of educating children.
We wondered exactly how many charter schools use non-traditional facilities. To answer this question, we looked at the seventy-nine charter schools located in Franklin County (most are in Columbus) and then searched their addresses on the county auditor’s real estate website, which provides information including structure type and ownership (present and former).
Unfortunately, we were unable to locate information about twenty-one of the seventy-nine charters on the site. (We verified school addresses of the twenty-one schools from multiple sources but were still unable to find their facility information.) That left us with fifty-eight charters in our sample. Of those fifty-eight, we found that just fifteen (26 percent) were housed in buildings classified as a school; the other forty-three (74 percent) were classified otherwise, mostly as commercial buildings. Of the fifteen charter schools located in school-classified facilities, just six were located in buildings either currently or previously owned by a school district. Many of the schools in commercial buildings are located in former retail stores, office buildings, or in one instance, a former pharmacy.
Of course, this is a small sample, and there are hundreds of charter schools across the state. Different areas in Ohio could have different results depending on a variety of factors, including available school buildings, real estate prices, and the amount of goodwill between charters and districts. That being said, the results in Columbus suggest that many charter school students enter school each day in a building that was, at some point, not a school. Whether this has any bearing on educational outcomes for students is unclear. But it’s not implausible to think that when students attend schools specifically designed for the purpose of learning, it makes an academic difference. Parents may also be more attracted to schools that actually look and feel like a school. To be sure, building type and building quality are different factors. Some district buildings are crumbling, and some nontraditional charter facilities are exemplary. However, these instances probably don’t represent the norm.
Ohio charter school advocates have rightly been pressing for greater facilities support. After all, it’s largely because of Ohio law that many charters are located in non-school buildings. As part of its charter “model law,” the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools lists twenty components weighted for importance, then rates each states’ charter laws by adding up the points accrued in each of those components. One of the twenty components is “Equitable Access to Public Funds and Facilities,” in which Ohio was given a lackluster eight points out of a possible sixteen in its latest edition (published October 2014).
Ohio policymakers have taken note and recently strengthened state charter facilities policy. In the most recent budget bill, the state increased per-pupil charter funding earmarked for facilities to $150 in FY 2016 and $200 in FY 2017 (funding was $100 per pupil in the previous biennium). But this almost certainly falls well short of the funds required to buy or lease facilities. As a result, charters must dig into their operational funds, enter the private debt market, seek assistance from charter operators, or seek philanthropic support to lease or construct buildings of their own.
Alternatively, district facilities represent a potentially attractive option for some charter schools. State law requires districts to offer to charters for sale or lease buildings that have gone unused for two or more years. A new policy enacted in the budget bill requires districts to offer these unused facilities first to high-quality charters (those earning an A, B, or C on performance index and an A or B for value added on the Ohio School Report Card). In addition, high-performing charter schools are eligible to apply for facility support from a newly created $25 million funding pool, with the condition that the schools provide matching funds.
These budget fixes should help solve charter schools’ facility struggles. But many will still be forced to be creative and, in some cases, make do with the space they can find. Not every school needs to be a palace, but every child deserves to learn in a space well suited for learning.
