Eight State Representatives who currently don’t have public charter schools in their home counties played a crucial role in advancing a bill to support the more than 40 thousand students who do attend those schools elsewhere.
Representatives Ryan Williams, Cookeville; Mark Cochran, R-Englewood; Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby; David Hawk, R-Greeneville; Patsy Hazlewood, R-Signal Mountain; Tim Hicks, R-Gray; Jerome Moon, R-Maryville; and Charlie Baum, R-Murfreesboro all voted in favor of legislation designed to provide better school facilities to charter students at Wednesday’s House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee. The vote was considered to be one of the larger hurdles the bill will face this session.
The legislation would require local school districts that have public charter schools in them to provide a list of vacant and underutilized buildings on an annual basis. Under the bill, school districts would additionally be required to make those properties available to public charter schools at a fair market value and give charters a first right of refusal for either purchase or lease.
“There are school buildings that are also vacant or underutilized all across the state but often access to these buildings is extremely difficult if not impossible. Instead, charter schools in Tennessee must finance, locate, build, update, or renovate facilities to use as school buildings,” said bill sponsor Representative Williams.
Supporters say the legislation will go a long way towards helping with the facilities funding gap charters across the state are facing. A recent report by the organization ExcelinEd found current state funding is only meeting 50 percent of charter facilities needs and this gap is expected to grow to just 42 percent of facility needs met in five years as more families choose to send their children to public charter schools.
This gap also disproportionately impacts economically disadvantaged students and students of color because public charter schools serve a higher percentage of those student groups.
Finding a building harder than finding staff
The challenge of finding a building is one STRIVE Collegiate Academy founder LaKendra Butler remembers well from when she founded her school nearly a decade ago in Nashville’s Donelson community. Butler says finding vacant space was more difficult than finding staff to work there.
“There wasn’t a ton of spaces in this area that we could utilize so we had to be creative,” said Butler. “The search of a space was clearly impossible.”
Butler ended up reaching an agreement to lease space in a building that used to be a hospital.
STRIVE has since built out the second floor of the building to serve as a middle school but there have been obstacles to overcome, including a lack of outdoor space for children and classrooms with structural pillars in inconvenient places.
Butler says it was luck that made the space possible.
“We just so happened to communicate with a community member who had space. It’s not that we found the building, it was we found the person who then was like, oh I may have some space that works,” said Butler.
Supporters believe the charter facility bill will make it easier for other public charter schools to acquire the facilities needed to suceed.
The Tennessee Senate passed the bill earlier this month on a 23 to 1 vote. It now heads to the full House Finance, Ways, and Means Committee.
