September 22nd, 2015                     
Table of Contents
Goals for Georgia's Charter Schools
Georgia Student Scholarship Organization
Education Savings Accounts
Expanding Educational Options for Georgia Families/School Choice
September 21, 2015
 
The Expanding Educational Options for Georgia Families/School Choice committee of the Education Reform Commission met on Friday, Sept. 18. Curiously, though the School Choice committee has not met in several months, the committee distributed a list of detailed recommendations before Friday's meeting which can be found HERE. No action was taken at the meeting; however, each of the recommendations were discussed in detail.
Goals for Georgia's Charter Schools
The committee provided three goals its members would like to see achieved by the ERC for Georgia's charter schools:
  1. Increase access to affordable facility options for charter schools
  2. Increase accountability for both charter schools and local authorizers
  3. Ensure equitable funding of Georgia charter schools.
Committee members discussed in detail the first goal regarding facility options for charters. This conversation centered around determining a different process that would allow charter schools to move into buildings vacated by local school systems. While this practice is already legal in Georgia, the goal of the committee is to eliminate confusion that often arises between potential charter schools and local school districts. The committee also recommends clarification of the law that states any property owned or leased by a non-profit for use by a charter school is considered public property and exempt from property tax (OCGA 48-51).
 
During the public comment section at the end of the meeting, Angela Palm, a representative from the Georgia School Boards Association, raised several concerns. Primarily, when the law mentioned above was created, there were no state-approved charter schools in existence. She urged the committee to recommend clarifying what exactly constitutes a charter school. Ms. Palm also described tension between local school boards and charter schools regarding costs of the facilities as local boards are still responsible for insuring school properties.
 
The committee labeled the facility issue as one of the most important recommendations they will make to the full ERC. For more information on the other recommendations under this section, CLICK HERE.
Georgia Student Scholarship Organization
For the existing Student Scholarship Organization (SSO), the committee recommended "truing up" pledges to actual annual contributions to the program. This reform would require a count to be made when the contributions come in rather than when pledges are made. The committee also recommended changing the yearly start date other than Jan. 1, since this is a holiday and makes it difficult for the organizations to process applications.
 
The majority of the discussion on SSOs centered on creating a new means-tested program which targets low income students as recipients of the scholarships. In order to do this, the committee recommends increased transparency in reporting requirements of SSO programs which would require reporting the total number of scholarships awarded to students in households that:
  • Qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL)
  • In households between 100 percent and 200 percentFRL
  • In households between 200 percent and 300 percent FRL
  • Households above 300 percent FRL
Nels Peterson, the committee chair, questioned whether there may be a different metric to use as part of the means test rather than FRL.
 
Another SSO recommendation is to ensure that participating schools are annually administering either state achievement tests or nationally norm-referenced tests with the SSO covering testing costs. Parents would receive a copy of test results. Additionally, the Georgia Department of Education would receive test results along with graduation rates in order to aggregate the data. The GaDOE would also receive an annual parental satisfaction survey with the program. The committee discussed creating another state agency to oversee this data, but several of the public commenters warned against creating more bureaucracy when GaDOE has the means to handle this data.
 
The remainder of the discussion focused on increasing transparency and accountability regarding SSO hiring processes and for schools that accept SSO students. More information can be found HERE.
 
During public comment, Lisa Kelly, the president of the Georgia GOAL Scholarship program conveyed to committee members that there is high demand for the program and she would like to see it expanded to have a broader opportunity to serve middle income families.

Education Savings Accounts 
Rep. Mike Glanton (D - Jonesboro) provided the committee with an update on recommendations for Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). One idea was to convert the current Special Needs Scholarship Program to an ESA citing more flexibility in the use of the funds as the impetus. He also urged the committee to, if they choose to recommend ESAs, to prioritize students with greater needs including students with financial need, students in foster families, military families, and refugees/English language learners.
 
In his outline, Glanton also called for ensuring increased academic accountability for these students through nationally norm-referenced tests or state achievement tests. In order to ensure financial accountability and transparency, he suggested annual audits of ESA accounts and requiring the Governor's Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) to collect and report data on how ESA funds are used.
 
Tina Fernandez, a committee member, expressed concern with allowing foster families to manage ESA funds. These students are often highly mobile, and it would be difficult to trust foster families to properly maintain the funds. She asked for more research.
 
Notably, Nels Peterson stated that it would be ideal to include ESAs in the committee's recommendation to the full ERC as a matter of practicality, but that fiscally, he would not recommend pursuing the idea.
Josh Stephens - Legislative Policy Analyst


          


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