Pub. 7 2017-2018 Issue 2

4 T he Legislature’s 2018 General Session is over; the Legislature treated charter schools and all of public education very well. While many of us have a tendency to focus on funding, I want to first talk about some important policy issues the Legislature considered. Perhaps most notable is that the Legislature heard our concerns about too many new laws every year. While the Legislature opened more bill files – 1351 – than ever before, the House and Senate considered roughly 80 bills on public education, and passed about 60. I n fac t , the House and Senate Education committees cancelled 4 meet- ings because they didn’t have enough bills to justify a meeting. Given that previous years have seen the Legislature consider more than 200 bills related to public education, and pass more than 100, we should all be grateful that our elected representatives heard and fol- lowed our collective pleas for fewer new requirements. Among the bills the Legislature passed was UAPCS’s highest priority, HB 313. Sponsored by Representative Dan McCay and Senator Stuart Adams at the request of UAPCS, HB 313 creates equality between Utah’s charter school authorizers and eliminates redundancy in the authorizing process. In improving Utah’s charter law previous legislatures made a variety of political compromises, particularly as they expanded the uni- verse of authorizers. Over the last few years it became apparent that these compromises inadvertently had created a situation where some authorizers lived by different standards than others. For example, the State Charter School Board and an institution of higher educa- tion needed to seek a confirming vote from the State Board of Education before a charter application they authorized became a school. By contrast, a school district’s decision to approve a charter application was final. In addition, several observers noted that a charter autho- rizer is necessarily much more familiar with a charter application’s strengths and weaknesses than the State Board of Education. This difference in familiarity stems simply from the reality that the authorizer spends 1 to 2 years evaluat- ing a charter application; State Board members have too many other respon- sibilities to evaluate charter applications at that level. One experience illustrates this issue well. In evaluating two charter appli- cations approved by the State Charter School Board this year, one well-meaning member of the State Board of Education expressed her concern that one of the schools might be affiliated with an out-of- state charter management organization. She had seen that the proposed school – Leap Academy – shares the same name as a New Jersey charter company, and questioned the relationship between the proposed school and the charter company. There was no relationship between the school and the company. It was pure coincidence that they shared a common name. Reasonable people can disagree about whether policy makers should worry about out-of-state companies’ work with public education. However, it is telling that members of the State Board were so pressed for time that they were not able to get an answer to this question before their meeting. HB 313 puts all charter school authorizers on the same footing; now the State Board only weighs in on a charter application if the authorizer or the new charter application violates statute or Board rule. HB 313 also directs the State Board of Education to create rules outlining common standards all authorizers must apply in the chartering process. These standards will focus on how well autho- rizers evaluate the financial, governance and academic health of the schools they authorize. The State Board has not yet begun drafting these rules, and UAPCS will work closely with them and the authorizing community to make sure these rules are fair. The Legislature also spent a signifi- cant amount of time evaluating how well Utah’s tax structure simultaneously sup- ports the ongoing needs of public educa- tion and the health of Utah’s economy. In delicate negotiations with the backers of Our Schools Now, the Legislature settled on a package of policies. First, they set school districts on a path towards equitable funding between school dis- tricts by allocating more money to state guarantees of the districts’ property tax levies. Importantly, charter schools will receive an equitable share of these increased state guarantees because the local replacement formula includes these guarantees. WELCOME Message BY ROYCE VAN TASSELL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF UAPCS CONTINUED ON PAGE 9