The way we fund school building maintenance and operations (M&O) structurally disadvantages DCPS. It requires DCPS to spend more – to the tune of $558 per student (or $28.6 million a year overall) -- from their funds, which are needed to serve students, than the charter Local Education Agencies overall spend of their funds.

The Council should address this structural unfairness in the budget for FY21. It can do so by moving to pay DCPS utility expense (around $23.7 million a year) outside of the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (PSFF)

The way we fund enrollment in our LEAs structurally disadvantages DCPS, failing to fund it to serve the thousands of students who come through its doors midyear while generously allowing the charter sector to retain funds for the approximately 1,350 plus students who leave their schools midyear. The net effect is to provide the charter sector with at least a $20 million advantage relative to DCPS in terms of enrollment based funding each year.

A call for the city council to use the FY2020 budget to invest in the schools that need it most and address steep budget cuts for schools like Woodson, the only high school every one of our children in Ward 7 has the right to attend.

Last year, C4DC published a web tool to help understand DCPS school budgets. We have updated that tool for the FY17 school budgets.

We are excited to launch a new interactive tool to help people understand and analyze the DCPS individual school budgets in the context of school budgets generally.