Agenda - 04-30-2007-e - Laserfiche WebLink

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format of the chart might not allow for that point to be made, she said, but it is very important that this point be noted in the record. Mr. Visser said that pages could be added so that the $1 increments can run all the way up to the OCS amount. ~He said that he understood Ms. Bedford's second point but needed "to think a little more about" whether it.can be incorporated into the chart. Mr. Whitling called attention to the chart titled, "2006-07 Student Enrollment Projections. " He said that this yeaz OCS is losing a disproportionate share of its per pupil fiinding to charter schools. The growth in charter school enrollment this year was 82 students, he said, and the effect on OCS is about $500,000. He added that if OCS had not lost those students to the charter schools, then the county district would have received funding from the state for a proportional number of staffpositions. This is why OCS has a line item in its requested budget for "increase in charter students," he said. Dr. Kelley said that local funding for charter school students "should be a wash" because they do not place demands on either district's resources. For example, a shift of 82 students from a school district to the charter schools represents about three teachers that the district no longer has to pay for, he said. Fewer students means less funding, and whileT see why that would be problematic, Mr. Kelly said, we can't get funding for students that we're not serving. Ms. Hough noted that there are fixed costs that do not diminish when student enrollment declines. We don't need to recoup the full $500,000 that we're losing from the growth in charter enrollment, she said, but we would, be remiss if we did not acknowledge that this was a significant hit for us this year. Dr. Kelley said that CHCCS was in a similaz situation last year, and that he understands ,the impact of such, losses on a district's economies of scale. `But that's the reality we all have to live with" he said. When enrollment declines we have to figure out how to scale down the fixed costs. Dr. Pedersen said that as a school district's projected charter enrollment rises, the County's calculation for the district's total projected student enrollment also rises. Charter student enrollment is included in the district's overall enrollment numbers, he said, and both districts get the same amount of local per pupil dollars against those overall numbers. There is not a loss of local dollars when numbers go up for charter students, he said. Mr. Whitling clarified that the $500,000 loss he had referred to was based on a comparison of GHCCS's proportion ofchazter students to OCS's proportion of charter students. If OCS had the same proportion of students going to charter schools as CHCCS, then OCS would have only 73 charter school students, not 254. The additional 181 charter school students (at the rate of $2,796 per pupil) represents a half million dollars "of flexibility" that OCS would control if it did not have to pass through to the charter schools funding to support such a disproportionate number of its total enrollment. 3