Charter School Funding: The Categorical Portion

| Post By Susan Perkins Weston |

Following up on yesterday's post about SEEK funding for charter schools under House Bill 471, here are some estimates of what Kentucky charter schools may receive from state and federal categorical programs.

Some categorical programs are focused on students with specific needs, and a charter school's share is likely to depend on its enrollment of eligible students. Those figures may include:

• $1,614 per student with a disability (from federal IDEA)
• $511 per low-income student (from federal Title I)
• $60 per gifted and talented student (from state gifted and talented)

Other programs target students at particular stages in their educations, so that a charter school's share may depend on how many students at that stage it enrolls.  Those amounts may include:

• $50 per elementary student (from state read to achieve)
• $36 per elementary or middle school student (from state instructional resources funding)
• $29 per high school student (from federal Perkins money)

Other amounts, less dependent on student traits, may include:

• $49 from federal Title II, Part A for teacher quality work
• $36 from state extended school services
• $14 from state safe schools
• $13 from state professional development 
• $71 from an array of smaller state and federal programs

Overall, combining all those programs, Kentucky charter schools may be working with the SEEK funding discussed yesterday plus average categorical funding of:

• $758 per student

I've used the word "may" steadily above, because each program has additional rules that can result in individual schools receiving or less. Still, I think these estimates give a ballpark idea of what categorical funding will be available to Kentucky charter schools.

Sources and Methods:
For this analysis, I used total funding to Kentucky's 173 school districts from the Department of Education's allocation spreadsheets for 2016-17 state programs and federal programs, along with student counts for the 173 districts from 2015-16 school report card files.  Here's my arithmetic: