In one of many split votes during last week’s school board meeting, Lehighton Area School District joined hundreds of others across the state in adopting a resolution calling for charter school funding reform.

The resolution, drafted by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, calls for state lawmakers to “meaningfully revise” charter school law, which has not been altered in 23 years.

“The average Pennsylvania school district spends millions of dollars in taxpayer money annually in mandatory payments to brick-and-mortar and cyber charter schools,” the resolution states. “These payments are calculated in a manner which requires districts to send more money to charter schools than is needed to operate their programs and places a significant financial burden on districts’ resources and taxpayers.”

Lehighton board member Joy Beers urged her colleagues to vote against the resolution, calling it “anti-education reform.”

“Charter schools do a lot of good, especially in urban areas for poor children and non-white children,” Beers said. “This would hurt that and take this away from children who don’t have other options.”

Beers joined Dave Bradley and Gail Maholick in voting against the resolution, while Larry Stern, Rita Spinelli, Wayne Wentz, Stephen Holland and Nathan Foeller voted in favor of it.

“This is not an attack on charter schools, it is attacking the funding model that is completely inadequate,” Stern said. “They are allowed to advertise and use public funds inappropriately instead of on their students.”

Last year, Lehighton voted to support two pieces of legislation that would have required parents to pay tuition when their child opts for an outside cyber or charter school, if a district offers its own online learning option.

The district is in its eighth year of offering the Lehighton Area Virtual Academy, in partnership with the Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit #21, to try to keep students who choose the cyber school route local.

Last year, Lehighton was paying a total of $1,083,184.41 for 81 students to attend outside cyber charter schools, and $57,919.35 for five students to attend brick-and-mortar charter schools.

Meanwhile, 39 students attended Lehighton’s Virtual Academy, which cost the district $279,762.30.

Bradley said the district shouldn’t adopt a resolution drafted by PSBA, which he dubbed a “private lobbyist organization.”

“A bunch of districts are trying to ram this through and I’m against lobbyists pushing around our local government,” Bradley said.

The latest data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, according to the resolution, shows that in 2017-18, total charter school tuition payments (cyber and brick-and-mortar) were more than $1.8 billion, with $519 million of that total paid by districts for tuition to cyber charter schools. Further analysis of PDE data shows that in 2014-15, school districts paid charter schools more than $100 million for special education services in excess of what charter schools reported spending on special education.

“We’re trying to make sure the money given to charter schools is as much money as we give our students, not more,” Spinelli said. “I have no problem with giving the tuition rate we can do in our district to a charter school, but we won’t pay them $12,000 a year when they can go to ours for $5,000.”

In his 2020-21 budget address, Gov. Tom Wolf proposed to establish a flat tuition rate for all cyber charter schools and apply the same formula used to distribute special education dollars to local districts to the state’s charter schools.

“If the reform went through, our potential budget relief is $140,914,” Lehighton business administrator Patricia Denicola said earlier this year. “It does, however, seem like this is a long shot to pass.”