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Charter School Signs Lease Despite Proposed Funding Cuts

Chion Wolf
/
WNPR

The state legislature's Appropriations Committee made it clear this week that it does not want to fund two new charter schools in Connecticut.

Committee co-chair Senator Beth Bye said there are too many other educational programs that need money. So it cut about $21 million from the governor’s proposed budget that was supposed to be used to fund the new charters.

But the owners of the Stamford Charter School for Excellence went ahead and signed a lease anyway.

Jeremiah Grace, director of the Northeast Charter School Network, said he’s confident that the charter school will open this fall.

“They’re moving forward with a fall 2015 opening with a lot of faith that at the end of the legislative session, they will support and fund this nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School,” Grace said.

Grace added that the Stamford community supports the new charter school, but the publicly elected Board of Education voted against the project.

With the state's public schools already under-funded by roughly $600 million, Bye said it’s more important to spend money on programs that support the neediest students, which often aren’t backed by high-powered lobbyists.

"The Appropriations Committee is not coming out and saying, 'We're against this,'" Bye said. "I think we're saying we need a plan. Because if we're under-funding our traditional public schools this much, and then they're not performing the way we want, do we then give the dollars that could fill in for them to another school that takes away from the public school."

Two years ago, the committee cut funds for four new charter schools, but the General Assembly put that money back into the final budget.

David finds and tells stories about education and learning for WNPR radio and its website. He also teaches journalism and media literacy to high school students, and he starts the year with the lesson: “Conflicts of interest: Real or perceived? Both matter.” He thinks he has a sense of humor, and he also finds writing in the third person awkward, but he does it anyway.

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