Let’s do the math: There are more than 500 students in that school. At about $4,000 per student, MPS is receiving about $2 million more for Carmen students than it is actually paying to Carmen. In addition, the school is paying MPS $727,469 this school year to rent the building, which was originally an MPS middle school.
The number of students in the MPS independent charter schools was only about 2,500 in the fall of 2008. That rose to a peak of just under 9,000 in the fall of 2016. Some schools have closed, some have switched to other authorizers, some have lost enrollment. The number in the MPS system this fall is about 6,900.
Current attention has focused primarily on Carmen Northwest, which was up for renewal of its charter contract. The school’s test scores have been low, but its general vitality as a school community has been pretty good (as the large number of Carmen supporters at recent school board meetings demonstrated).
The school board voted Nov. 20 to give the school a one-year renewal, on the condition that it won’t be renewed again and it won’t be allowed to continue to use the building that has been its home for more than a decade.
That means the forecast is for the number of students in this group of charter schools to fall by more than 3,500 by fall 2027. That alone would create a revenue loss to MPS of more than $12 million a year. And the loss of these charter schools, most of them with academic performance above the MPS averages, is very likely to drop the MPS overall achievement picture. Furthermore, one of the remaining MPS-authorized charter schools, the Hmong American Peace Academy with about 2,000 students, would account for two-thirds of the remaining students in this scenario. HAPA, as it is called, has achievement scores well above the MPS average. Will HAPA stay with MPS in the future? I wouldn’t count on that.