Baltimore City Bd. of School Comm’rs v. City Neighbors Charter Sch.
The Maryland Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court, has ruled that charter schools are entitled under the state charter school statute to receive the same per pupil funding as is distributed to other schools in the school district. The court chose to deal with in one opinion with two separate appeals arising from disputes between charter schools and their authorizing school boards over the amount of per pupil funding to be provided the charter schools. The Maryland State Board of Education (SBE) had issued declaratory rulings in favor of the charter schools, which state trial courts then struck down. Maryland’s intermediate appeals court reversed these lower court decisions, and the high court’s decision affirms the intermediate court’s decisions. The high court first rejected the argument by the school boards and dissenting justices that because the SBE rulings were intended to "provide guidance and direction" to other charter applicants and school boards, they amounted to regulations that should have been promulgated in accordance with the state Administrative Procedures Act. The court then held that the SBE’s interpretation of the statutory language on funding¯that "an amount of county, State, and federal money for elementary, middle, and secondary students that is commensurate with the amount disbursed to other public schools in the jurisdiction" means the same average per pupil funding available to traditional schools¯was entitled to deference. Although the statute was "patently ambiguous" on the point, the court in a lengthy discussion of its legislative history concluded that the state legislature could not have intended local boards, rather than the SBE, to have the discretion to interpret the language and in fact must have contemplated per pupil funding. The court also held that SBE did not err legally in construing the statute as precluding a school district from providing some support in the form of services rather than money, in including Title I and special education funds in the calculation, limiting the school district’s deduction for central administration expenses to 2%.
Baltimore City Bd. of School Comm’rs v. City Neighbors Charter Sch. and Bd. and Educ. of Prince George’s County v. Lincoln Public Charter Sch., No. 06-99 (Md. July 30, 2007)
[Full opinion]
[Editor’s Note: For reactions to the ruling and discussions of its potential implications in Maryland and beyond, see the coverage in the Baltimore Sun, below.]
Baltimore Sun
By Sara Neufeld
[Full story]