After months of anticipation, the General Assembly failed to pass a single bill related to charter schools.
That’s good news if you’re in the charter school world. It means lawmakers failed to reach agreement on bills that would place new restrictions on the expansion of charter schools and reopen the state funding formula to reduce money for charter schools.
It’s not such good news for many local officials and school district leaders. They led the charge, calling for local politicians to get a vote on new and expanding charter schools. That measure looked poised to pass, but lawmakers never managed to vote on matching versions. Then they abruptly went home for the summer.
Another bill that called for a re-examination of the state funding formula also looked favorable, and it may be the way lawmakers go in the future. There seems to be widespread agreement that the formula can be improved to make funding more equitable for public schools.
Finally, an effort to require the State Department of Education to complete an impact report before authorizing new charter schools also failed to pass, or at least lawmakers never reconciled competing versions of the bill.
I, for one, am interested to see whether lawmakers revive any of these issues when they return for a possible special session in the fall.