Ga. charter schools lawsuit goes before top court

ATLANTA - The first ever legal challenge to the state's charter school law goes before the Georgia's highest court this week.

Seven public school districts hope to persuade the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy Shoob. She ruled from the bench in May that the Georgia Charter Schools Commission is constitutional and not breaking any laws.

Attorneys for the districts filed an appeal, hoping to prove the commission is creating an independent school system prohibited by the state constitution and is unfairly taking funding away from the districts and giving it to charter schools. Thirty-seven other school districts are supporting the appeal. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case Tuesday afternoon.

Charter schools receive public support but are not subject to many regulations that apply to conventional public schools. Even if a local school district turns down a charter school petition, state law allows the commission to approve it and move funding from the school district to the charter school's coffers. Charter school supporters say that's not only legal, it's money that the charter schools need.

The school districts say the commission is actually taking local tax dollars without the approval of local taxpayers. They argue that for every student who goes to a charter school, the state reduces the state support it would ordinarily send for that student, along with an amount equal to the local tax revenue that would be set aside for that student.

For the state's largest district, Gwinnett County, which is part of the lawsuit, that meant losing $850,000 in a year when state funding for education was slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars.

"This is a shell game created by this bill to capture local funds without the local board allowing it," said Herb Garrett, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association.

Charter school advocates disagree.

"The money spent on the charter commission schools is state-raised money," said Tony Roberts, president of the Georgia Charter Schools Association. "I don't know how they would say that's local money."

The districts in the lawsuit are among the state's largest -Gwinnett County, DeKalb County and Atlanta Public Schools - as well as smaller districts like Bulloch, Henry, Candler and Griffin-Spalding schools.

In Bulloch County, which has a commission-approved charter school, the district is losing $400,000 a year because of students attending the school. The 9,500-student district raised its millage rate to make up for the difference and avoid getting rid of seven teachers, said Superintendent Lewis Holloway.

"We're not against charter schools," Holloway said. "We're against the state arbitrarily pulling dollars out of our school system."

The lawsuit poses the first challenge to a law passed in 2008 creating the commission, part of a series of state laws over the last decade that have made Georgia one of the most welcoming states for charter schools. Georgia now has 170 charter schools, including eight school districts that have converted entirely to charter schools.

State lawmakers created the Charter Schools Commission because they said many local school boards were unfairly turning down high quality charter petitions simply because they don't like charter schools. Georgia began allowing charter schools in 1993.

Minnesota passed the first charter school law in 1991, and now 39 states and Washington, D.C., allow the schools to be opened. Nationally, more than 1.5 million students are in nearly 5,000 public charter schools.