Last week, David Blank, the acting CEO of City Garden Montessori School, watched as $104,661 vanished from the school’s bank account. And City Garden wasn’t alone: All 18 St. Louis charter schools and all 20 in Kansas City saw money taken away, through no fault of their own, long after they’d spent it—clawed back by the state of Missouri.
And that’s not the end of the impact: In addition to the money that was pulled back Friday, Blank says the state’s new math will be putting a $400,000 dent in City Garden’s budget for the rest of the year.
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Blank says he was initially stunned by the news that revisions to funding formulas would mean a big hit to the budget. Even now, as he’s come to terms with it, it’s a hard blow. “Even if we had the money that we thought we were supposed to get, it’s still challenging being in this business,” he says. “Now it’s just gotten a little bit more challenging.”
The reason for the clawback is incredibly complicated, but here’s the gist of it: For the past three fiscal years that wrapped last June, the state allowed school districts to use enrollment numbers from before the pandemic. Those enrollment numbers (called the Weighted Average Daily Attendance, or WADA) are a key part of an equation that determines how much the state pays each district per child. But for the fiscal year that began July 1, the state was ready to shift back to real-time numbers, not ones from a half-dozen years earlier. That meant big adjustments for the first time in years.
And in both St. Louis and Kansas City—where the allotment for each public school district is shared with charter schools within their footprint—the district corrected some enrollment numbers in the fall, well after budgets for the year had already been set. In each case, the district realized they had more students enrolled than reflected in the enrollment numbers they’d recently shared with the state. (And yes, that’s despite enrollment numbers that continue to decline overall; SLPS has seen a 16 percent decline in enrollment since 2019–2020, a spokesman says.) The revised numbers submitted in the fall meant a bigger piece of the pie would go to the St. Louis Public Schools and less to the charter schools.
And because the state had already started paying out the per-pupil allocations, that meant not just revising budgets going forward, but taking money back.
A spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Secondary and Elementary Education confirmed the changes, saying in a statement, “State law requires that prior year corrections, both under and overpayments, are conducted on a yearly basis. The prior year correction currently taking place is larger than in previous years because of the increase in attendance for
both KCPS and SLPS.”
Noah Devine, executive director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association, broke the bad news to charter schools in St. Louis in October. He acknowledges that the numbers drew “shock and surprise,” adding that the idea of an autumnal revision was neither a shock nor a surprise (it happens many years). But the size of this one was.
Devine says this year has entailed a lot more change than usual: It’s the first year in quite some time that everyone is using real-time numbers, and many districts have seen big changes since 2019-2020. Additionally, a new state law in 2022 rejiggered the funding formula for charter schools and their public school counterparts, and that’s now kicking in too. Finally, the sheer size of the correction meant a whole lot of schools were suddenly looking at six-figure corrections to the amount of state aid they can rely upon—for budgets where many of the costs are fixed. “I think folks will be OK, but they’re going to have to make some adjustments,” he says.
He adds, “Schools are ultimately extremely resilient. As long as they have time to budget and plan, they can work through a lot. It’s like rough shocks without any time to absorb them that are really impossible to handle because, you know, your biggest expenditure is your teachers.” And no one wants to lay them off.
City Garden Montessori is carefully considering its options. Says Blank, “We’re looking at our long-term plans, looking at summer staffing models, and working with our community to figure out what are the tradeoffs, and trying to make the best decision possible to live with the new reality.”
Blank acknowledges that he was briefly annoyed that someone else’s revision was having such an outsized impact on his budget. But he’s made peace with the situation—-even with the anxiety he now feels about the school’s finances.
“There’s a lot of things that impact schools that we have almost no control over,” he says. “There were about two minutes of, ‘I’m upset about this. What can we do?’ And then it’s like, ‘OK, this is the reality. We don’t have time to complain, and we have to make plans. We’ve got to do what’s best for the kids.”
