GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A Queens charter school that pays for pension costs directly out of its budget is cutting programs to afford pensions.

Stacey Gauthier at the Renaissance Charter School is worrying a lot these days — about money. This year she’s had to increase class sizes, cut the summer school program, and forgo hiring experienced teachers when an older teacher retires. Yet she still hasn’t cut enough to be able to afford the school’s rising pension costs, which have grown from $12,000 per teacher in 2004 to $21,000 per teacher this year.

Pension costs for city teachers have been rising steadily over the past decade, but for the most part the expenses have been hidden from individual schools, which rely on the city to cover all pension costs. Yet for a small number of charters schools like Renaissance that participate in the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) out of their own budgets, the ballooning price of a comfortable retirement has been acutely felt.

“We have another year to live,” Gauthier said. “We’re dipping into our savings now, which is okay, but if things don’t rebound, we won’t be financially viable.” (more…)

Opportunity Charter School's flags line 113th street in Harlem, where the school shares a building with P.S. 241.

Opportunity Charter School in Harlem is a rare species in the charter school movement.

Its student body is roughly half general education students and half students with learning disabilities. The two groups learn in classes side by side, following the “inclusion” model. And year after year, students entering the school have some of the lowest test scores in the city — a distinction that’s become a point of pride.

“Lowest achieving kids in New York City. Bottom 10 percent,” Opportunity’s assistant principal, Brett Fazio, said in an interview, with the same delight other school administrators reserve for science fair champions.

But the point of Opportunity, as CEO Leonard Goldberg dreamed it up when he was an administrator at a residential school five years ago, is to take the least and make them champions.

That hasn’t been an easy task and as a result, Goldberg’s school is in trouble. In part, this is because it’s a charter school, subject to the demands of the charter school ultimatum: set your standards high and meet them, or else.

At the same time that the combined middle and high school is preparing its first twelfth grade class for graduation, the city has put the school on probation. Opportunity has one year to improve its test scores or it will lose its charter, something that’s rarely happened among the city’s charter schools. (more…)