Glory Reitz
Education First for Newberry (EFN) released a budget spreadsheet this week after Newberry city staff said it appeared “materially sound.” Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) and opposition group Save Our Schools (SOS) Newberry say the budget does not assuage their concerns.
The budget, which EFN says is based on a template from the Charter Support Unit, a nonprofit that supports charter schools for their first five years, was released in a presentation format last week, then as a more detailed spreadsheet this week. The spreadsheet includes multiple options based on one, two or all three schools successfully transitioning to charter schools.
Schools receive an average of $8,050 per student, according to EFN spokesman Joel Searby, with potential for additional funding for Exceptional Student Education (ESE) and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL).
The proposed budget bases its estimates on the expectation that enrollment will increase during the first three years of charter operations, from 2,479 in the 2025-26 school year to 2,622 in the 2027-28 school year.
The district’s latest enrollment numbers show 672 students at Newberry Elementary School, 949 at Oak View Middle School, and 743 at Newberry High School—totaling 2,364 current students.
One of the major issues the EFN organizers proposed to solve through charter conversion was overcrowding. The plan originally called for the incoming kindergarten class to begin capping acceptance at 100% enrollment to eventually solve the overcrowding problem.
Searby said the goal has now shifted to accommodate community concerns that students in Archer and unincorporated areas would eventually lose their automatic acceptance and be pushed out of the schools.
“As we’ve listened to community input and concern, we have heard loud and clear a strong desire to first ensure all our students are included, and then begin tackling overcrowding,” Searby wrote in an email. “In order to do that, we’ve presented a budget that starts with all enrolled students currently, plus some room for growth, and then begins to plan immediately for capacity growth, rather than prioritizing shrinking enrollment.”
Searby said the budget accommodates the expected growth and sets aside money for “well-maintained portables” to serve as a short-term solution.
ACPS spokeswoman Jackie Johnson said conversion charter schools would not receive the property tax revenue that the district receives for the facilities and said Newberry also cannot impose school impact fees or issue bonds.
“That being the case, a big question is where are they going to get enough money to add capacity in any meaningful way,” Johnson wrote in an email.
Searby said the state also allocates money for things like transportation, safety, mental health and classroom supplies.
Transportation has become a sticking point for those who oppose the conversion plan, in part because the state funding provided for the service is not adequate. Searby acknowledged as much in his presentation, saying EFN expects to lose money on transporting students.
“That budget is a loser,” Searby said in a presentation Tuesday. “Everybody knows that. You lose money on transportation, you don’t get enough money to fund the students you need to [transport].”
Many charter schools do not provide transportation to their students, according to Johnson.
Searby said EFN has planned for the current percentage of students using transportation, using formulas provided by the state to calculate the number of buses needed. The group plans to hire contractor bus services.
Tyler Foerst, co-chair of SOS Newberry, said he does not trust that the conversion charters would be able to handle transportation. He said Searby told a roundtable discussion the charters would need to be “innovative,” and that EFN could not be sure of the accuracy of a contractor’s quote without knowing the district’s bus routes.
“If it isn’t a security concern, it seems like they could’ve made a public records request for that information at any point over the last 8-9 months they’ve been planning this if they had actually been doing the homework they claimed they did,” Foerst wrote.
Yet Searby said EFN’s budget includes plans to provide transportation, not only for students to and from school, but also for varsity athletes traveling for sports.
According to Searby, the budget also includes funding for all current food service employees, opting for a “basic approach” to food service by mirroring as closely as possible the district’s system.
EFN’s budget presentation projects $659,556 spent on food in a year, with $803,520 in revenue from the school lunch program. Johnson said while she assumes staff costs are factored into employee salaries, the food service budget may still come up short.
Last year, Johnson said, the three schools generated $1,383,299 in food service revenues, but expenditures were $1,641,294.
Foerst said the spreadsheet budget still does not address his organization’s concerns and expressed frustration that the “detailed” version was only released an hour before the final public meeting, two weeks before voting begins.
“Once we actually started looking, we found it wasn’t much of a budget at all,” Foerst wrote in an email. “It was another summary without the line item detail needed to vet their proposal.”
Searby said multiple portions of the budget, based off what Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) currently pays for things, had to be recreated without the district’s cooperation.
“We have reached out to ACPS on numerous occasions for clarification on items such as transportation routes but have not received that information,” Searby wrote in an email. “We did submit several public records requests in order to gain further information, but we have had to resort primarily to the use of the publicly available information from the district.”
ACPS’s Johnson said she has looked for EFN’s requests, and the only one she could find was submitted on Tuesday, requesting bus routes from the attorney’s office.
“Other than that, no requests for information to the staff attorney’s office or to the heads of budget & finance, transportation, facilities or food service,” Johnson wrote. “I’m curious who they requested this information from.”
Johnson also noted that the district has currently budgeted $1.18 million for utilities at the three schools, including water, sewage, garbage collection, gas and electricity. The charter budget presentation plans $704,580 for utilities in the first year.
“Maybe utility costs will go down between now and when the charters would take over in 2025-26, but I doubt it, and probably not by $472,000,” Johnson wrote in an email.
Searby noted in his presentation Tuesday that Oak View is currently spending over half a million dollars each year on liquefied petroleum (LP) gas. He said a new natural gas pipeline is planned to be run in front of Oak View soon, so the school may be able to tie into that line and save some money.
“These are the kinds of things that we are able to do as a small little community-based school system, that it’s not possible currently,” Searby said in his presentation.