This matters a great deal to the students, teachers, and administrators that I work with every day at Coney Island Prep – a public charter school in South Brooklyn. We opened our doors in 2009, becoming the first charter school in South Brooklyn and welcoming students into four rooms of a neighborhood community center. We were also the first charter school to be located in a New York Housing Authority building – where we sought to provide a quality education option to families who were desperate for one.
Now, in our eighth year of operation, Coney Island Prep has grown to serve more than 900 students across our elementary, middle and high schools. This year, we’ll be graduating our first senior class. We’ve done all of this while maintaining our core beliefs of fostering joy in our students, helping them explore their passions, and challenging them to be their best selves.
There’s just one problem: Because of New York’s unfair budgetary practices, our students are treated differently than their district school peers, and are deprived of the resources they need to have the best possible shot at success. The problem has gotten rapidly worse over the past several years – between 2014 and 2017, the funding gap between charter schools and district schools grew nearly forty times larger.
To put those numbers is perspective: today, public charter schools that operate out of co-located buildings, like Coney Island Elementary School and Coney Island Middle School, receive an average of $1,145 less in per-pupil funding than the district schools we share space with. This disparity is even greater at public charter schools that have been unable to secure public facilities and forced to find private space, like Coney Island Prep High School. At these schools, students each receive an average of $2,057 less than their district school counterparts.
This deep inequity in funding has a tangible, negative impact on public charter schools, and the children and families we serve. School leaders are forced to make impossible choices, opting between investing more in support and development for hard-working staff, or providing resources like student technology, school counselors, and other vital services that can make a huge difference for kids.
Coney Island Prep is no exception. We’ve struggled with the impact of being underfunded in the past, and we worry that the problems will only become more pronounced as we grow to serve 1,000 students next year.
The teachers and staff at Coney Island Prep, and our community of dedicated parents, have worked hard to make sure that the children we educated have a bright future ahead of them. But until our students are treated equally and given the same opportunities as their district school peers, we won’t be able to maximize our potential as a school community.
That’s why the coming weeks are such a critical time for the Coney Island Prep community, and the more than 100,000 students across New York City who attend a public charter school. It’s time for legislators to come together, remember that our scholars are public school students too, and ensure that public charter school students receive the fair funding they deserve.
