The Montana Board of Public Education unanimously approved contracts Wednesday for 19 public charter schools in communities around the state, a final key step in enabling those new schools to begin operating this summer.
“We’re delighted to have reached this milestone in implementing the provisions of House Bill 549 that was adopted by the Legislature and approved by the governor during the last legislative session,” Jane Lee Hamman, who chairs the board’s charter school committee, said prior to Wednesday’s vote.
Approval of the contracts follows a January meeting during which board members accepted 19 of the 25 charter applications received from public school districts throughout Montana. The contracts spell out in greater detail the legal obligations the new charters will have to meet under HB 549 and include monitoring plans, performance metrics and instructional assurances the board will use to determine whether the schools are meeting those obligations.
The array of reporting requirements charter schools are expected to meet ranges from information on student attendance, academic growth and college readiness to documentation on financial sustainability and student-level disciplinary actions. Under HB 549, the board must determine every five years whether to renew each charter contract, and failure to adhere to the academic and institutional benchmarks outlined in the contracts could impact a charter school’s ability to continue operating.
With this first wave of contracts, the approved charter schools will officially be able to open to students starting July 1 with one exception. At the request of the Bozeman Public Schools, the contract for the district’s Bozeman Charter School — one of two applications it submitted and received approval for — won’t go into effect until July 1, 2025. The contract for the second Bozeman charter is effective this summer. The other approved charters will be located in Missoula, Billings, Helena, Great Falls, Kalispell, Hamilton, Frenchtown, Corvallis, Boulder and East Helena.
Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, the board discussed a few details regarding oversight, reporting and funding for the new charters. Board member Renee Rasmussen said she was struck by the number of reporting requirements outlined in the contracts and asked if participating districts would be furnished with a one-page document summarizing the requirements and mandated timelines. McCall Flynn, the board’s executive director, assured her that board staff and the Office of Public Instruction were planning to produce such a document.
Rasmussen also inquired about the logistics surrounding the specific requirement that the Board of Public Education each year visit the approved charters. In response, Board Chair Tim Tharp recommended the board work together to determine when individual members might be traveling close enough to a charter to facilitate a visit.
“These visits aren’t going to be like when we’ve gone and visited a school all of us together, spending half a day,” Tharp said. “We would never get anything else done if that was what we were doing. So it may mean one or two of us … when we’re in the area swinging by the ones in Billings.”
On the financial side, Flynn informed the board some state funding for the charters this fall will be calculated based on projected enrollment, but that per-student payments will be calculated based on actual enrollment at those schools.
Speaking with Montana Free Press, Flynn further explained that the charters will not receive per-student state payments in their first year. Montana’s school funding formula calculates per-student payments using prior-year enrollment, and, Flynn said, as the bulk of new charter school students are expected to come from other public schools within the same district, the state would likely end up double-counting those students for funding purposes this fall. Flynn added that staff at the board and OPI are still working through the specifics of how state funding will flow to the new charters.
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