Dive Brief:

• Utah’s Charter School Funding Task Force — comprised of legislators, State School Board members, and other education leaders — has presented recommendations to the state’s Education Interim Committee, including one that would mandate charters and district schools follow identical enrollment procedures, thus evening out the difference in funding between the two.  
• Right now, charters are funded on a per-student basis which will expire in 2016, while district schools follow a “daily membership” model, the Deseret News reports.
• If charters move to the system used by districts, they stand to lose around $6 million, but if district schools moved to a per-student funding system, they’d rack up an additional $65 million from the state.

Dive Insight:

At this meeting, the sixth in a series of seven, members of the Charter School Funding Task Force considered solutions like enrollment caps for charters that would help alleviate the funding gap, and also considered amending existing laws that regulate equity in capital funding. That’s because all Utah district schools currently pay 25% of per-student revenue into a statewide capital fund. The final meeting of the task force is scheduled for next Monday.

Other attempts at raising revenue for charters, such as a per-student investment approach attempted by Goldman Sachs, have been scrutinized recently due to irregularities in success metrics.

Around 8% (or about 50,000) of Utah’s student population attended charter schools in 2012. Today, according to 2014-15 data from the Utah State Office of Education, that number is over 67,000.