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星期四, 7月 14, 2016

​Statement on Launch of Charter Expansion Ballot Campaign

Statement on Launch of Charter Expansion Ballot Campaign

BOSTON — The Save Our Public Schools campaign, a grassroots organization of Massachusetts families, parents, educators, and students opposed to Question 2, which would expand charter schools in Massachusetts, released the following statement on the launch of the Yes on Question 2 campaign:

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“Every time a new charter school opens or expands, it takes funding away from the public schools in that area. Under this proposal, the number of charter schools in Massachusetts would nearly triple in just 10 years, costing local public school districts more than $1 billion every single year.
If some public schools are falling short, we should fix them by investing in areas such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), arts and music, and Pre-K, not diverting even more resources to charters, which educate just four percent of students.”

In the current school year, over $400 million in taxpayer money is being diverted to charter schools statewide, with money withdrawn from 243 local school districts. The charter school ballot question would allow the state to approve 12 new charters schools a year, every year, with no limit on how much money a single district could lose. If all the allowable schools were opened, the annual losses would grow from almost $450 million in the first year to more than $550 million the next year, $670 million the year after, and so on. By the seventeenth year after the ballot question was passed, more than $3 billion would be diverted from district public schools to charter school every single year.

Local communities and their school committees have no say in the approval or operation of charter schools. The state approves charter schools even when the communities where they will be located are opposed to them. This has happened in Brockton, Gloucester and many other communities.

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