No, you are simply wrong, that isn't the way the federal funding works. The money in question is assigned on a per-child basis, not on a zone basis. This is the link to the 2014 NC school budget:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...kMoxQ1SlQGF6tQ
Look on page 12 of the PDF, which is where the federal funding is broken down. The school gets $27.46 from the feds for every student. Then, the school (in this case the traditional public school) gets an additional $1,822.38 for each Low Income Family student (which is what is being discussed here, the lunches and bussing); another $1,507.01 for each student with an IEP; and $1,452.26 for a limited English student. These funds are tracked by student, not by zone. How do you think the IEP funding works - they just guess based on a percentage? No, of course not, when a kid with an IEP moves from district to district or from public to charter, the federal money assigned to that child goes with them. It is the same way for the Low Income Family addition within the traditional public school system.
So, again, the only way the charter school gets the Low Income Family money under the proposed legislation is if the student from the Low Income Family goes to the school. So your hypothetical doesn't work, unless you think that there are Low Income Families who are swinging the system by qualifying for the subsidy while hiding their cars and lunches from the process. In your scenario a middle class kid from Pilot going to a charter school, regardless of how he gets there or what he eats for lunch, would not bring the $1,822.38 of Low Income Family funding with him, because he is not from a Low Income Family. The only way your hypothetical works is if there are Low Income Families who qualify for the $1,822.38/student bonus but who don't need the bus or the lunch, which doesn't make sense because they likely wouldn't qualify for the funding category in the first place. The charter school would not get that $1,822.38 unless the Low Income Family student actually went to the school.
Here is how charter school annual funding works: The charter school opens on day 1 of the academic year. They then have to wait 20 school days for the enrollment to sort itself out, as some kids who got accepted don't show but never bothered to decline, others try it for a few days then switch, whatever. After that 20 day threshold, the charter school submits its actual roster of students to the various public school systems from which it draws. That home system then transfers the money allotted to those particular students to the charter school. Currently, for a student with an IEP, the federal $1,507.01 addition for that IEP follows that student. That is why certain charter schools push for more IEP students and designations, because if they only have a few then they don't get enough funding to fully support them, but once they reach a critical mass then they can put the infrastructure in place and then use any excess arising from their efficiency for the school in general.
And that is what hey are trying to do here with the $1,822.38 Low Income Family addition. It is already tracked by student, they are trying to get it to follow the student. And there is no logical reason why it shouldn't. The public school no longer has that Low Income Family student, why should it get to keep the $1,822.38 allocated by the feds to that student, whereas the charter school has to make it up from other sources? Yes, Pilot would no longer get that federal subsidy if the Low Income Family student goes to a charter school, but why should they? They obviously failed enough to alienate that Low Income Family to push them somewhere else, so they have nobody to blame but themselves. That shouldn't mean that said Low Income Family student should lose his funding because he has a better opportunity. #allLowIncomeFamilylivesmatter
