There are three key ingredients for a successful charter school, says school finance expert Debi Deal: a focused and rigorous curriculum, a solid governance structure, and a strong finance team. “Not any one of them is more important than the other; they’re all important together,” adds Deal, who serves as treasurer of the CCAP board of directors.
Over the years, she has found that the financial piece is often the Achilles heel of charter school survival. Nationwide, financial troubles are a factor in more than 40 percent of charter school closures, according to a 2011 study by the Center for Education Reform.
When Deal was Chief Business Officer of the Santa Maria High School District, an early experience reviewing a charter petition opened her eyes to the problem and the need to address it. The petitioners had a good program and governance structure, but they missed the mark on financial management. When she pointed that out, the petitioners responded, “We don’t really care about finance…we’ll be fine.”
In 2007, Deal joined California’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team, known as FCMAT, as a fiscal intervention specialist and investigated suspected fraud and financial mismanagement as part of her list of assignments. Many of the audits involved charter schools, but, she said, “some of them didn’t turn out to be fraud; they turned out to be people who just didn’t really understand and they were doing things wrong.”
She set out on a mission to strengthen financial literacy in charter schools and created the Charter School Finance Academy, a collaborative effort with the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) to provide professional development for charter school leaders throughout the state.
At the time, California charter authorizers—schools districts and county offices of education—were in a period that Deal described as “kind of the wild, wild west.” There were few comprehensive resources for authorizers to use as a roadmap to fulfill their responsibilities, such as reviewing petitions and providing oversight, “so, they created their own tools.”
Deal said that the search for high-quality authorizing tools began to take shape in 2015, when the Alameda County Office of Education received a federal grant to launch CARSNet, the Charter Authorizers Regional Support Network. Deal helped draft curriculum and taught master level classes to authorizers. CARSNet also collected tools and resources developed by authorizers, evaluated them, and shared the best tools and templates as resources online.
When the CARSNet grant ended three years later, the work was picked up by CCAP, which received a federal grant that took authorizing improvement work to a new, in-depth level. In addition to professional development trainings and webinars, CCAP is creating comprehensive toolkits that focus on specific areas of authorizing and can be updated as new legislation and regulations are enacted.
“CCAP’s staff and its experienced Board members are well positioned to provide resources and training to keep people super current,” said Deal. “These tools are an integral part of what authorizers need to do their jobs well.”
Since retiring from FCMAT, Deal has continued working with charter schools as a consultant and says given how the pandemic has disrupted education, it is also essential to help authorizers and charter schools build strong partnerships to ensure that each has the information they need to make sound decisions that enable students to thrive.
To learn more about funding sources available to help schools with COVID recovery and program deadlines, please see Critical Deadlines for Funding in this newsletter.
