My name is Wayne Sherwood, retired director of Aldo Leopold Charter School (ALCS). ALCS is a New Mexico State Public Charter School in Silver City, NM, founded in 2005 and serves about 180 students in grades 6-12. Aldo is an outdoor/experiential education school with a focus on community connections. Students spend one day a week out in the field doing everything from water-quality data collection, to trail maintenance, to art walks downtown. I had been the director since 2016 and retired in January 2023.
At the start of the 2019-2020 school year, an extra funding allocation, “small school size adjustment”, started to be phased out at a rate of 20% per year. The adjustment had been put into place over 40 years ago to help small, rural schools. Many small charters, like ALCS, depended on that money to stay afloat. In 2019 the legislature voted to phase out that funding (dmullan@sfnewmexican.com, 2019). Before 2019, the school received about $600,000 per year from the adjustment, or 30.6 units, for small school funding per year. One unit is equal to one student. Smaller schools and districts get more units through small school funding to maintain overhead costs, such as administration, that can easily be absorbed by larger districts. Small schools have the same reporting and state standards that larger schools do with fewer personnel.
The loss of small school funding has forced the school to cut some positions and do away with its previous capacity on class size. By the time the adjustment is completely phased out in 2024-2025, there is a very real possibility that the school will cease to exist. This is not just unfortunate, but a huge disservice to students in Grant County. Because the school’s focus is on “hands-on” learning, it attracts a large number of Special Education students with Individual Education Plans. Special education students comprise 30% of the student body, whereas the national average is 14% (Riser-Kositsky, 2019). The school’s current operating budget is just over three million dollars a year, so obviously $600,000 is a significant portion of the budget.
Particularly troubling is the fact that New Mexico is spending more than ever on education.
Spending for New Mexico’s K-12 system has increased by a third, from $2.69 billion in FY18 to a proposed $3.8 billion this year, even though student enrollment has declined by 20,000 students from its pre-pandemic high in 2018-19. In Improving Education the New Mexico Way: An Evidenced-Based Approach, the authors argue for more adequate and equitable funding (Oakes et al., 2020). They also state clearly, “this means making high-leverage strategic investments in the five key areas addressed in this report. It also requires, however, avoiding a proliferation of categorical (“below-the-line”) programs that limit the flexibility of communities and districts to tailor their resource use to meet local needs” (Oakes et al., 2020, p.15).
Small schools simply lack the infrastructure that exists in large districts and cities. The small school size adjustment was created to rectify that problem, but many in the legislature felt that charters were unfairly profiting from it (dmullan@sfnewmexican.com, 2019). Our school was not profiting from the small school size adjustment; it was barely surviving.
Over 12 years ago a report on the school funding formula was issued that showed that New Mexico’s funding formula was insufficient to cover the costs of properly educating our students (Chambers, Levin, DeLancey, & Manship, 2008). New Mexico uses the State equalization guarantee commonly referred to as the 'funding formula'—as the mechanism for distributing funds to school districts. The SEG is the amount allocated to each district by the state Public Education Department (PED) for each unit value. If legislation isn’t introduced to reinstate the small school size adjustment, or some other funding adjustment, ALCS, and many other small schools in New Mexico may be doomed. This is particularly upsetting to me because so much money goes into initiatives, programs and below-the-line funding that isn’t equitably distributed among schools and districts. I certainly am hopeful that some solution can be found. A solution is critical for the life of ALCS and many other schools in the state that are providing above-the-line education for their students.