CHARLESTON — Leaders in the Charleston County School District want more oversight of the charter schools they authorize, and they see the charter reform bill making its way through the legislature as a way to get it.
The district’s chief finance officer, Daniel Prentice, is pushing state representatives to add language to the legislation that would, among other things, require locally authorized charters to get their budgets approved by district school boards.
The effort comes after a year of tension in the Charleston County School District, which authorizes nine charter schools — the most of any local district in the state.
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School officials have raised concerns that charters receive significant local tax funding through the district without facing the same level of oversight as other Charleston public schools. Some have accumulated millions of dollars in reserve funds, figures that raised eyebrows when presented to board members last spring.
Prentice’s proposed changes would make the law draw a clearer distinction between local authorizers and their larger statewide counterparts, and expand the financial and operational information that charters must provide to local authorizers.
If it goes anywhere, the proposal would be a notable expansion of local districts’ authority over charter schools.
Such a change would be controversial. Charter leaders in Charleston and elsewhere see independence as the main reason for charter schools’ existence.
“Budget approval is control, and that’s not how the charter model was designed to work,” said Tim Thorn, the principal of James Island Charter High School.
Prentice argues that the changes would create more consistent oversight by establishing uniform statutory standards while still allowing individual charter schools to govern themselves.
“I just hope that our voice, from the perspective of being a large local district authorizer, is valued,” he said.
The S.C. Senate unanimously passed the charter accountability bill in February. It now sits in a House subcommittee, but the chamber has been occupied with the state budget in recent weeks. That subcommittee held a public hearing in February at which Prentice pitched the idea.
State Rep. Shannon Erickson, the Beaufort Republican who chairs the House education committee, said it was too early to say whether Charleston’s suggestions could be included in the bill.
Prentice said he’s heard similar concerns from other districts that authorize charters. Spokespeople for Richland One, Horry and Beaufort, which have a handful of the schools, either declined or did not respond to The Post and Courier’s request for comment.
Debates on oversight and local control
Years of work on the charter accountability bill in the Senate have focused almost entirely on the statewide authorizers, which sponsor most of South Carolina’s charter schools and are growing quickly.
But Prentice contends that local school districts — which originally were the only charter school sponsors — have different missions, responsibilities and financial commitments from bodies like the S.C. Public Charter School District or the Charter Institute at Erskine.
For instance, he argues that the law fails to account for the range of responsibilities local school districts face, such as managing their own schools while overseeing charter school operations and reviewing new charter applications.
His suggestions would extend the deadline for authorizers to approve or deny new charter applications to 120 days. As the law currently stands, a charter application is automatically considered approved if not otherwise acted on within 90 days.
For Prentice, giving local school boards a say in charter school budget approvals would turn the process into more of a partnership, while forcing greater transparency and oversight to ensure the funds are used properly instead of “just giving charters a lump sum appropriation and hoping for the best.”
He added that many charter-district contracts were signed under different administrations and cannot be changed unless terminated or voluntarily amended, which the schools often decline.
By codifying budget approval and reporting requirements in state law, local authorizers would have a legal basis to require detailed records on governance, finance, staffing and operations, including budgets and purchasing records, staff lists and salaries, curriculum materials, facility leases and health and safety reports, Prentice said.
Daniel Neikirk, Allegro Charter School of Music’s chief executive officer, said those additional requirements would be an onerous burden on administrative staff, which is the exact kind of bureaucratic bloat that charter schools are designed to avoid.
He contended that Prentice’s proposal would turn charter schools into something more akin to a regular district magnet, stripping them of their autonomy and local determination.
Thorn, the James Island school principal, noted that charters already submit their annual budgets and independent financial audits to authorizers.
He added that charter governing boards review and approve budgets in public meetings and are responsible for ensuring sound financial stewardship. This provides strong financial transparency and oversight, Thorn said, though additional reporting requirements may be reasonable if they support transparency and align with the existing accountability framework.
However, a district’s ability to veto a school’s budget would tip the balance between independence and accountability that’s central to the charter school model, said Kevin Mason, a lobbyist for the S.C. Public Charter School Alliance.
“I think expanding that authority, in ways, would move towards day-to-day control, and undermine the very flexibility that makes charter schools effective,” he added.
Some charters have struggled to keep their finances in order. In 2019, for instance, CCSD’s board revoked the charter of Prestige Preparatory Academy, an all-boys school that overestimated its budget and faced a financial crunch when the students — and the funding they were supposed to bring — didn’t appear.
Prentice said he wants more budget oversight because a large portion of local tax revenue is allocated to locally authorized charter schools through the current state formula. He emphasized that the goal isn’t to control the schools’ curricula, programs or day-to-day operations, but districts should be able to challenge unrealistic budgets and enrollment assumptions to prevent potential financial problems and ensure contract compliance.
“There has to be a higher level of oversight in fiscal matters — because of the amounts of funding at stake, the sources of the funding and the necessity for alignment between the authorizer and the charter — without crossing the line of autonomy,” Prentice said.
Charleston County Schools’ allocation to charters has continued to increase over the years, despite no new charters opening. The district currently allocates $77.5 million to charter schools, about $46 million of which comes from local property tax revenue. Officials expect that allocation to increase by about $6 million in fiscal year 2027.
That’s because Charleston is a relatively wealthy county with valuable real estate. The state’s education funding formula allocates less state funding per pupil to the district, reasoning that it can raise more revenue through local property taxes than poorer districts.
And local authorizers aren’t entitled to the extra slice of state funding that goes to the statewide authorizers, which can’t levy property taxes.
Charleston school district pushes for more charter oversight
