This West Philly charter owes the school district $30 million for students it overenrolled. Should it have to pay?

A West Philadelphia charter school owes the Philadelphia School District roughly $30 million for the number of students it has overenrolled during the last 14 years.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education ruled recently that West Philadelphia Achievement Charter Elementary School, at 67th and Callowhill Streets, must repay the equivalent of what it has received for educating upward of 200 extra students a year since 2010.

Angela Fitterer, the state’s interim acting secretary of education, ordered WPACES to pay because of its “failure to abide by an enforceable term of their charter.”

“WPACES is not entitled to funds for students enrolled above the mutually agreed upon cap of 400 students …,” an order filed by the department on Dec. 24 said. The school currently educates about 650 students, and its enrollment has been as high as about 700.

Charter schools receive per-pupil payments from their home districts based on the amount the school system spent on its students the prior year. For the 2024-25 school year, Philadelphia brick-and-mortar charters receive $12,754.11 per student and $40,053.17 for each student who receives special-education services.

Stacy Gill-Phillips, the school’s chief executive, said it will appeal the state’s decision to Commonwealth Court.

“This is a classic David vs. Goliath,” Gill-Phillips said. “I am just so saddened that we’re even here.”

The dispute started when WPACES, which opened in 2001, requested permission in 2010 of the district’s charter schools office to move to its current location, Gill-Phillips said.

“They agreed and approved the new location,” Gill-Phillips said. WPACES, according to case documents, “received preliminary approval to relocate upon satisfaction of several conditions.”

Gill-Phillips said she told district officials at the time that WPACES would have to enroll more children “to be able to afford the building, to pay our mortgage and hire educators.” She said she received “somewhat of a soft idea around, ‘You can move into this building.’”

The district’s 2010 preliminary approval reminded WPACES that its 2006 charter was set to expire in 2011 and “this preliminary approval of a new location for WPACES may not be interpreted in any way as a renewal of, or a promise to renew, the Charter,” state documents say.

In 2011, the School Reform Commission, the precursor to the current school board, passed a resolution authorizing a new charter for WPACES at its 2006 cap of 400 students. The SRC said that “any requests for amendment to the Charter not addressed in this resolution are deemed denied.”

WPACES never signed that charter, or any other since. But it continued to enroll above and beyond its cap, billing the state directly for the additional students. The Department of Education paid, deducting the amount it annually sent WPACES for the over-enrollment from Philadelphia’s state funding. The ruling now requires WPACES to repay the district.

The charter argued during that time that because the district “did not include words of limitation in the enrollment cap,” that cap was nonbinding. It also suggested a victory for the district would “decimate WPACES’s financial condition.”

Fitterer rejected the charter school’s argument.

This is not the only dispute the charter has had with the district. The charter sued the school system in 2014, charging that the SRC’s move to limit enrollment, among other acts, was illegal. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately sided with WPACES, but that dispute was about the reform commission’s authority to suspend school code under state law. The SRC no longer exists; the school board replaced it in 2018.

Gill-Phillips said the district has refused to meet with her school lawyers to come to an agreement about enrollment, behavior that’s tantamount to “retaliation,” she said. “It became very apparent that they were exercising some form of blackballing. If I was a white male, I would not be in this situation.”

Gill-Phillips, who is Black, is part of the African American Charter School Coalition, a group that has publicly blasted the district for what it says is biased treatment of Black-led charter schools. (A 2023 independent report found “no intentional acts of racial discrimination or bias, based on the race of a charter school leader, committed by any members of the Board of Education, School Reform Commission, or the Charter Schools Office,” but members of the coalition took issue with the board’s characterization of that report.)

Other charters have been granted expansions since 2010, Gill-Phillips said, including a number of white-led charters. School board leaders, who have granted some expansions to Black- and Latino-led charters since 2010, have publicly said they will consider expansions only for charters that have a demonstrated track record of success.

Because WPACES is operating on a 2006 charter, it does not participate in the same accountability systems that the district’s 80 other charters do. The district does periodically review WPACES data, but only those which are available publicly.

If an appeal is not successful, Gill-Phillips said, “we would have to explore all our options. If it came down to a final we had to pay it back, we would just hope and pray that the district would be reasonable about a repayment plan. This money was spent on the children it was meant to be spent on. There’s no real owe here — that money was spent on children, and it’s all taxpayer dollars.”

Peng Chao, the district’s chief of charters, said officials believe the decision is significant.

“Charter agreements establish mutual clarity for the school district and charter schools as to our collective obligation to students, families, and the public,” Chao said in a statement. “Adherence to terms set forth in the legal agreements by the Board of Education and agreed to by charter schools is critical to the sustenance of the charter sector within our system of schools in Philadelphia.”