Legislature poised to shower money on charter schools once again

The Florida Legislature is preparing its annual budget, and we should be alarmed by how much they are planning to allocate to charter schools.

The House is budgeting $90 million in construction and maintenance costs for the state's 650 charter schools, many of which are managed by for-profit companies.

Since the facilities are privately held, this is money the public will never recover if one of these charter schools fails -- which has already happened 313 times over the years in Florida, costing us hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's not so baffling that we are giving these for-profit companies millions in extra money when you consider the hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions charter schools have given to the members of the Legislature.

It, however, gets worse. At the same time the House is planning on giving charters $90 million, it is planning to allocate only $50 million to the state's 4,300 public schools. Furthermore, since 2011 charters have received $326 million in maintenance funds from the state while public schools have received barely over a $100 million.

Maybe this could be justified if charter schools as a group were doing better than public schools but they aren't.

Isn't it time we ended this crony capitalism and instead invested in our public schools? After all, they are by far the better investment.

Chris Guerrieri

Jacksonville

This story was originally published February 6, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Legislature poised to shower money on charter schools once again ."