National Survey of Charter School Facilities

The Charter School Program needs reliable data to understand the current facilities landscape for charter schools. The Charter Schools Program, through the National Charter School Resource Center, administers a questionnaire conducted by the Colorado League of Charter Schools to gather data on charter schools facilities. This data helps to assess the true facilities challenges of the charter schools and what actions ED and the SEAs must take to better financially support the facilities needs of quality charter schools. This survey can incite positive change, increase the involvement of state legislature to mitigate the financial issues of charter schools to obtain equitable facilities, and ensure charter schools receive an amount for facilities that is more commensurate with the amount provided for traditional public schools. CSOs in participating states have reported that the survey results have provided the charter school facilities discussion in their states credibility regarding the problems facing charter schools and have resulted in legislative and other gains in their state towards charter school facility equity. CSOs have also reported that the results allow them to continue to push the facilities discussion forward for future changes. ED would like to continue to use and administer this survey in additional states and compile the data from all states into a facilities database. ED plans to conduct this survey in approximately three to four states per year, depending on the size of the state and local resources of the CSO to support the survey. This database will provide comprehensive information about the facilities for charter schools and the issues that charter school face in trying to obtain adequate facilities. The League will produce a report and an analysis summarizing the findings per state.

The latest form for National Survey of Charter School Facilities expires 2021-03-31 and can be found here.