One of the poorest school districts on Long Island is Hempstead in Nassau County. The heavily minority community is plagued with gangs, (MS-13) illegal immigrants, and a relatively high crime rate when compared to the County as a whole. The result is that the schools have one of the lowest academic achievement results on Long Island.
Because of the poor academic results in the traditional public schools in Hempstead, many parents, who care about their child's education, decided to put their children into charter schools. The result is that the three charter schools were able to cherry pick their students and since many immigrant families had no clue how to apply to these charter schools. The charter schools have a low percentage of both English Language Learners and Special Education students.
The problem is that the charter schools require funding from the school district for tuition, food, and transportation costs for the 2,000 students enrolled. This is 27% of the 7,300 students enrolled in the Hempstead public schools and that takes a significant chunk out of the school district budget. This school year that is 44 million dollars and next year's projected budget it will rise to 55 million.
The result is that this school year Hempstead had to fire school staff, including teachers and next year the school district envisions more teacher layoffs as the charter schools expect an 11 million dollar increase in their budgets abd if the State does not issue a special grant for Hempstead, the school district will have to cut many programs. Newsday has a nice article about Hempstead schools.