The California Legislature's June 2026 budget proposal added roughly $2 billion more for TK-12 schools than Governor Newsom's May Revise, including a one-time $5 billion discretionary block grant that will flow to charter schools on the same basis as district schools, since charters are LEAs under California law. For charter directors, this is the single largest "what should we spend it on" decision of the fiscal year. The window to influence how that money lands closes in roughly two weeks, when the Legislature and Governor finalize amendments to the budget already passed June 15, before the July 1 start of the fiscal year. If you run intervention programs, special education, or English learner services at a California charter, the answer to "what should we do with this money" is being negotiated right now, and your partner schools are already making decisions you may want to match.
The Legislature's June 15 budget does several things that matter for charter school leaders. It produces roughly $2 billion more for TK-12 than Newsom's May Revise on the strength of higher revenue forecasts. It increases the per-pupil special education appropriation, moving California closer to actual service cost. And the headline item is a one-time $5 billion discretionary block grant to be distributed to local educational agencies on a Prop 98 basis. EdSource's June 16 coverage of the Legislature's budget makes clear that districts and charter schools can spend the block grant however they want, meaning California's roughly 1,300 charter schools will receive a per-ADA share alongside traditional districts as LEAs under California law.
Discretionary, in this context, means no statutory spending categories are attached. Schools can use the money for intervention, capital, technology, staff retention bonuses, or general fund stabilization. The flexibility is real. So is the audit risk.
If you are a charter director or CBO reading this, your board is going to ask you two questions at the next meeting. How much did we receive, and what are we doing with it. The first question has a clean answer (ADA times the per-pupil distribution rate the State Board sets). The second is where charters tend to make decisions they regret. Discretionary one-time money is a known governance hazard. It is easy to spend on items that feel productive in the moment and impossible to defend two years later when the auditor or your authorizer asks what measurable improvement the dollars produced.
For special programs coordinators, this matters in a different way. The same budget bill also raises special education funding. If your charter has been carrying special ed services out of the general fund because the state allocation did not cover actual service costs, this is a rare year where you may be able to fund a real intervention layer without that decision pulling against teacher salaries.
When was the last time your board approved a spending plan tied to a specific student outcome target rather than to a line-item category?
The track record of one-time discretionary money in K-12 is not encouraging. The federal ESSER funds distributed during the pandemic offer the clearest recent case. Analysis by FutureEd of district ESSER spending found that the largest share of those dollars went to staff retention bonuses, facilities, and technology, and that the share spent on academic recovery interventions was smaller than initial guidance had projected. Where dollars were tied to specific evidence-based interventions like high-impact tutoring delivered at the dosage research supports, results matched the literature. Where dollars were spent without a measurement framework, districts could not produce outcome data when the federal government asked for results.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) defines four tiers of evidence for academic interventions, from Tier 1 (strong) through Tier 4 (demonstrates a rationale), and that framework is what the U.S. Department of Education uses to evaluate whether a spending decision was defensible. For California charter directors, the rule of thumb that has emerged from the ESSER post-mortem is straightforward: if you cannot map a spending category to an ESSA tier and a measurable outcome, the auditor cannot defend it for you. The discretionary block grant comes with the same risk profile, with one important difference. There is no federal Office of Inspector General waiting in the wings, but your authorizer is. In our experience, authorizer-level scrutiny of charter spending decisions has tightened in recent years, and we expect that trend to continue.
The interventions with the strongest evidence base for the discretionary buckets charters are weighing include high-impact tutoring (Tier 1 ESSA evidence), MTSS-aligned Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction, structured literacy programming for elementary readers, and targeted support for long-term English learners. The common thread is dosage and design. The interventions that move data are the ones delivered consistently, by trained instructors, at frequencies the research supports, and measured against a baseline assessment the school already trusts. Stanford education researcher Susanna Loeb has documented that high-impact tutoring delivered at three or more sessions per week produces effect sizes among the largest in the K-12 intervention literature. NWEA MAP and CAASPP interim assessments, alongside ELPAC for English learners, are the measurement frames most California charters have already invested in. Spending decisions that connect to those existing frames are the ones that survive a board review.
Where in your current intervention model does the ESSA tier evidence actually live, and would your authorizer be able to find it?
A+ Tutoring works with California charter schools on Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention contracts, and the conversations we are having with partner directors in the last two weeks have all landed on the same four priorities. Partner schools are prioritizing a defensible intervention layer for the students furthest from grade level, expanded special education service capacity that the higher state allocation now makes affordable, measurement-and-reporting infrastructure that demonstrates outcomes back to the authorizer at the next renewal cycle, and staff retention investments in the instructors carrying those intervention caseloads.
We have evidence those priorities work. In our iLEAD AV Math Tier 3 partnership, the 2024-25 cohort showed 75% of students (9 of 12) reaching MAP growth benchmarks, and the ELA Tier 3 cohort showed 87.5% (7 of 8) reaching benchmark, with the combined Tier 3 cohort showing 80% (16 of 20) at growth. Math Tier 3 students averaged +18.7 RIT and +20.8 percentile points of growth across the year, and ELA Tier 3 students averaged +20.1 RIT and +17.8 percentile points. The block grant gives charter directors a rare chance to fund this kind of intervention layer without pulling against the general fund.
Five steps to take before the negotiation window closes:
A+ Tutoring is a California K-12 virtual intervention provider serving charter schools across the state with Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction in math, literacy, and English learner reclassification. A+ partner schools have shown 75% of Math Tier 3 students reaching growth benchmarks, 87.5% in ELA Tier 3, and 80% in the combined Tier 3 cohort, with average gains of +18.7 RIT in Math and +20.1 RIT in ELA.
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