VAO Collaborative · Funding Analysis
Pick the charter school that holds the code. Everything else fills in — its funded counts, its district’s factors, its hold-harmless basis, its mill levy rate. Then the partner program enters four numbers and the tool prices what its students add to the Local Education Provider’s total program, which is what passes through. Same reconciled FY27 engine as the What’s My Funding? School Check. Export a live-formula workbook when the terms are settled.
The hold-harmless floor is last year’s total program plus one per cent. A provider funded below what that floor guarantees receives the floor, and new students bring in no PPR until the formula climbs back above it. The floor covers total program only. Mill levy equalization is a separate state appropriation, so it keeps flowing on the program’s funded pupils even while PPR is frozen.
| FY26-27 October FTE | ||
| FY25-26 | ||
| FY24-25 | ||
| FY23-24 | ||
| FY22-23 |
| Funded FTE — new formula | funds base, COL, size, locale | |
| Funded FTE — 1994 formula | often differs from the new-formula count | |
| Membership (headcount) | denominator for the at-risk share | |
| At-risk | ||
| ELL | ||
| SPED | ||
| FY25-26 Total Program | sets the hold-harmless floor |
Starts at 100 students with the district’s own at-risk, ELL and special education rates applied. Overwrite any of it — these are identified headcounts, not rates, and a part-time student counts once, in full.
| Beginning of year | Finalized October | |
|---|---|---|
| Headcount | ||
| Funded FTE | ||
| At-risk | ||
| ELL | ||
| SPED |
| MLE per-pupil rate | ||
| Administrative fee (%) | off the program’s PPR, not its MLE. 3% at CSI; 5% assumed elsewhere | |
| CDE fee (%) | a CSI charge; zero for district-authorized | |
| portion of year (%) | ||
| MOU benefit to the provider | negotiated; splits FY27 / FY28 | |
| Capital construction per pupil | assumed | |
| READ Act per pupil | assumed | |
| READ-eligible, mid-year | ||
| Installments | Sep–Jun | |
| before true-up | ||
| after true-up |
Both legs, run twice. The difference column is what the program’s students move. Where a threshold flips, the difference is not a per-pupil rate and cannot be extrapolated.
| Beginning of year | Finalized |
|---|
| Month | Rate | Payment | Cumulative |
|---|
The program’s share is priced marginally: the two-leg formula runs once for the provider alone and once for the provider plus the program, and the difference passes through. That is what both existing VAO pass-through workbooks do. It is not the same as paying the provider’s average per-pupil rate, which runs higher wherever the provider’s own demographics are richer than the program’s.
Funded FTE for a home-school-enrichment program is half of headcount. The at-risk, ELL and SPED figures are identified headcounts — a part-time pupil counts once, in full, per CDE’s at-risk and ELL guidance. Do not convert them to a rate times FTE.
The MLE rate is the FY26 basis: certified override mills times net assessed value, divided by the district’s funded count. No FY27 rate has been published. Durango is an exception — the district reports an actual shared amount rather than the mill calculation. District-authorized providers have no published rate at all, and the field is left blank on purpose.
For providers seeded from CDE’s Charter Pass-Through Model rather than CSI’s estimates, the baseline carries the defects VAO has documented in that workbook. Those figures are indicative and should not be used as a distribution basis without checking against the district’s own calculation.
The provider block is editable. Enter a negative enrollment change to model a school that is shrinking — every count scales, but the FY25-26 total program does not, because that year already happened. That asymmetry is the whole mechanism: a provider losing students moves toward its hold-harmless floor, and once it is on the floor an added program generates nothing until the formula climbs back. The hold-harmless panel shows exactly where a provider stands and how many students it takes to get off the floor.
“New or unlisted school” models a provider that is not on the roster: pick its district, choose whose factors apply, and enter the counts. Nothing in that mode reconciles to a published estimate, and the exported workbook says so on its face.
The operator list is the CSI application roster with each applicant’s reported headcount. Picking one sets the program name and size; the demographic mix still mirrors the district until you overwrite it, because the applications do not carry at-risk or ELL counts. Two applicants have no headcount on file.
Picking a provider fills the program block with a hundred students carrying that district’s own at-risk, ELL and special-education rates. That is a neutral starting assumption, not a forecast — district rates range from 15 per cent at-risk in Douglas County to 84 per cent in Aurora 28J, and which end a provider sits at drives more of the per-student figure than anything about the provider itself. Overwrite the counts with a real roster as soon as you have one.
The contract flag marks the nineteen providers already able to run home-school enrichment under their current charter, as of 25 August 2026. The other thirty-eight can still be modelled, but a charter amendment has to be approved first and the approval timeline decides the launch year. The flag is a contract fact, not a funding one — it comes from VAO’s record rather than from CSI’s estimates file, and it needs re-checking whenever a contract is amended.
Capital construction and the READ Act rate are assumptions, labelled as such. The MOU benefit is a negotiated term with no default that means anything.
VAO Collaborative · FY27 engine reconciled against CSI’s published estimates for all 49 CSI-authorized schools, verified 21 August 2026. Exported workbooks recalculate to the same figures with zero formula errors.