By BARRETT NEWKIRK

The charter school set to open this fall will likely create a noticeable enrollment decline at Anderson Community Schools and cut into public dollars given to the school system.

The Anderson Preparatory Academy, the first charter school planned for Madison County, has received about 160 applications, executive director Robert Guillaume said. Almost all of the applicants, 95 percent, live in Anderson and about 70 percent attend public schools.

“We feel that we are a go at this point,” Guillaume said. “We have an optimal number that we feel very confident in reaching, and that’s somewhere between that number (160) and 200.”

The Anderson Preparatory Academy is a public school governed by a charter from Ball State University and open to all Indiana students. Its goal, according to Guillaume, is to offer a casual military-style setting and a curriculum focused on leadership skills and community service.

It is scheduled to begin classes Aug. 4 for grades six, seven and eight and then add one grade each year through grade 12. Guillaume said applications for incoming sixth-graders are outnumbering other grades.

The final grade distribution of students leaving Anderson’s three middle schools will determine the charter school’s impact on Anderson’s public classrooms, ACS Superintendent Mikella Lowe said.

“A hundred students out of middle school is a lot for us,” she said. “But if it’s only 33 at each school, while that’s a lot, we probably can’t reduce staff.”

Lowe said the school corporation likely loses students to public schools and other charter schools every year, but a new school within the district’s boundaries is going to have a much more measurable impact.

If not this fall, staff reductions or a form of light redistricting that moves some grade levels to other schools may help Anderson schools deal with a more rapid decline in enrollment, she said.

And for each student the school system loses to the Anderson Preparatory Academy, it also loses funding for that student.

“Charter schools get the funds for the students they are serving,” said Kimb Stewart, a charter school specialist with the Indiana Department of Education.

Funding sources for charter schools are “not all that different from traditional school corporations,” Stewart said, with the biggest difference being that charter schools receive no tax funds for transportation or building projects.

But because of the way Indiana distributes money for education, local public schools will continue to receive transportation and capital project dollars for the students who leave for the charter school, Guillaume said.