Savannah Balisalisa doesn’t want to leave her school.
The rising fifth-grader from Huntington Beach lights up when she talks about her classes.
“I feel really sad that we might have to move or something, and I don’t want to move,” she said. “I can learn a lot of new things at my school.”
Her mother, Natalie, said she enrolled Savannah in Cabrillo Point Academy during the pandemic after researching every option. She said she wanted something more flexible for her daughter’s early education, and Cabrillo, a charter school, offered that.
It’s what’s known as a nonclassroom-based charter school, where students learn from home or through customized programs that are state-funded instead of sitting in a traditional classroom. Today, Savannah learns through a blend of at-home instruction, enrichment courses taught by outside experts and part-time, in-person classes. Natalie Balisalisa said she works closely with a credentialed teacher to tailor Savannah’s learning.
Cabrillo, authorized by the Dehesa Elementary School District in San Diego, serves about 5,000 students, mostly in Orange County, according to Gina Garland, the school’s director of secondary education. It’s also one of several schools watching closely as California lawmakers weigh legislation that could reshape how charters operate.
A bill with high stakes
Assembly Bill 84, authored by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, would increase oversight of charter schools, especially nonclassroom-based programs such as Cabrillo. Negotiations are ongoing between Muratsuchi — who’s running for state superintendent of public instruction in 2026 — and Sen. Angelique Ashby, D-Sacramento, whose SB 414 offers a narrower alternative. Charter school advocates are backing Ashby’s version, saying it increases transparency without unnecessary red tape. Both lawmakers said they’re working toward a compromise during the Legislature’s summer recess, and that’s likely to result in one consolidated bill.
AB 84 proposes broad changes to how charter schools operate and are overseen in the state. It would place stricter audit requirements on charter schools, particularly nonclassroom-based schools, and calls for creating a new Office of the Education Inspector General, which, according to the Assembly Appropriations Committee, could cost the state anywhere from a few million to tens of millions of dollars each year.
Supporters of AB 84, including educational agencies and school unions, say the bill is necessary to crack down on fraud. Muratsuchi points to high-profile scandals in recent years involving hundreds of millions in state funding being misused or diverted.
“Assembly Bill 84 seeks to strengthen charter school oversight and accountability, to crack down on the documented cases of charter school fraud,” Muratsuchi said. “AB 84 is not an anti-charter school bill.”
But charter school supporters argue the bill overreaches. They warn it could end programs that help students who don’t thrive in traditional classrooms. One of their biggest concerns is a provision that would effectively eliminate public funding for enrichment activities unless they’re taught directly by credentialed teachers who are employees of the charter school.
Considered by some as a controversial practice, nonclassroom-based charters may provide students’ families with funding to pay private vendors for educational or enrichment activities, which can include horseback riding, ice skating or private music lessons.
But under the bill, “there would be no vendors, because anyone working with a student would need to be a credentialed teacher and an employee of the school,” said Lourdes Ornelas, a teacher at Cabrillo Point Academy.
That means families could lose access to supplemental courses taught by outside providers, such as engineers, marine biologists or art instructors — people who, while experts in their fields, aren’t credentialed classroom teachers.
“Vendors are misunderstood in the non-charter school world,” Garland said. “They’re small businesses or entrepreneurs. The problem is that under the bill, anybody we work with needs to be credentialed.”
When asked, Garland acknowledged Cabrillo was previously part of a charter network that state auditors raised questions about, but said the school has since restructured. The school had also previously allowed parents to use instructional funds for educational field trips to Disneyland and other theme parks, a practice it has since ended, she said. Supporters of AB 84 have repeatedly pointed to the Disneyland tickets as evidence for why tighter regulations are needed.
“We’ve done away with allowing people to buy Disneyland tickets. That is not allowed,” she said.
Ornelas said critics often overlook student success stories. She pointed to one Cabrillo student who graduated with an associate’s degree and went on to complete his final two years at UC San Diego.
“Our students all take standardized tests. They’re held to the same accountability,” she said. “They don’t emphasize the kids who go to UCSD, for example.”
Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Huntington Beach, said charter accountability shouldn’t come at the expense of fair treatment.
“Whenever you have bad actors, you need to hold those people accountable,” he said, adding, “there’s a lot of bad actors in the K-12 public school education as well.”
Growing pains
Charter schools are public schools, independently operated, but publicly funded. They were established in California in 1992 to offer innovative models for families seeking alternatives to neighborhood schools. Of California’s approximately 1,300 charters, roughly 300 are nonclassroom-based, either virtual, hybrid or home-based programs.
In Orange County, charter enrollment has grown more than 16% in the past three years, even as overall K-12 enrollment has declined. According to the Orange County Department of Education, charters now make up 6% of all students in the county. There are currently 44 charter schools in the county, with two more opening this fall.
Charter schools receive state funding based on average daily attendance, just like traditional public schools, but they are funded at lower rates.
At the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, state funding totals about $35 million annually, according to Greg Endelman, the school’s chief operating officer. But the school raised an additional $9 million in parent donations the past school year to support its arts programming, which Endelman says is a luxury many charter schools do not have. The school currently has about 2,280 students, making for about $19,200 per student between those two funding sources. In 2023-24 school year, state education data had per student funding at about $25,300 for Santa Ana Unified.
OCSA could be impacted by AB 84’s push for charters to adopt school district-style accounting systems, a shift that Endelman says could cost OCSA hundreds of thousands of dollars in retraining staff and adjusting operations.
“They would be charging us more money, creating a lot more regulation, a lot more mandates with no additional funds,” Endelman said.
“We’re currently ranked the No. 6 best overall high school in the state of California, No. 1 charter high school in the state of California. We’re overseen by the county Department of Education. Our books are independently audited,” he added. “My honest opinion is they’re trying to kill competition and innovation and limit choice for families.”
Nicole Piper, a teacher with California Virtual Academies and a member of the California Teachers Association, said she supports AB 84 and wants to see some of the stronger provisions that were removed during negotiations restored, including a requirement that charter school administrators hold an administrative credential.
But that would create major challenges for OCSA, said Endelman, where many of the school’s arts directors are working professional artists who don’t have credentials.
“To tell them that they would have to go back to school to get an administrative credential just to continue overseeing our arts programs would be a giant problem for us. We have 21 conservatory directors,” he said.
Eric Premack, executive director of the Charter Schools Development Center and one of the original drafters of California’s 1992 charter law, called charter schools a political target.
“There’s been an ongoing effort to rein in charter schools politically,” Premack said. “The chartering concept is very powerful, and it is very threatening to the established interests in the traditional public school system.”
Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine, one of the handful of Democrats who voted against AB 84, cited the impact on her constituents. It passed the Assembly last month.
“I had more people reach out about this bill, come to my office, write letters, write emails, more constituents in opposition to this than any other bill this legislative session,” she said. “My concerns really are rooted in the fact that every additional dollar that is spent on administrative bureaucracy is a dollar taken out of the classroom.”
“Whether we’re talking about charter schools or any other industry, there are always a few bad actors,” she went on. “But we’ve got to ensure that the regulations we develop prohibit the bad actors, but don’t penalize good actors.”
Dr. Michael Kirst, the longest-serving president of the California State Board of Education and Gov. Jerry Brown’s education secretary, said charter schools, in most cases, “are much more accountable than public schools.”
“They have to have charters renewed every five years. And if they don’t improve test scores and performance, then they’re not renewed, and that’s a requirement,” he said.
Still, Kirst believes the fraud cases have been egregious enough to warrant stronger oversight, he said. ‘”These scandals are so bad that my reaction to that is that the charters just may have to eat that.”
Back in Huntington Beach, Natalie Balisalisa said she’s trying to focus on the upcoming school year, but said she’s feeling anxious watching AB 84 move forward. The legislation passed out of the Senate Education Committee on July 16.
“Each year has been more beneficial, more advanced for her,” she said. “If we lose this flexibility, I just don’t know what we’ll do.”