Charter schools received $100 million more in special education funding than they spent on providing those services to students with special needs in 2014-15, and on average that year, outspent school districts on chief administrator salaries by $87 on a per-student basis, according to a report released on Thursday.

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Fayfich said his organization supports forming a commission to study the issue of charter school funding and having the same special education funding formula for charters that now exists for school districts. That formula distributes resources based on a three-tiered system of funding that takes into account the cost of providing services to special education students.

But the way the legislation was written it applied this formula to only new state funding for special education dollars that school districts received, starting in 2014, whereas for charters, it would have applied to their existing and new special education dollars.

"What this meant was that, regardless of the tier, a student with the same challenges would receive significantly less special education funding if attending a charter school than attending a district school. Not only is that unfair, but it is discriminatory," Fayfich said. "Charters support actions that are applied equally to them as to the districts but will oppose legislation that discriminates against children merely because of the type of public education they have chosen."