Washington, DC - The U.S. Department of Education has announced grant awards totaling more than $14 million to three organizations working across the country to help public charter schools obtain facilities under the Credit Enhancement for Charter Schools Facilities Program (Credit Enhancement). Today’s grant awards are to Boston Community Loan Fund, Inc., Charter Schools Development Corporation, and the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency (MassDevelopment).
“Education innovation is about empowering local leaders who are finding new and better ways to help students succeed,” said Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Nadya Chinoy Dabby. “The Credit Enhancement program does just that by ensuring that our partners can secure the resources they need to create safe and healthy learning environments where all children can thrive.”
The Credit Enhancement program enables public charter schools to obtain school facilities and targets its funds to schools focused on high-need students. Through an innovative credit enhancement mechanism, grantees can leverage a relatively small amount of federal funds to access much greater funding for charter school facilities. From 2002–2013, the Department awarded 34 grants totaling approximately $256 million under this program—which were then leveraged to obtain $3.6 billion in total financing for more than 500 charter school facilities. Grant funds help public charter schools construct and renovate school facilities, guarantee and insure leases for property, and identify potential lending sources for charter school facilities.
The 2015 Credit Enhancement grantees and amounts are listed below:
- Boston Community Loan Fund, Inc. received a new award for $8 million;
- Charter Schools Development Corporation received a new award for $5 million; and
- MassDevelopment, a current Credit Enhancement grantee, received a supplemental award of $1,069,608.
To learn more about this program, please visit the Credit Enhancement Web page.
