Pennsylvania’s largest online charter school spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on dining, entertainment, retail purchases and vehicles, a public education advocacy group found in a review of two years’ worth of checks cut by Commonwealth Charter Academy.
Susan Spika, executive director of Education Voters PA, said Monday that the group’s findings show a need for greater accountability for cyber charter schools. She renewed the group’s call for a statewide cyber charter tuition rate to end disparity in the amounts school districts across Pennsylvania must pay for students who chose to attend one of the state’s 14 cyber charters.
Education Voters found spending that included a $4,000 sponsorship for The Hill Society, an exclusive Harrisburg social club where members “Celebrate the good stuff. Wine. Food. Whiskey,” according to the society’s marketing material. It also found the Harrisburg-based charter academy had purchased four new SUVs including a Ford Explorer ST, one of the model’s highest trim levels, for nearly $59,000.
“The property taxes that fund cyber charter schools are paid by retirees who don’t have enough money to buy medicine after they pay their property tax bills, they are paid by families that struggle to put the food on their tables for their children every month,” Spika said.
“These taxes are taken away from school districts, which account for every dollar they spend in public meetings,” Spika said, adding that public school districts are “underfunded by more than $4 billion and lack basic and essential resources that they need so that students can be successful.”
A spokesperson for CCA said Education Voters doesn’t represent the Pennsylvania voters who “overwhelmingly support school choice.”
“Ed Voters only speaks for traditional public education establishment organizations and self-serving public sector unions that want to weaken or eliminate proven school choice options for tens of thousands of families,” Timothy Eller, chief branding and government relations officer for CCA said in a statement to the Capital-Star.
Eller added that Education Voters misrepresented the information that it had received and is misleading the public with its report.
“The cherry-picked and isolated expenditures highlighted by Ed Voters for school-related travel expenses are well within what is customary for organizations of like size that have a statewide footprint. All schools and organizations, whether public or private, have travel expenses that are incurred for the benefit of their students and families,” Eller said in the statement.
With a $500 million budget, CCA is open to students living anywhere in Pennsylvania, enrolls more than 33,000 K-12 students and employs more than 2,400 staff.
Cyber charter schools generally have come under criticism in recent years for poor graduation rates and a lack of accountability for student performance.
In the previous session, the state House approved a bill with bipartisan support that would cap taxpayer-funded tuition for cyber charter schools at $8,000 per student and save an estimated $500 million a year in overpayments for school district coffers.
State Rep. Joe Ciresi (D-Montgomery), one of the bill’s prime sponsors, said he will re-introduce the legislation this year along with other cyber charter reform measures.
Those would include regulations for the use of artificial intelligence in cyber education and requirements for cyber charter schools to conduct health checks for students, Ciresi said.
“We’ve heard some horror stories, unfortunately, of things that have happened to some students because there’s no checking in on them,” Ciresi said, noting that a Chester County 12-year old whose father and stepmother are charged in her torture and murder was pulled from a in-person school and enrolled in a cyber charter. Investigators say there’s no indication either school failed to meet legal requirements to report abuse.
Ciresi added that he expects charter reform, including the tuition cap, to be part of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget address next week.
House Education Committee Chairperson Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh) said he’s hopeful that reform bills will be considered in the Senate this session. Schweyer said he respects the decisions of parents to do what is right for their children, but as a former teacher, he’s troubled by the performance of Pennsylvania charter schools.
“I think more and more legislators on both sides of the aisle are seeing that we’re not getting what we pay for,” Schweyer said.
Senate Education Committee Chairperson Lynda Schlegel Culver (R-Northumberland) told the Capital-Star in a statement that she anticipates a number of proposals on charter reform, particularly for cyber charter funding.
“This has been an ongoing issue for several years, and even prior to my chairmanship, an issue that my superintendents and school boards have expressed frustration over,” Culver said, noting that she has not seen the Education Voters report.
“But it is timely as we prepare to hear the governor’s budget address next Tuesday and then begin Senate Appropriations budget hearings later in February; and I look forward to reading the report to see exactly what has been identified, not only as problems but potential solutions for us to consider in the legislature,” Culver said
Spika said Education Voters filed requests for CCA’s check registers from 2021 to 2023. It focused on CCA because a member of the group had attended the organization’s monthly board meetings and saw expenditures “that didn’t seem right.” The group received check registers for May 2021 through June 2022 that were redacted to conceal to whom $2.2 million worth of checks were issued.
It received check registers for July 2022 through June 2023 where the names of “family mentors,” “student/caretakers,” and “staff” were redacted but the recipients of other checks were visible. Those included:
- 455 payments for dining totaling more than $116,000
- 193 payments for entertainment totaling nearly $405,000
- 51 payments to car dealerships and car washes totaling more than $584,000
- 276 payments to retailers for more than $406,000
- 92 payments that were totally redacted to conceal the recipient
- More than 2,600 payments to students’ families totaling more than $1 million
- And 766 payments to “staff” totaling nearly $750,000 that included a single payment of $94,500.
In addition to a $9,500 statewide cyber charter school tuition rate, Spika said Education Voters is calling for additional funding for the state Department of Education to hire staff dedicated to the process by which cyber schools renew their charters. Nine out of 14 cyber charters are operating with expired charters, according to the Department of Education. No school district should be required to pay tuition to a cyber school with an expired charter, Spika said.
“The state must immediately open a forensic audit of Commonwealth Charter Academy and potentially other cyber charter schools to determine whether these expenditures they’ve made have been in compliance with state law,” Spika said, adding that completing a forensic audit should also be a condition of renewing a cyber school charter.
The Pennsylvania Auditor General’s Office said in April that it is currently engaged in an audit of charter schools, including cyber charters, but a spokesperson said Monday that it has no timeframe for completion or release.
Finally, Spika said, the state must place a moratorium on new cyber school charters until all of those currently operating have valid charters.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source penncapital-star.com ’
