Public school districts recognize that some families will always prefer cyber charter schools to their brick-and-mortar environment, but the 60,000 students who have chosen online coursework come with a price tag for their home districts.
For Carlisle, it's nearly $4 million.
"It is a losing situation," said Stephanie Douglas, the district's director of digital learning. "We lose control, we're out the money, and that child is not getting the support services that they need."
Cyber charter schools, which are statewide public schools approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, are funded not by the state but by students' local school districts.
A formula in state law factors in a district's finances and enrollments. Thus, the money taken from districts is essentially based on each's per-pupil spending.
Generally, a higher-spending district pays a higher rate to cyber charters, and vice versa. The payments range from roughly $8,000 to $26,000 per student — depending on the district — according to the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
For students with disabilities, separate payments use a district's base rate plus a flat percentage for its overall disability services.
"It's irrational," said University of Washington assistant professor Matthew Kelly, an expert in how states fund education. He said Pennsylvania doesn't base cyber charter funding on how much money the charter will spend on the student or how much a district saves by not teaching them.
School districts have more "stranded costs" than cyber charters, he said, like facilities, lunches, sports and transportation.
Imagine a fourth-grade classroom of 25 students, and one leaves for a cyber charter. When that student leaves, the district pays the cyber charter tuition but doesn't actually save much.
"That district can't pay that fourth-grade teacher 1/25th less any longer, right?" Kelly said. "And that district can't spend 1/25th less on electricity for that fourth-grade classroom."
The Pennsylvania School Boards Association tracks the money that school districts lose to cyber charter schools. It found that districts statewide paid out nearly $1.1 billion in the 2022-23 school year, the latest year it has data for all districts.
Cumberland County's nine school districts paid out more than $24 million.
"Let's get a flat, statewide rate that's more reflective of what it actually costs to provide a cyber charter education," said Larry Feinberg, director of the association's Keystone Center for Charter Change.
"Right now, the excess that they're getting, it's being used for things like advertising, buying buildings," Feinberg said. "And it's tax dollars. You're paying for it."
Ninety-two percent of Agora Cyber Charter School's funding, in a budget of about $100 million, comes from school districts, CEO Rich Jensen said. The rest comes from the federal government.
Commonwealth Charter Academy — home to nearly four in 10 Pennsylvania cyber charter students — gets 97 percent of its $460 million budget from school districts, said Tim Eller, chief branding and government relations officer.
RURAL DISTRICTS AFFECTED MOST
Cyber charter schools had fewer than 40,000 students before the COVID-19 pandemic but then jumped to around 60,000 and have mostly stayed level.
The jump in enrollments exerted "acute financial pressure on rural school districts," especially, a Penn State University study found last year, and it's hurting their ability to serve in-person students.
Rural district leaders told the authors, which included Washington's Kelly, that the situation "has reached crisis proportions," said co-author Karen Eppley, a Penn State associate teaching professor of education.
"Even losing just a few dozen students to a charter school can move a district towards considering closing or consolidating schools," Eppley said, "particularly when a district is already experiencing enrollment declines and budget shortfalls."
The study also found 47 rural districts were financially strained more than the rest. They include Big Spring in Cumberland County and several others in Perry and Dauphin counties.
Rural districts tend to be affected more because their smaller budgets give leaders less room to make up for those stranded costs that Kelly mentioned earlier: classrooms, buses, sports teams, etc.
"You have fewer options to try to deal with a really difficult situation," Kelly said.
Big Spring's budget, for example, is about two-thirds the size of less-rural Carlisle's, and Big Spring has fewer students in cyber charters: 184 versus 252. But last school year, Big Spring paid more to cyber charters than Carlisle: $4,085,854 compared to $3,985,680.
"The funding formula has been frustrating for everybody," Big Spring Superintendent Nicholas Guarente said.
Agora's Jensen argues that cybers have similar expenses to a district, including teacher salaries and paying into teachers' state retirement system (called PSERS).
Also, the same research that finds flaws in the funding model also finds cyber charter parents are happy with the schools. Parents surveyed in the Penn State study said they like that their children get more individualized attention, flexibility and control over curriculum.
"We need the funding that we're receiving to make sure that we're providing the services and the supports that our families and our students need," Jensen said.
FUNDING CHANGES COME NEXT YEAR
Guarente doesn't wallow in the losses, however.
The Big Spring students who have gone to cyber charters are not "lost," he said. Instead, the "responsible" thing to do is to reflect on how the district can improve.
"If those students want to come back because we've improved the educational system, that's a win-win," Guarente said. "But we want students to go where they're going to be best served."
Many school districts have beefed up their own online offerings in recent years, especially after some families left for cyber charters after being unsatisfied with districts' cyber platforms during the pandemic.
While Carlisle administrators argue their in-house option offers a more comprehensive experience than cyber charters, it also costs the district less.
Carlisle pays nearly $16,000 per student to cyber charters. But to educate the students in its Carlisle Virtual Academy, the district only spends $6,000-$7,000 per elementary student and $2,500-$3,000 per secondary student, Superintendent Colleen Friend said.
"I think frustrating is a very fair description of the situation," Friend said. "We want to keep everybody. We think we have a stellar program."
School districts will soon get some help from the latest state budget. Starting in January, districts will be partially reimbursed for their cyber charter payments from a $100 million pool of money. The special-needs-student formula also changed, which is estimated to save districts about $34 million next fiscal year.
Pennsylvania's school boards association estimates Cumberland County districts will save about $2.2 million in total next school year from the payment reimbursements and less than $500,000 from the special education change.
"Our state took a baby step this year to start to rectify things," Friend said, "but there's a lot of work that needs to be done. A lot of work."
Kelly thinks payment rates should be based on how much cyber charters are actually spending and the little that school districts are actually saving.
His study with Eppley also suggests cyber charters should spend special education money solely on special education, which isn't required now.
Friend wants districts' payments to be capped, to be reflective of the cost to educate the child, and to not depend on what district the child is from.
The tweaks this year were "the first real changes" to Pennsylvania's charter school laws in over 20 years, Feinberg said. School districts have been pushing so hard that they became harder to ignore, he said.
But lots of change takes lots of time. The first step is for elected officials to realize lasting change is possible, Kelly said.
"It doesn't have to be this way," he said. "The structure of charter school funding in Pennsylvania is just particularly problematic in that there are ways to fix it. This is an issue that can and should be solved."
©2024 The Sentinel (Carlisle, Pa.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
