Cyber charter schools are aggressively hunting for students to fill their schools and their bank accounts and they are using your tax dollars to do it.
What they aren’t telling parents is that EVERY. SINGLE. CYBER. CHARTER. is on the list of the worst schools in the state.
Hundreds of ads are running to recruit students for the fall semester – enticing children from high-performing schools by preying on parents’ fears.
And every single ad is paid for by hard-earned school tax dollars that were supposed to be spent educating students.
While school districts are preparing for mass layoffs and catastrophic cuts in programs and services as a result of the COVID-19 economic downturn, cyber charter schools are laughing all the way to the bank. Despite the economic downturn, they will get huge tuition increases next year thanks to Pennsylvania’s outdated charter school law. Awash in taxpayer funding, they can afford to waste millions of dollars on advertising.
Click here to tell your state lawmaker to eliminate excess payments to charter schools.
Charter schools spend school funding on billboards, TV commercials, internet ads, and expensive mailing pieces. And public relations firms, lobbyists, and the CEOS and shareholders of private management companies that work with charter schools rake in millions of taxpayer dollars each year.
This is wrong and it is time for lawmakers to finally end the excessive profiteering that is occurring in the charter sector.
Click HERE to send a letter to your state lawmakers.
Ask your state lawmakers to:
1. Cap cyber charter tuition at the actual cost of educating students at home on a computer.
2. Apply the special education funding formula to all charter schools to eliminate the profit that charters reap off of students with disabilities.
Eliminating excess payments to charter schools would save school districts more than $200 million each year, help prevent mass teacher layoffs, and save vital programs and services for students.
As we reported earlier, in 2018 Commonwealth Charter Academy received so much excess funding from school districts that they had $7.9 million in surplus funding to spend on advertising, including $850,000 in a three-month period on a single student recruitment campaign. Other cyber charters engage in the same practices.