Week Twenty-Six: Axe throwing, pottery parties, and more.

Commonwealth Charter Academy touts thousands of field trips as a benefit it offers to families who enroll their children in the cyber school.

 We obtained the “Field Trip Payment Information” document for the 2024-2025 school year from CCA through a Right-to-Know request that shows CCA paid:

 Up to $60.00 per month for a student’s field trips (2 x $30.00)

Up to $120.00 per month for 2 caregivers’ field trips (2 x $60.00)

 We wanted to learn more about these field trips. However, there is not an easily-accessible, public listing of field trips or a record of how much CCA spends on these. We decided to do a quick search of public Facebook posts to see what we could find and filed a Right-to-Know request based on this information.

 Our work uncovered a tiny window into the kind of field trips that CCA has paid for including:

• Adult range time at High Times Archery

• Make and take events at Board and Brush

• Private axe throwing at the Fraxure Factory

• Ice cream socials and pottery making at Centered Earth

• Admissions and food at Urban Air Adventure Park, including events booked as birthday parties

Week Twenty-Five: $444 Per Student On Marketing For One School

This week’s Waste of the Week takes us back to REACH Cyber Charter School, where the price tag for digital media buys, TV advertising, and video shoots for the 2024-2025 school year totaled an astonishing $2,733,610.00 – all paid to one company, Crane Communications.

To put this in perspective, according to the Future Ready PA Index, REACH enrolls 6152 students which means they are spending an eye-popping $444 per student on advertising.

These are millions of public education dollars siphoned out of Pennsylvania classrooms for another year and put into marketing budgets to recruit more students, not to improve instruction or support the kids already enrolled.

And here’s the kicker: this figure doesn’t even touch the 118 pages of gift card receipts for places like Target, Walmart, and Domino’s Pizza that REACH is also spending taxpayer money on. We’ll be digging into those shortly.

Week Twenty-Four: A dive into CCA’s board packet

Commonwealth Charter Academy, Pennsylvania’s largest cyber charter school, has nine board board meetings each year that are held in Harrisburg and open to the public to attend in person or via Zoom. These are held at 9:00 am on a weekday. Meeting links are not publicly posted. Anyone who would like to attend via Zoom must notify school staff by no later than 5:00 pm the night before the meeting to receive a link.

Prior to August, if someone requested all public information that would be provided to the CCA board for the meeting, CCA provided this information.

However, in August, CCA notified a PennLive reporter that detailed information about expenditures (the check register) would be available only after the board meeting and through the Right-to-Know request process. This leaves any member of the public attending a CCA board meeting with incomplete information about the spending the board approves.

To create additional transparency for spending in the cyber charter sector, we will begin posting CCA’s board packets that we obtain through Right-to-Know requests each month. We do not have the bandwidth to carefully analyze what is in the packets, but invite anyone who is interested to take a deep dive!

Week Twenty-Three: A Staggering Increase In Cyber Charter Fund Balances

As the budget impasse drags on, the state has missed $1.75 billion in payments to school districts. Some school districts are drawing money out of their fund balances (savings accounts) to pay their bills. Districts that lack adequate fund balances must borrow from banks and take out lines of credit to pay their bills. These districts will pay untold millions of dollars in bank fees and interest payments and be forced to reduce the opportunities they provide to students.

Charter and cyber charter schools, on the other hand, are not seeing any interruption in their funding. School districts are required to pay tuition to charter schools whether or not the state budget has been passed.

Given this context, we thought it appropriate to focus our Waste of the Week on a Research for Action report from June titled, “Growing Per Pupil Fund Balances in Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools,” which documents a truly staggering growth in funding that cyber charters are packing into their fund balances.

RFA found that in the 2023-2024 school year, cyber charter school per-pupil fund balances averaged $10,132 per student, more than twice the school district fund balance of $4,869 per student.

Week Twenty-Two: PA Virtual

Lawmakers told us last year that the accountability measures and funding reforms they passed would finally fix cyber charter waste. They asked us to “wait and see” what this year’s numbers looked like.

Well, we’ve waited. And after receiving our first batch of invoices detailing expenditures for marketing and promotion for the 2024/25 school year for PA Virtual Cyber School, here’s what we see:

2022/23: $720,163.78

2023/24: $790,438.21

2024/25: $764,288.58

The numbers haven’t changed. PA Virtual Cyber School is still spending three-quarters of a million dollars every year on advertising and promotions, including theme park, sports, and zoo sponsorships, plus thousands on Google and Facebook ads.

This is not accountability. This is business as usual.

Week Seventeen to Twenty-One: Cyber Charter “Report Cards”

Central PA Digital Learning Foundation

PA Distance Charter School