Week Thirty: A Waterpark Retreat on the Taxpayer’s Dime

Pennsylvania taxpayers spent more than half a million dollars on the Insight PA Cyber Charter School three-day back-to-school staff orientation at Kalahari Resorts & Conventions — a luxury resort and indoor water park in the Poconos.

Any Insight PA Cyber Charter staff member wishing to attend received a hotel room for four, with four complimentary waterpark wristbands per room included — plus the option to bring additional guests at a discounted rate. 

And Pennsylvania taxpayers footed the bill for this entire event.

Click HERE for the Insight PA Cyber Charter slide deck with details about the event. 

We understand that cyber charter schools do not have a school auditorium where they can gather staff for their beginning-of-the-year professional development. We also acknowledge that venues that can accommodate hundreds of people are not plentiful, so it could make sense for Insight PA Cyber Charter School to hold their event at the Kalahari. 

What we question here is the use of Pennsylvanians’ education tax dollars being used to fund what amounts to a water park vacation for the families of a cyber charter’s entire staff.

We filed multiple Right-to-Know requests, and the documents we received were eye opening.

• The response to our request for an invoice shows $576,286 for approximately 500 double queen sofa rooms for three nights plus event fees.  (The RTK officer stated that this is the only receipt in the school’s possession).

• This contract for the event, which was handled by a travel agency in Spain, documents the terms of this agreement. 

• In addition to free rooms, water passes, breakfast, and lunch, employees received up to $38.00 in reimbursements for their dinner expenses on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday which totals nearly $60,000 if the 509 employees who registered to attend the event took the full amount.  

• We do not have documentation of substantial travel costs/reimbursements for employees, including charter buses, Ubers to charter bus pick-up locations, airfare and mileage reimbursement.

Let’s be clear:  Professional development is important for teachers. But this event was not just professional development. This was a taxpayer-funded vacation for cyber charter staff and their families.

Week Twenty-Nine: Supporting the shareholders of for-profit management companies

When we filed the Right-to-Know request for advertising and marketing costs for Insight PA Cyber Charter School, we received a response that included:

• Invoices totalling about $225,000 for public affairs consulting and enrollment marketing services, and
  

• $873,833 documented on invoices paid to the for-profit management company, K12, Inc (also known as Stride Learning) as a $250 per student fee for “Marketing, Communications and Community Services.”  

Under Pennsylvania law, cyber charter schools must be nonprofit entities. However, they are legally allowed to contract with for-profit management companies whose primary purpose is to create profits for shareholders. 

This means that the property taxes that Pennsylvanians pay to their local school districts end up in the pockets of shareholders across the globe.  

And K12, Inc/Stride Learning certainly generates a profit.

Because K12, Inc/Stride Learning is private, we have no way of learning how much of the  funding Insight PA Cyber Charter School pays them is spent supporting the education of students versus how much is siphoned into profit.

We do know that with a four-year graduation rate of just 71% and just 4.4% of students proficient in math, Insight PA Cyber Charter School is failing to ensure that their students gain the knowledge and skills they will need to graduate and succeed in the workforce or in their pursuit of further education. 

Week Twenty-Eight: So much waste, we had to split into two pages! 

We now have so many WOW updates that we had to split them into two pages to keep from crashing our website. Click below to see each set of waste.

Click below to see our first round of Waste of the Week updates! 

Week Twenty-Seven: $504 per day on Facebook Ads.

We’re back with another Waste of the Week and this week we’re questioning how a cyber charter school could spend $504.00 per day on Facebook (Meta) advertising.

That’s right; Pennsylvania Distance Learning Charter School spent $185,358.03 on Facebook ads last year. We have 147 pages of invoices – the equivalent of $504 every single day in taxpayer dollars.

With that much money being funneled into Facebook ads, you have to wonder – is PA Distance more concerned with boosting impressions online or improving education for its students?

While public schools across Pennsylvania are cutting programs and struggling to fill teaching positions, PA Distance is funneling thousands of public education dollars into social media ads designed to recruit more students – and therefore, more tuition revenue.

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