As budget season in the Pennsylvania legislature turns its attention toward public school funding, a new report shows that the state’s cyber charter schools spent nearly $17 million in advertising and promotion alone in the last year.

Education Voters of PA, a project of the Keystone Research Center, filed Right to Know requests with Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools seeking all invoices for advertising, marketing, and promotions, including invoices for communications firms and third-party vendors contracted to do this work for the 2021-2022 school year. The group also asked for information about gift cards, cash payments, parties, and events.

What it found in nearly 3,000 pages of invoices and multiple spreadsheets of transactions was what it called a waste of more than $16.8 million in a single year on advertising and promotion.

Why is this important? Charter schools, organized as public, nonprofit corporations, do not charge students tuition – they receive the majority of funding from their students’ resident school districts. The amount a charter school receives is based upon a statutory funding formula, which requires tuition rates for both nonspecial and special education students.

In 2021-2022, school districts sent nearly $1 billion in tuition payments to cyber charter schools. It costs the Lower Merion School District in Montgomery County $22,608 for each nonspecial student and over $60K for each special education student. Manheim Township School District in Lancaster County has spent $1.8 million in the past year alone. Because there is no state reimbursement for these costs, cyber charter tuition payments are funded primarily by property taxes.

The Pennsylvania Association for School Business Officials found that local tax revenue increases were eclipsed by increases in cyber charter tuition payments alone and thus never reached students in PA’s school district classrooms.

Schools that operate under a charter are divided into three general categories—charter schools, regional charter schools, and cyber charter schools.

Charter schools are exempt from many educational mandates. Some of the mandates that charter schools are not exempt from include health and safety, special education, civil rights, student accountability, employee criminal history checks, open meetings, freedom of information requirements, generally accepted accounting principles, and certain provisions of the Pennsylvania School Code.

A cyber charter school is an independent public school established and operated under a charter from the Pennsylvania Department of Education and in which the school uses technology in order to provide a significant portion of curriculum and to deliver a significant portion of instruction to its students through the internet.

The actual cost to operate a cyber charter school is estimated to be 25-30 percent less than the cost to operate a brick & mortar charter school. However, Pennsylvania law requires school districts to pay per pupil tuition to cyber charter schools at the same rates paid to brick & mortar charter schools.

Education Voters of PA cited a number of examples of what they are referring to a waste of their property tax dollars.

The Commonwealth Charter Academy spent $3.4 million on advertising in a three-month period from January-March 2022, while also spending more than $150,000 on Major League Baseball tickets, catering, parking and other parties.

PA Cyber Charter School spent $58,000 on swag, including $9,725 on owl-shaped erasers, $6,750 on custom lapel pins, $8,678 on branded Post-It notes, and $18,120 on branded magnets, while also purchasing high-end hoodies, embroidered cardigans, and track jackets.

The PA Virtual Charter School allocated $132,404 on bus wraps and other transit advertising, as well as $28,807 on sponsorships of minor league baseball teams.

Reach Cyber Charter School spent $125,308 on Target gift cards for students. And Insight Cyber Charter School spent $959,053 on a contract for undisclosed services with for-profit management company K-12, Inc.

The governing school boards of 432 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts have passed resolutions calling on the General Assembly “to meaningfully revise the existing flawed charter school funding systems” including overpayments to cyber charter schools.

There are at least 10 bills under consideration by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and another four in the State Senate on cyber charter schools.

State lawmakers could end the excessive profiteering of cyber charter schools with the stroke of a pen, says Education Voters of PA. Simple reforms to Pennsylvania’s 25-year-old charter school law that more closely match the tuition districts pay to cyber charters with the actual cost of a cyber charter education would leave cybers with plenty of funding to educate their students and reduce tuition costs for districts. This would mean more money in school district classrooms, less pressure to raise property taxes, and fewer dollars for cyber charter schools to waste.