Education Voters of Pennsylvania do some extraordinary work for public education here in the Keystone State, and that has included hounding cyber charters to fork over documentation of how much they spend on marketing.
It's labor-intensive work--the cybers send over thousands of pages of invoices, heavily redacted, and volunteers just have to go through page by page. Over a year ago, EdVoters ploughed through a trove of documentation and found that from 2019-2021, the cyber charters had spent over $35 million on marketing. Everything from sponsoring local events to newspaper ads to a float in a Philadelphia parade, all paid for with taxpayer dollars. That would be taxpayer dollars taken with the understanding that they would be spent on educating students, but instead, well, not.
Now EdVoters has finished sifting through the materials from 2021-2022, and it's...well, it's something else.
$16.8 million, at least. That's a lot of money, and digging into the details makes it look even worse.
Achievement House Cyber Charter School spent $1,306 per student on advertising.PA Cyber 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.
PA Cyber spent $81,000 on branded clothing and mugs.
PA Virtual Charter School spent $132,404 on bus wraps and other transit advertising.
PA Virtual Charter school spent $28,807 on sponsorships of minor league baseball teams.
Insight Cyber Charter School spent $959,053 on a contract for undisclosed services with for-profit management company K-12, Inc.
More than $17,000 for family parties at Dave & Busters, Ninja Nook, 814 Lanes and Games, and Lehigh Valley Laser Tag.
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