PA: Looks Like This Cyber School Is Doing Okay

When Pennsylvania passed some rudimentary cyber charter school funding reforms, the cybers squealed like impaled porkers. "This is terrible," they hollered. "We will have to lay people off! Some schools will close!"

CCA HQ. Really

So now it's six months later, and the Education Voters of PA have continued the hard work of filing and pursuing Right To Know requests (because although cyber charters pretend to be public schools and run on taxpayer dollars, they fight hard to avoid actual transparency and accountability). They've been checking to see how much cyber charters have had to scale back, now that they're in the grip of these new reforms. 

Apparently they're doing okay.

Ed Voters reports that Commonwealth Charter Academy, the 800-pound gorilla of PA cybers, has approved the following field trips since the reforms (and, presumably, the associated belt tightening) went into effect. (You can read the actual receipts here.)

$28,800 for a field trip to the Kalahari Resort, including 400 waterpark passes and meal vouchers that cost $62 per attendee,

$13,375.70 for 192 tickets ranging from $25 to $92 for a field trip to the Sight and Sound Theatre in Lancaster County. As a bonus, this is a theater that aims to present "powerful stories from the pages of Scripture and history."

$6,18.80 for parties at five different Urban Air locations, another sort of indoor adventure park

$5,088.00 for 125 students to enjoy two hours of snow tubing at the Seven Springs Mountain resort.

Is it terrible for a school to wrap up the year with a field trip to some place fun? Not at all. At my old high school, we took seniors on a trip every year-- and they paid for it with four years of fundraising leading up to that. I'm pretty sure that if our district had started asking taxpayers to fork over money to send seniors to an amusement park, there would have been complaints (and even more if we asked taxpayers to foot the bill for some Biblical "entertainment").

Perhaps it would fly better in other districts. But what seems clear is that CCA is not struggling to deal with the financial fallout of Pennsylvania's cyber charter reforms. (It certainly hasn't slowed down the building of one more of their multi-million dollar centers in my county.)