As you may have recently seen confirmed in Auditor General DeFoor’s audit of five Pennsylvania cyber charter schools, cyber charter funding is broken.

Current charter school law mandates that cyber charters receive significantly more in taxpayer funded tuition than they use to educate their students. This has led to an excessive windfall for cyber charter organizations at the expense of Pennsylvania students and taxpayers. These monies are siphoned from school districts and are being accumulated by cyber charters as astronomical fund balances- over 618 million dollars between the 5 cyber charters- as well major real estate investments made by the state's largest cyber school. These are funds that could be meeting the needs of students across the state or, in some cases, could lower property taxes.

As the Auditor General said in the report, the results of the audit “raise concerns over the funding formula for providing tuition payments to the cyber schools for regular and special education students with the excessive fund balances being accumulated by these cyber charter schools.”
 
It is time for the Pennsylvania legislature to update charter school law to ensure that taxes collected to fund public education are in fact used for public education. My bill, which is a compliment to other essential cyber charter funding legislation, proposes important reforms as it relates to excessive fund balance:
 
1. Allow taxpayers and school districts to claw back the excess funding.
2. Provides definitions and clarity as it relates to allowable expenses and calculation of fund balances for cyber charter schools.

Please join me in pressing for wise and effective use of taxpayer dollars.

Statutes/Laws affected:
Printer's No. 1237: P.L.30, No.14