In 2024, residents of Chester County and our Commonwealth were shocked to learn of the death of a preteen child due to alleged ongoing abuse and torture, including starvation, at the hands of her father and his girlfriend. While the child originally attended public school, her father moved her to a cyber charter school approximately five months before her death. Without in-person observations by school personnel, the child’s true condition went undetected.
 
While Pennsylvania’s charter school law requires that cyber charter schools take attendance, there is very minimal specification for how each school records attendance or how often it is required to be reported.
 
The purpose of this legislation is to ensure the physical and mental well-being of cyber charter students by requiring in-person communication between students and teachers or administrators on a regular basis. My legislation will require that cyber charter schools ensure that each student is communicated with in-person at least once every three weeks by teachers or administrators, while continuing once weekly online check-in requirements that were enacted through Act 55 of 2024.
 
Cyber charter schools educate four percent of students in Pennsylvania, with a count of over 57,000 students enrolled in the 2022-23 school year. These students deserve oversight and safety protections. As legislators, we owe it to the children of our Commonwealth to insist on this commonsense measure to fill the gap when children are not receiving proper care in their own homes.

I hope you will join me in co-sponsoring this legislation to protect Pennsylvania’s students.